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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, July 14, 2006
OGIC: My eleventh Altman
Last week a friend took me to see Prairie Home Companion on a free pass. I went somewhat against my better judgment. Like anyone, I'm a fan of Robert Altman at his best. And like many, I'm a Garrison Keillor detractor. At the time we made the plan, I knew Keillor had written the script but wasn't clear about whether I'd actually have to look at him. My friend, who as far as I can tell is neutral on the subject of Keillor but does hail from Lake Wobegon country, confirmed that Mr. Lawsuit would appear onscreen. "Oh well," I wrote back, "we can bring tomatoes." In the blink of an eye he responded: "I don't throw tomatoes at Minnesotans." A principled position that I had to respect, though I'm not at all sure there aren't several Michiganders I would gladly pelt, given the opportunity, with whatever happened to be handy.
At the outset, I disliked the movie. Michael Blowhard has written with infectious enthusiasm about its meandering charm:
Weak on storyline and action, it's nonetheless focused and controlled -- more a "Tempest"-like poetic picture of life than a narrative: We live among spirits and archetypes; death and beauty are never more than a few steps away; gallantry, generosity, humor, and belief carry us through ... It's a jewelbox and a metaphysical romance, yet it's fully inhabited and embodied, and it never stops rolling along.
This gets at the trademark naturalism of many Altman films, but in the early going of Prairie Home Companion that signal quality struck me as terribly staged. The scene backstage at the radio show (a fictional, small-time version of "Prairie Home Companion") as on-air time approaches is barely controlled chaos, a classic Altman occasion. As in more persuasive such scenes in Altman's oeuvre, we get overlapping conversations, a dozen subplots unfolding at once, and lots and lots to look at. In the midst of this cheerful frenzy, both the cheer and disorder seem centered on the singing sisters played by Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep, who clatter in like a squall at the last minute. Sweet and tart, blithe and barely holding things together, they more than any other characters encapsulate the reigning mood and aesthetic of the radio show and of the movie itself. What a drag, then, when they start uttering gobs of exposition while doing their makeup. The genius of Altman's naturalism, when it's on, is that it doesn't press explanations on you but lets you put things together gradually: who people are, what their relationships are to one another, what stories they trail behind him. When Tomlin and Streep launched on this character-establishing and backstory-telling torrent almost as soon as we'd met them, my heart sank. I thought the movie was going to be really bad—and guessed the culprit would be the script. I reached for my tomato. But I hadn't brought one.
Good thing too, because the film eventually won me over—for the most part. The on-stage musical performances loosened things up considerably: they themselves are pure pleasure, and by virtue of the balance they provide, they make the more contrived backstage action more interesting. But even as the film grew lovelier and more absorbing, the mote that I kept wanting to flick away was the weirdly flat performance by Virginia Madsen as an angel of death or something. I shouldn't blame Madsen; it was probably an unsalvageable role, though it is true that Kevin Kline spun another undercooked part into a little bit of incidental charm, at least, as Guy Noir.
Now to help me understand why Madsen's angel was so objectionable, along comes Odienator at the group film and television blog The House Next Door with a great essay on angels of death in Prairie Home Companion and Bob Fosse's All that Jazz. To his mind, Altman is soft-pedaling death, he's not buying it, and it makes him miss the Altman of years past:
Later in the film, Dangerous Ginny comments that "the death of an old man is not a tragedy," which led me to holler out, “Bullshit, Mr. Altman." When Lola asks if he is concerned that this is the last show, G.K. says "every show is your last show. That's my philosophy." "Thank you, Plato," Lola’s sister Yolanda (Lily Tomlin) sarcastically replies, saving grumps like me the trouble of talking back to the screen again.
…I am closer to 52 than 80, and more attuned to Broadway than Lake Woebegone; I know more about sex and self-destruction than the wisdom of age and the sense of entitlement one feels for living a long life. Most importantly, though, I also know something about being a grouch, and from that vantage point, Prairie’s subtle exhortations to go gentle into that good night seem a false comfort from Altman to his fans—a reassurance that displaces his usual blunt honesty. For a movie whose cast includes a sexy reaper, Prairie is too smug and passive about dying. The mortal coil is unraveling from the show and its participants, yet Altman chooses to deflect a universal fear by pretending that death is a mere nuisance.
This is why Madsen is so terrible; her air-headed angel's platitudes ring hollow in the Altman universe we've come to know. Would the younger Altman have let a character get away with such bullshit? This artist has never felt the need to embrace and console his audiences in the past, so why start now? Nashville’s final number, "It Don't Worry Me," was about willful denial; the whole of Prairie is about acceptance, yet it feels like a denial as well. The palpable fear that this is Altman's last movie is never honestly dealt with by the director’s stand-in, Keillor, nor the film itself. It seems almost as if Prairie thinks it holds the monopoly on dying, and that the show-within-a-movie is noble—and its demise a tragedy—simply because it's been around for so long. Altman's onscreen representative G.K. keeps pooh-poohing the distress his colleagues feel throughout their last show, going so far as to state that he doesn't want to tell people how to feel about his legacy; but his relaxed attitude never feels true. Altman throws out a hopeful, interesting curve when dealing with the fate of Tommy Lee Jones' character (a fantasy of how to deal with one's enemies). Here is the mean Altman we know and love, lashing out at his critics, informing you of his perceived greatness and how much it'll be missed once he's gone. But the film treats it as a throwaway; as quickly as it arrives, it defers back to that transparent, dishonest lulling. If Prairie weren’t so concerned with coddling us, we'd deduce that it's OK to acknowledge Death—just don’t go looking for it; wait until it shows up to pull your number.
Yes. Read the whole thing, and bookmark that blog because they are always posting something good.
Incidentally, my first ten Altman films, in (rough) order of preference: The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, California Split, MASH, Short Cuts, Gosford Park, Cookie's Fortune, The Player, Thieves Like Us, The Gingerbread Man. I've only seen half of Nashville, sad to say, and half a movie never sticks.
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TT: Which way is the airport?
I spent much of Thursday driving around the highlands of Boise in my rented car, then made my way to the Boise Art Museum for a sneak peek at Frank Lloyd Wright and the House Beautiful, which opens Saturday. As I drove I listened to Twin Falls, the new Deidre Rodman-Steve Swallow CD, and I couldn’t have made a better choice: Rodman comes from Boise, and Twin Falls is a sequence of lyrical duets for acoustic piano and electric bass in which she and Swallow evoke with great subtlety the stony landscapes among which I wandered all afternoon.
Once I got back to the hotel, I turned on my iBook and plugged into the Web, where I ran across a New York Times story about Jack Larson and Noel Neill, who played Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane a half-century ago in the Superman TV series. Not only are they both alive and well, but it seems that Larson, who later wrote the libretti for operas by Virgil Thomson and Ned Rorem, lives in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Brentwood, California. Charmed by the coincidence, I did a bit of Googling and quickly found a photo of Larson's home, a gorgeous Usonian built in 1939. (It’s S. 272 in the Wright catalogue, if you’re interested.)
Later on I dined at the Milky Way with Dana Oland, a smart young ex-dancer who covers the arts for the Idaho Statesman. Should you ever find yourself in Boise, I strongly suggest you make a point of eating there, too. After dinner I headed out Warm Springs Avenue to the Idaho Shakespeare Festival to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, which ends with my favorite curtain line in all of Shakespeare: The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way.
Now I’m packing my bag and regretting my imminent departure from Boise, with which I find myself much taken. Tomorrow morning I fly to Salt Lake City, change planes for Saint George, pick up another rental car at the airport, drive to Cedar City, and see three shows at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I wish I could stick around for another day or two, but I can’t. I never can. No sooner do I find my bearings in one town than I’m off to the next one, looking for another aisle seat and another tasty meal. You that way: I this way.
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TT: All Synge, all the time
This week my entire Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to DruidSynge:
In Ireland John Millington Synge is considered a great playwright. In America, however, he has vanished into the pantheon of half-remembered masters—none of his plays has been seen on Broadway since 1971—and even the Irish long preferred respecting him to performing him. It wasn’t until the Druid Theatre Company of Galway City started reviving his work in the ’70s that the author of “The Playboy of the Western World,” who died in 1909, once again became a hot ticket in the land of his birth.
Now Americans are getting a fresh chance to grapple with Synge. “DruidSynge,” a marathon presentation of his six major plays, just opened at the Lincoln Center Festival after a week-long run at Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theater. The plays, which run for a total of eight and a half hours (including a 90-minute dinner break), are staged by Garry Hynes, founder of the Druid Theatre Company and the first woman director to win a Tony Award. All six are performed on a powerfully evocative set designed by Francis O’Connor, a fog-filled, dirt-floored hut whose dead gray walls stretch upward to infinity. The results are a mixed bag, but the best parts are so good that you’ll forget the rest well before the long day closes….
No link. You know what to do: be cheap and buy today’s Journal, or be smart and subscribe to the online edition by going here.
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TT: Almanac
"'I hate music.' His voice rises, and for the first time this evening he speaks with a hoarse intensity. 'I hate this incomprehensible, melodious language which select people can understand and use to say uninhibited, irregular things that are also probably indecent and immoral. Watch their faces and see how strangely they change when they're listening to music. You and Krisztina never sought out music—I do not remember you ever playing four-handed together, you never sat down at the piano in front of Krisztina, at least not in my presence. Evidently her sense of tact and shame restrained her from listening to music with you while I was there. And because music's power is inexpressible, it seems to carry a larger danger in that it has the power to arouse the deepest emotions in people who come together to listen to it and discover that it is their fate to belong to each other.'"
Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)
| Thursday, July 13, 2006
TT: For the road
Accompanists tend not to get the credit they deserve, especially in the field of pop music. Unless you’re in the business or on its fringes, for instance, you probably won’t recognize the name of Bill Miller, who died on Tuesday at the age of 91. As of this morning, the New York Times hadn’t yet published an obituary of Miller. Nevertheless, you’ve probably heard him play piano, because he spent nearly a half-century, from 1951 to 1995, backing up Frank Sinatra. It was a difficult task that he discharged with supreme tact and taste, steering clear of the spotlight, finding fulfillment in making his boss sound good.
The best evidence of Miller’s gifts is the 1958 performance of “One for My Baby” that closes Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely. Most of it is a duet for voice and piano, with Nelson Riddle adding discreet touches of orchestral support here and there. It is Sinatra’s greatest recording—and it wouldn’t have been the same without Bill Miller. Listen to it as you bid him farewell.
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OGIC: Evelina and me
"I HAVE a vast deal to say, and shall give all this morning to my pen.
"As to my plan of writing every evening the adventures of the day, I find it impracticable; for the diversions here are so very late, that if I begin my letters after them, I could not go to bed at all."
That is the opening of one of Evelina's early letters to her guardian, the Rev. Mr. Villars, in Fanny Burney's 1778 novel Evelina, Or, The History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. I find myself much in the same situation trying to blog this week, forced to choose sleep over blogging in the interests of self-preservation. But I have a vast deal to say, and shall give all this evening to my keyboard. So look for updates then.
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TT: Long day's journey
I arose at four-thirty Wednesday morning in New York City. Twelve hours later I checked into a hotel in Boise, Idaho, having first flown west to Phoenix, Arizona, where I changed planes and headed north. Five hours after that I was sitting down to see the Idaho Shakespeare Festival’s production of Major Barbara. Now, twenty-one hours after my alarm clock last went off, I’m back in my hotel room, getting ready for bed.
I could complain about the length of my day, as well as certain disagreeable things that happened to me along the way, but I won’t, because I’ve been reading Notes of a Pianist, the newly reprinted travel diaries of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, in which America’s first important concert pianist (and one of our most original composers) tells in excruciatingly frank and funny detail what it was like for a musician to go on the road in nineteenth-century America. No, I’m not fond of snatching a hasty breakfast in between flights, but once you learn what it was like to pay an overnight visit to Springfield, Illinois, in 1863, you’re likely to come away with a greatly enhanced appreciation of the Egg McMuffin:
St. Nicholas Hotel (!!!!) Each one of these exclamation points, if it could speak, would tell you a story of tribulations, of all kinds of mortifications that should render the St. Nicholas Hotel, Springfield, forever celebrated! First, the legislature being in session, the house is full, which is the same as saying that the beefsteaks are leathery, the eggs too hard….We are cooped up, six of us, in a little room hardly large enough to hold one bed comfortably. The water to wash with is as black as ink. The proprietor charges us for a supper that we have not eaten, and, upon a timid observation that we make respecting it, looks at us as if he wished to crush us and, addressing the porter, throws out this memorable phrase, which seems to me not to speak very highly in favor of the honesty of the travelers with whom he is in the habit of dealing: “Billy, take care that the trunks are not taken away before the bills are paid!”
In any case, the truth is that I love traveling, even the ordinary parts. I love being whisked through the streets of Manhattan before sunrise. I love gazing out the window of a plane at clouds and deserts and mesas and mountain ranges. Above all, I love to explore a city that's new to me, then spend the evening watching Shaw or Shakespeare or Lynn Nottage. What could be more fun?
So yes, I had an excellent day—but enough is enough. I get to sleep in tomorrow, after which I’ll be paying a visit to the Boise Art Museum, dining with a local arts journalist, going to see Love’s Labour’s Lost, then flying to Cedar City, Utah, to do the whole thing over again. That being the case, I think I’ll eat an Owyhee Idaho Spud (no, it’s not a potato product) and hit the sack. It’s midnight in Boise, and even a drama critic deserves a good night’s sleep.
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TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Aug. 6)
• Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
• 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)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, 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)
• Pig Farm (comedy, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON:
• Faith Healer (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)
• Susan and God (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 30)
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TT: Almanac
"I am thinking that people find truth and collect experiences in vain, for they cannot change their fundamental natures. And perhaps the only thing in life one can do is take the givens of one's fundamental nature and tailor them to reality as cleverly and carefully as one can. That is the most we can accomplish. And it does not make us any the cleverer, or any the less vulnerable."
Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)
| Wednesday, July 12, 2006
TT: Almanac
"Passion has no footing in reason. Passion is indifferent to reciprocal emotion, it needs to express itself to the full, live itself to the very end, no matter if all it receives in return is kind feelings, courtesy, friendship, or mere patience. Every great passion is hopeless, if not it would be no passion at all but some cleverly calculated arrangement, an exchange of lukewarm interests."
Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)
| Tuesday, July 11, 2006
TT: Away I go
I depart very early on Wednesday morning for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, from which I'll be traveling directly to the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I plan to bring my trusty laptop with me and to blog as often as possible, but I'll be spending a great deal of time in transit—I'm flying home from Utah by way of Los Angeles, for example—so don't be surprised if my postings for the rest of the week are a trifle irregular.
The good news, as you may have noticed last week, is that Our Girl is back on the blog and full of stuff to say. No doubt she'll be filling in some of the empty spaces.
See you in the wild, wild West!
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TT: Brush up your Shakespeare
A reader writes:
Having come late in life to the wonders of Shakespeare myself, I read your post today with interest. I totally agree with you that the plays must be seen to be fully appreciated. Sadly, being neither a critic nor resident of a city, I lack opportunities to see as many as I would wish. You offered an interesting
alternative, however: “I've learned in the process that no matter how many times you may have read a Shakespeare play, you don’t really know it until you’ve seen it on stage (though the very best Shakespeare films, of which there are a dozen or so, can go a long way toward plugging the gap).” I wonder if you might list some of the ones you think qualify?
Gladly. According to Wikipedia, 420 feature-length films have been made out of Shakespeare’s plays. Of the ones that are actually full-fledged movies (as opposed to telecasts or film records of a stage production), these are a few of my personal favorites. Many of them—especially the ones directed by Orson Welles—are flawed in significant ways, but all are absolutely worth watching:
• Max Reinhardt, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935). With Jimmy Cagney as Bottom and a score adapted from Mendelssohn’s incidental music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. A bit slow-moving and overblown, but still charming.
• Laurence Olivier, Henry V (1944). The quintessential Shakespeare film. William Walton’s score is worth the price of admission all by itself.
• Laurence Olivier, Hamlet (1948). Heavily cut but highly effective, not least because of Olivier’s own performance.
• Orson Welles, Macbeth (1948). A fascinatingly eccentric low-budget take on the Scottish play.
• Joseph Mankiewicz, Julius Caesar (1953). Hollywood Shakespeare, produced by John Houseman and played straight down the center by Marlon Brando, James Mason, and John Gielgud. The superlative score is by Miklós Rózsa.
• Orson Welles, Chimes at Midnight (1965, adapted from Richard II, Henry IV, and The Merry Wives of Windsor). Welles’ greatest and most personal Shakespeare film.
• Franco Zeffirelli, Romeo and Juliet (1968). Lush and lavish, à la Zeffirelli. I saw it in junior high school—it was my very first Shakespeare—and was knocked flat. I now find it a bit goopy, but my guess is that modern-day youngsters will respond to it the same way I did.
• Kenneth Branagh, Much Ado About Nothing (1993). After Olivier’s Henry V, the best traditional Shakespeare movie ever made.
• Al Pacino, Looking for Richard (1996, based on Richard III). Part documentary, part performance, with striking performances by Pacino, Kevin Spacey, and Winona Ryder. Odd and wonderful.
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TT: Almanac
"One never forgets what is important. I learned that only later, when I was somewhat older. Nothing secondary remains—it gets thrown away along with one's dreams."
Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)
| Monday, July 10, 2006
TT: YouTube's greatest hits
In the past year YouTube has evolved from a curiosity into a major online resource. If you’re interested in seeing rare film and video clips by a fast-growing number of great performers of the past, you’ll find them there—but only if you have the patience to sift through the innumerable postings of nitwits who think the world is waiting with bated breath to see their homemade music videos.
From time to time I've passed on links to interesting videos that I've found on other blogs, but it never occurred to me to try making this blog a one-stop portal to the wonders of YouTube—until now. Take a look at the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column and you’ll find that it ends with a brand-new roll of selected culture- and history-oriented video links, most (but not all) of them to YouTube. So far as I know, this is the first such list to appear anywhere on the Web.
In addition to blogrolling the links I’ve already mentioned on “About Last Night,” I recently spent several hours trolling through YouTube in search of still more buried treasure. The results are now available for your amusement and edification. Most of the videos to which I’ve linked are familiar to specialists, but my guess is that you’ll find quite a few that are new to you.
This is an experiment. You’re invited to take part by sending me any choice culture-related links that you run across in the course of your own YouTube explorations. As you'll see, I've tried to be selective, so keep in mind that for the moment I'm more interested in increasing the total number of artists represented than in posting additional links to videos by those artists already included on the list—though I'll be more than happy to make room for something that's really good. (In addition, please let me know if any of the existing links have gone dead since I posted them.)
Have fun!
UPDATE: I've also added a similar list of links to RealAudio and QuickTime files of spoken-word recordings by artists and other historical figures.
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TT: Democracy in action
I was sitting on a rowing machine at the gym the other day when I looked up at the bank of television sets just above my head and saw Peri Gilpin (remember her?) chatting earnestly with Tony Danza (remember him?) about her latest venture, a Lifetime TV movie about child abuse. It was as if I’d inadvertently glanced through an astral portal into a parallel universe inhabited exclusively by second-tier ex-celebrities. I thought of Andy Warhol’s oft-quoted vision of a future in which “every person will be world-famous for 15 minutes,” and I recalled the piece I wrote for The Wall Street Journal on the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth in which I argued that “Warhol did as much as anyone to shape the culture of pure, accomplishment-free celebrity in which we now live.”
Looking back at that piece now, I realize that neither Warhol nor I gave any thought to the question of what happens to celebrities after their fifteen minutes are up. A.E. Housman, at a time when it was a good deal harder to become famous, wrote a poem about an athlete whose “solution” was to die young:
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
And what happens to such a person these days? Now I know: he makes a TV movie about an Important Issue and goes on The Tony Danza Show to hawk it.
Two sets to the left, CNN was hawking with identical fervor an upcoming appearance by President and Mrs. Bush on Larry King Live. That made me feel even older than remembering Tony Danza, for I’m just old enough to have seen the very first prime-time TV interview by a sitting president of the United States. The president in question was John Kennedy, and the interview, which took place in 1962, was broadcast by all three TV networks and conducted by their White House correspondents. (You can read a transcript here.) If memory serves—and I’m pretty sure it does—Kennedy required that the interview be videotaped, not aired live, and that the networks allow him to review the tape prior to broadcast so that he could edit out anything he wanted suppressed.
I’m not one of those people who thinks everything was better when he was young, nor do I suffer from excessive respect for politicians, but I do have sharply mixed feelings about the process that brought us from Jack Paar and After Two Years: A Conversation With the President to Peri Gilpin on The Tony Danza Show and George and Laura on Larry King Live. I was tempted for a moment to say that TV did it to us, but of course we did it to ourselves: America is a democracy in the deepest and most far-reaching sense of the word, a truly popular culture whose citizens believe devoutly that they’re as good as anyone else, and who for this reason prefer their celebrities and politicians to be just like everyone else.
That’s one aspect of the democratic experience. Here’s another. Last week I watched Kevin Costner's Open Range, which is set in 1882. In the scene immediately preceding the climactic gunfight, Robert Duvall’s character goes into a general store and purchases two bars of Swiss chocolate and three Havana cigars. The total cost of these rare items, we’re told, is five dollars. I’ve no idea whether Craig Storper, who wrote the screenplay, made any attempt to get that figure right, but operating on the assumption that he did, I went to Inflation Calculator and learned that what cost Duvall’s character five dollars in 1882 would cost $95.57 in 2005.
It happened that I was reading Madame Bovary on the same day I watched Open Range, and I was no less struck by a scene early in the book in which Flaubert tells of how Emma Bovary liked to listen to the music of a hurdy-gurdy whose operator sometimes stood in the street below her parlor window and cranked his machine in the afternoon:
The tunes it played were tunes that were being heard in other places—in theatres, in drawing rooms, under the lighted chandeliers of ballrooms: echoes from the world that reached Emma this way. Sarabands ran on endlessly in her head; and her thoughts, like dancing girls on some flowery carpet, leapt with the notes from dream to dream, from sorrow to sorrow. Then, when the man had caught in his cap the coin she threw him, he would pull down an old blue wool cover, hoist his organ onto his back, and move heavily off. She always watched him till he disappeared.
A little later on Emma has this exchange with a similarly frustrated clerk:
Emma went on: “What is your favorite kind of music?”
“Oh, German music. It’s the most inspiring.”
“Do you know Italian opera?”
“Not yet—but I’ll hear some next year when I go to Paris to finish law school.”
Much of American literature portrays small-town folk like Madame Bovary and Monsieur Lèon, unhappy creatures with immortal longings in them who either moved to the city to chase their dreams or lived lives of fast-increasing frustration. But by the time my mother was born in the smallest of small midwestern towns in 1929, she no longer had to settle for the visits of an itinerant hurdy-gurdy player. The phonograph, the movies, and the radio had already started to open up the outside world to her generation. I was born twenty-seven years later in a town a few miles away from the one where my mother grew up, and TV gave me even more of what the other modern media had given my mother. As for today’s Emma Bovarys, if there are any, they have access to infinitely more powerful tools by which they can put themselves in touch with the world of art and culture. They can even buy imported chocolate bars on line for the tiniest fraction of what a cowboy with a sweet tooth would have paid in 1882.
I draw no conclusion from these fugitive observations: I merely offer them for your consideration. To be sure, I wish the postmodern world were classier than it is, but I also know that it gives each of us the opportunity to be as classy as we care to be. On a recent visit to Storm King Art Center, I rode the tram in the company of a group of tourists who chatted loudly, incessantly, and knowledgeably about the sculptures with which the five-hundred-acre park is filled. One of them actually took a call on her cell phone as we drove past Mark di Suvero’s Mozart’s Birthday. Had I thought to bring a garrote with me, her conversation would have been terminated abruptly. Yet I couldn’t deny that she knew more about modern art than most people, and she probably knew more about di Suvero than I did.
Such is life under democracy. We can use our TV sets to watch Peri Gilpin and Larry King, or The Light in the Piazza. We can pay a visit to a sculpture park, and chat on our cell phones while doing so. We can use our computers to communicate with fellow aesthetes halfway around the world, or to download kiddie porn. To a greater extent than at any previous time in the history of the world, our lives are up to us—and we’re on our own.
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TT: Almanac
"Like the lover, the friend expects no reward for his feelings. He does not wish the performance of any duty in return, he does not view the person he has chosen as his friend with any illusion, he sees his faults and accepts him with all their consequences. Such is the ideal. And without such an ideal, would there be any point to life?"
Sándor Márai, Embers (trans. Carol Brown Janeway)
| Sunday, July 9, 2006
OGIC: Fortune cookie
"There is this myth that I was formed on Henry James. I had hardly read anything of him when I started to write. It must be because I take more trouble, perhaps, with words than authors usually do these days. James is a consummate writer, but you do feel it's like the needle on the old gramophone, that it's got stuck and you want to move it on. Also, I have to say, I think I'm funnier than Henry James."
Shirley Hazzard (thanks to Sarah for the link)
| Friday, July 8, 2005
TT: I've been thinking about this poem today
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
W.H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts"
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TT: Remember this?
The Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index is a year old this week, so I thought I'd repost it for the benefit of those who missed it the first time around.
If you had to choose, would you pick:
1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly?
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises?
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington?
4. Cats or dogs?
5. Matisse or Picasso?
6. Yeats or Eliot?
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin?
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike?
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca?
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning?
11. The Who or the Stones?
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath?
13. Trollope or Dickens?
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald?
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy?
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair?
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham?
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers?
19. Letterman or Leno?
20. Wilco or Cat Power?
21. Verdi or Wagner?
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe?
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash?
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis?
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando?
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp?
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt?
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin?
29. Red wine or white?
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde?
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity?
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev?
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev?
34. Constable or Turner?
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo?
36. Comedy or tragedy?
37. Fall or spring?
38. Manet or Monet?
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons?
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin?
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James?
42. Sunset or sunrise?
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter?
44. Mac or PC?
45. New York or Los Angeles?
46. Partisan Review or Horizon?
47. Stax or Motown?
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin?
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello?
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine?
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier?
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers?
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde?
54. Ghost World or Election?
55. Minimalism or conceptual art?
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny?
57. Modernism or postmodernism?
58. Batman or Spider-Man?
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams?
60. Johnson or Boswell?
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf?
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show?
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table?
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity?
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni?
66. Blue or green?
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It?
68. Ballet or opera?
69. Film or live theater?
70. Acoustic or electric?
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo?
72. Sargent or Whistler?
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera?
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma?
75. Sushi, yes or no?
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn?
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee?
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove?
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham?
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe?
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones?
82. Watercolor or pastel?
83. Bus or subway?
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg?
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter?
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser?
87. Schubert or Mozart?
88. The Fifties or the Twenties?
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick?
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce?
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins?
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman?
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill?
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann?
95. Italian or French cooking?
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord?
97. Anchovies, yes or no?
98. Short novels or long ones?
99. Swing or bebop?
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"?
Close readers of "About Last Night" may already have guessed that I’d choose column A over column B in all cases—but some calls would be much closer than others, while others remain subject to change without notice....
How about you? What’s your Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index? If you answered all 100 questions, your TCCI is the number of answers from column A. If you left some of the questions blank because you weren't familiar with one or both of the possible answers, your TCCI is the number of column-A answers divided by the total number of questions that you answered.
(If you're taking the TCCI for the first time, go here when you're done to read last year's explanation of what it's all about.)
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TT: Tempest on a hilltop
It's Friday, and I'm back from the road and ready to post my Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I reviewed two out-of-town shows today, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival's production of The Tempest and Barrington Stage Company's revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies:
When playing Shakespeare out of doors, nothing is so dangerous as a beautiful view. The Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival is currently performing “The Tempest” in a tent pitched on the well-kept lawn of the Boscobel Restoration, an 1808 mansion on a high wooded bluff that overlooks the Hudson River. Even after you've spent a pleasant hour picnicking on the grass, the spectacle of the water below and the mountains beyond remains irresistibly seductive. Terrence O'Brien, founder and artistic director of the festival and director of this production, has wisely chosen not to fight the view but blend with it, and the result is a winsome “Tempest” that seems as much a part of its natural surroundings as the silver moon in the night sky overhead….
I've long wondered whether “Follies” might be a small show trapped inside a giant body, in which case it could profit from a bare-bones rethinking along the lines of Stafford Arima's Paper Mill Playhouse revival of “Ragtime.” Instead, Julianne Boyd, Barrington Stage Company's artistic director, has stuck as close to the look and feel of the original production of “Follies” as her limited resources will allow, and she's done an impressive job of making the most of the tools at hand, thanks in part to an outstanding cast (whose roster of showgirls includes Donna McKechnie and Marni Nixon!). If the results fail to tell us anything new about “Follies,” they nonetheless succeed in bringing a flawed yet eloquent show to pulsing, passionate life.
No link. To read the whole thing, buy this morning's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal.
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TT: Almanac
"Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist."
W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
| Thursday, July 7, 2005
TT: Almanac
"He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth; he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May."
William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor
| Wednesday, July 6, 2005
TT: Almanac
"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun."
Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely
| Tuesday, July 5, 2005
OGIC: Fortune cookie
"And, thanks to the standardization of an archaic rule, the past still vibrated in the convent, a high, sweet note. It was the France of the Restoration that was embalmed in the Sacred Heart atmosphere, like a period room in a museum with a silken cord drawn across it. The quarrels of the philosophes still echoed in the classrooms; the tumbrils had just ceased to creak, and Voltaire grinned in the background. Orthodoxy had been re-established, Louis XVIII ruled, but there was a hint of Orleanism in the air and a whisper of reduced circumstances in the pick-pick of our needles doing fine darning and turning buttonholes. Byron's great star had risen, and, across the sea, America beckoned in the romances of Chateaubriand and Fenimore Cooper and the adventures of the coureurs de bois. Protestantism did not trouble us; we had made our peace with the Huguenots. What we feared was skepticism, deism, and the dread spirit of atheism—France's Lucifer. Monthly, in the study hall, the Mother Superior, Madame MacIllvra, adjured us, daughters of dentists and lawyers, grocers and realtors, heiresses of the Chevrolet agency and of Riley & Finn, contractors, against the sin of doubt, that curse of fine intellects. Her blue eyes clouded and her fair white brow ruffled under her snowy coif as she considered, with true feminine sympathy, the awful fate of Shelley, a young man of good family who had contracted atheism at Oxford."
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
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TT: Reverse commute
While most of the rest of the world was thinking about what it'd be doing come the Fourth of July, I was on the road, seeing plays for The Wall Street Journal, sleeping in country inns, and rattling down back roads in the cutest little rental car imaginable (mine was purple).
My theatrical odyssey began on Thursday when I picked up my car, escaped from the sickening heat of Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge, and made my unhurried way up Route 9 to the Boscobel Restoration in Garrison, where I ate a catered picnic supper and watched the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival perform The Tempest under a tent pitched on a lawn overlooking the Hudson River. (The “backdrop” looked like this.) It was a humid but otherwise lovely night, and though thunder rumbled onomatopoeically in the distance, the rain was kind enough not to start falling until the show was over.
I found my car in the soggy darkness, drove over Bear Mountain Bridge, and headed north for Storm King Lodge, a cozy B&B housed in a handsome converted barn built into the side of a hill that overlooks the Storm King Art Center. Hal, the genial innkeeper, plays trombone with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, so I got a tasty plateful of music-business gossip along with my Friday-morning omelet. Then I crossed the Hudson for the fourth time in 24 hours and set a course for the Berkshire Mountains, driving along the Housatonic River to Sheffield, Massachusetts, where I saw Barrington Stage Company's new revival of Stephen Sondheim's Follies.
After the show, I checked into Race Brook Lodge, a brookside inn reminiscent of the set for a movie about a hijinks-fraught summer camp. The owner bills it as a “chintz-free rustic alternative” to the twee B&Bs of Sheffield and Great Barrington, and he's right on all counts: Race Brook Lodge is casual, slightly askew, the opposite of fancy, and wholly companionable. I awoke the next morning to the friendly smell of home cooking, came downstairs to breakfast, packed my bags, and went south. The heat wave had broken in the night, so I rolled down my windows and cranked up Erin McKeown on the CD player, in no doubt whatsoever that I have the best job in the world.
As for the rest of the weekend, I spent it holed up in my adopted home town, which was balmy, breezy, and half-empty, the majority of New Yorkers having long since departed for points north, south, east, and west. Given good weather and nothing to do, the Upper West Side is wonderfully habitable on holiday weekends, and I took advantage of its tranquil delights, dining at an uncrowded Good Enough to Eat, hanging out with a couple of friends who, like me, had chosen to stay in town, and communing with the Teachout Museum.
Today Manhattan is full of sunburned travelers, few of whom look as though they'd profited greatly from their travels. Believe me, I'm not feeling smug: I went for more than a decade without taking a vacation, and it's only been in the past year that I discovered the value of getting out of town. I know, too, how fortunate I am to be able to live perpendicular to the rest of the world, slipping away in the middle of the week and coming back on Friday to write and go to the theater. In fact, I'm just about to do it all over again: I'm taking Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday off, and I'm not even going to see any plays while I'm gone. Instead, I plan to spend three computer-free nights reading Proust, listening to my iPod, and sleeping next to three different bodies of water, one of which will be an ocean. I think I deserve it, don't you?
See you Friday. Or maybe Monday.
P.S. If you're in urgent need of something to read, you'll find it in the next posting, not to mention the right-hand column, which is chock full of fresh stuff.
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TT: Elsewhere
I thought I ought to leave some reading matter behind to tide you over until I get back, so here's a bunch:
• John Lahr is onto something here:
Bannered across the poster for London's new hit musical “Billy Elliot” (at the Victoria Palace)—a collaboration between two of the country's mightiest showmen, the director Stephen Daldry and the composer Sir Elton John—is an unbuttoned quotation from the usually buttoned-down British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. “The greatest British musical I have ever seen,” it says. What, I wonder, are the other great British musicals? “Salad Days”? “The Boy Friend”? “Cats”? The British love musicals; they just don't do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity—the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it….
• On the other hand, this is one of the most vulgar pieces about theater (or anything else) that I've run across in ages:
The true legacy of Shakespeare in the Park is not the education of the unlettered masses; nor did [Joseph] Papp create (or desire to create) a stateside equivalent of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Shakespeare in the Park is a benediction for intellectual daytrippers—an attempt to convince us that a few hours spent sweating in Central Park is culture earned the hard way….
(The inspiration for this pissy little essay, by the way, was Mark Lamos' production of As You Like It. To be sure, I haven't seen it yet, and I've written some very sharp things about the past couple of years' worth of Shakespeare in the Park productions. On the other hand, Lamos is one of the best stage directors we have, which suggests to me that the author wrote his piece before he saw the show—not an unheard-of practice among journalists.)
• I've done this—though never on the way to a show! (If the reference doesn't ring a bell, go here for, er, enlightenment.)
• Mr. Modern Art Notes
drew my attention to this painter, and now I'm soooo curious to see his stuff in the flesh. Take a look and see if you don't feel the same way.
• For those who wonder why I'm forever singing the praises of Bob Brookmeyer, go straight to this amazon.com list of his best CDs and buy one. You can pick at random—they're all terrific.
• Ms. Bookish Gardener has gone all warm and fuzzy over the great jazz pianist Hank Jones….
• …while Jonathan Yardley waxes appreciative of Wilfrid Sheed's half-forgotten comic novel Office Politics:
Its singularly unheroic protagonist, George Wren, is "number-four editor" at a little magazine called the Outsider, based in shabby New York offices, that boasts "21,000 subscribers (it used to be 27,000), a small, nagging deficit, a reputation that shrank a little every time a subscriber died." It's "just another little magazine . . . staggering through life in an endless dribble of opinion," but—ta-da!—it "had once been endorsed by Adlai Stevenson and Madame Pandit Nehru" and George believes in it passionately, so much so that three months ago he took a pay cut from $13,000 (at CBS) to $7,500 just for the privilege of becoming a part of it.
Actually, put that in the past tense, because George is no longer sure there's much at the Outsider worth believing in. Its charismatic editor, a transplanted Brit named Gilbert Twining, has loads of facile charm and wields a keen editorial pen, but whether there's anything behind the charm is open to question. The rest of the magazine's tiny staff is a conglomeration of oddballs and misfits "hand-picked" by Twining, apparently "on some principle of interlocking incompatibility."…
To which I would only add that Sheed's Max Jamison is at least as good.
• In case you haven't read The Skeptic, you may not know that H.L. Mencken translated Nietzsche's The Antichrist. I recently stumbled by chance across a Web-based e-text of his English-language version, complete with an utterly characteristic preface in which Mencken's good and bad sides are placed on simultaneous display. (Rarely has his weirdly idiosyncratic anti-Semitism, for example, been epitomized so concisely.) It's one of his least well-known essays, and shouldn't be.
• Finally, some thoughts from Lileks about the joys of staying off interstate highways:
Ten connects Minneapolis to Fargo. And vice versa, of course. It always has. Before the Interstate, Ten was the road between here and there, two lanes of concrete slabs that bothered your shocks and made the wheel jump in your hands. But it kept your attention. Strung along Ten were all the towns set up in the early days of the trains, improbable hamlets with names like Motley and Dilworth. Each larger town was halved by a perpendicular artery, and each of those roads split off into endless capillaries. If you wanted to get lost, you started on Ten and kept going until the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel turned to dirt. If you wanted to, that is. We didn't; we were headed to Fargo.
It's three and a half hours by Interstate, if you speed, and you get out of the city in good time. It's four and a half on the Highway. You spend part of that hour slowing to limp through towns great and mean, places that have a swinging yellow light and a bar and a gas station, places that creep up to the road like some old wounded beast, places that had the lucky to have Ten march right through the center of things so you could sample the signage: Kiwanis Lions Elks Guns Gas Food Camping Liquor Motel Bait Feed, and incidentally speed limits are strictly enforced. You don't doubt it. You slow. Everyone does. Then the sign says 65 and you do 75. Twenty miles later there's another. These are the towns you usually know only as a name on the Interstate signs. It's nice to finally meet them….
By the time you get around to reading these words, I'll be doing the same thing, only in a different place. I hope I enjoy it half as much. (I expect to.)
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TT: Almanac
"Some are 'industrious,' and appear to love labor for its own sake, or perhaps because it keeps them out of worse mischief; to such I have at present nothing to say. Those who would not know what to do with more leisure than they now enjoy, I might advise to work twice as hard as they do,—work till they pay for themselves, and get their free papers."
Henry David Thoreau, Walden
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OGIC: Blaming the equipment
I'm on pins and needles over here. Every so often my lovely iBook starts to clickety-clack somewhere in its forward left innards, and functionality is temporarily suspended. This morning the phenomenon persisted for three hours, and I thought the computer was a goner. It came back to life, however, and I was able to back up the important files. No fits and starts since early afternoon now, though I've been laying off using it much for fear of inadvertently administering the coup de grace to what has been a much-loved machine. So far so good this evening, but I'm breathing in its direction as little as possible.
The jury's out on whether I'll try to get this guy fixed or take the plunge and replace him. He's three and a half years old, which is twenty-four in dog years and some far more advanced age in computer years. The current version of the same machine has twice as fast a processor and costs $300 less than what I paid in 2002, so it's tempting and probably a smart way to go. In any case, I'll be leaving the computer with the Mac docs and thinking over my options while in Los Angeles this week for some gallivanting around the Getty, taking meetings with a fellow blogger or two, and generally taking a break from everyday things. What I won't be doing is blogging, but with any luck will be back next week with one or another properly functioning machine, a few LA stories, and a fresh head of steam. In the meantime, do visit all our fine feathered friends to the right, and enjoy the short week.
| Monday, July 4, 2005
TT: Milestone
Like many a middle-aged man with a taste for poetry and a preoccupation with lost possibilities, I caught myself thinking the other day of the first stanza of Dante's Divine Comedy. It can be translated in countless ways, but comes most fully to the point in the most literal of renderings: In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark wood,/for the straight way was lost. One of my fellow bloggers has lately been reflecting on the meaning of the expression “midlife crisis,” but she and her readers are so preoccupied with the more florid symptoms of that often-absurd phenomenon that they seem to have lost sight of the thing itself, the terrible moment in the middle of the journey when you wander into a dark wood and suddenly notice that you can no longer see the signposts that led you there.
That moment came for me when death first touched my life. I'd somehow managed to make it to the age of thirty-nine without losing anyone to whom I was close. Then one day the bolts of lightning started falling all around me. First my best friend, then my father, and in the twinkling of an eye I was picking up the paper each morning and turning to the obituary page. I'd joined the club, the society of those who no longer need reminding that we all die sooner or later—and that some of us die too soon. Such knowledge changes a man permanently, and often the first outward sign of the change is the predictably embarrassing behavior popularly associated with midlife crises.
Aside from these transient embarrassments, the trouble with middle age is that people keep dying on you, and the longer you live, the more often you lose the ones who mattered most when you were young. A few months ago I checked my e-mail and discovered
that Richard Powell, my first music teacher, had died. On Friday I called my mother and learned with like abruptness of the death of Gordon Beaver, who taught me how to play piano and led the choirs in which I sang as a boy.
A few quick clicks on my iBook brought me to his obituary:
Born May 8, 1933, in St. Joseph, son of the late Leroy C. and Julia Waite Beaver, he had been a member of the Army National Guard and received a degree in music arts at Central Methodist University in Fayette in 1955 and a master's degree in music education from the University of Missouri in Columbia. He was a member of the First United Methodist Church in Sikeston where he directed the church choir for over 25 years. He directed and helped form the Sikeston High School Concert Choir, taught music at the Sikeston Junior and Senior High Schools for 30 years, and took high school choir students from Southeast Missouri to Europe during the summers for three years. He also gave piano lessons and directed the Sikeston Community Choir for 20 years and played for the Sikeston Little Theatre musical productions for many years.
That's all the Web has to say about him, and it isn't enough. My own memories could easily fill a chapter of a book. We met 35 years ago, the summer before I entered high school. I'd decided that I needed to learn how to play piano in order to be a fully rounded musician; Beaver was generally thought to be the best piano teacher in town, and though it wasn't his custom to work with late starters, Richard Powell urged him to take me on. He proved to be a genial, slightly cynical fellow and no kind of disciplinarian whatsoever, and we soon found ourselves spending almost as much time talking as we did playing, though he did manage to nudge me through a handful of Bach inventions and Beethoven sonatinas, as well as a stack of the semi-popular piano solos that once were the stock in trade of small-town piano teachers throughout America. (Remember John W. Schaum?) I can still play one of them, “Salt Water Boogie,” from memory.
I have a sneaking suspicion that he didn't much care for classical music—we didn't sing it very often in the high-school choruses he led—but he was passionate about the making of music, and threw himself into it with unflagging abandon. His enthusiasm was what I took away from the hours I spent with him, along with a feeling that, like me, he didn't quite fit into the world into which he'd been born. I'm sure that's why he went out of his way to be so kind to me: he must have sensed that I, too, was something of a fish out of water, and that it might be a long time before I found the right pond in which to swim. So instead of insisting that I spend hour upon hour polishing my scales in contrary motion, he let me tell him of my hopes and dreams and puzzlements, gently encouraging me to chase after whatever distant stars seemed to me most interesting.
I never became much of a piano player, and it wasn't until I got to college that I started working with teachers who bulldozed me into learning intermezzi by Brahms and preludes by Debussy. But by then I knew I wasn't destined to be much of a piano player, and that it didn't matter in the slightest. For me, playing the piano would always be a small part of something infinitely larger, and I think in retrospect I may have been fortunate to have fallen into the hands of a teacher who understood that.
The day after my mother told me of Gordon Beaver's death, I got an e-mail from an old and beloved friend:
I'm sure your mother called you for this one. I read in the paper that Mr. B. died this week. I believe the service is today, actually. I don't mean to sound so cut and dried about it, it's just that all these childhood icons are dying and I DON'T LIKE IT.
Nor do I, Lee, not one little bit. In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself in a dark wood, and though I finally seem to have reached its far edge and started to make my way back into the light, one thing hasn't changed: the people that I love keep dying on me. I noticed to my surprise a few years ago that most of my closest friends were now a good deal younger than I am. This is one of the gifts middle age gives us to compensate for that which it takes away, and I'm as grateful for it as I can be. Still, no gift, however generous, can possibly make up for the empty feeling with which we say farewell to the kindly men and women who once upon a time helped to show us what we were.
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TT: Almanac
"America has always been a country of amateurs where the professional, that is to say, the man who claims authority as a member of an élite which knows the law in some field or other, is an object of distrust and resentment."
W.H. Auden, introduction to Faber Book of Modern American Verse
| Friday, July 9, 2004
TT: You heard it here first
The White House announced this afternoon that President Bush will be nominating me to serve on the National Council on the Arts, the civilian panel that advises the National Endowment for the Arts and its chairman, Dana Gioia.
(For those of you not familiar with the intricacies of the federal arts bureaucracy, go here to find out exactly what the Council does.)
This is a volunteer post, meaning that I won’t be paid for my labors, but it does require Senate confirmation, meaning that I was recently investigated by the FBI (which is a story in itself) and have filled out a stack of papers not dissimilar in size to an unabridged dictionary. As close readers of this site may recall, I also had myself fingerprinted back in April, and now you know why.
I had to give the White House my full legal name, which I never, ever use, and that explains why the official announcement refers to me as "Terence Alan Teachout." Maybe they'll change it, someday....
Beyond that, there’s not much to tell. The NEA will be issuing a press release about my nomination, and I’ll post a link to it as soon as it goes up on their Web site. The Senate will either confirm me or not, and if it does, I’ll serve a six-year term. Yes, I'll continue to write about the arts, here and elsewhere, but I’ve been requested not to make any public statements about the NEA or its activities until my name comes before the Senate, so don’t ask me.
This much I’ll happily say: I’m grateful to the President for giving me the opportunity to serve on the Council. It’s an honor. I hope the Senate finds me worthy of confirmation.
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TT: Onward and upward with the TCCI
"About Last Night" appears to be on the way to breaking its all-time record for single-day traffic, mainly because the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, in addition to having been mentioned in yesterday’s "Hip Clicks" column on the USA Today Web site, was linked early this morning by Political Animal, Kevin Drum’s Washington Monthly blog. In the immortal Time-style words of Wolcott Gibbs, "Where it will all end, knows God!"
In Our Girl's temporary absence, I'm trying to stay on top of the scores posted by the various bloggers listed in "Sites to See." Here's the complete roster to date:
Banana Oil, 70%.
Bookish Gardener, 57%.
Brandywine Books, 67%.
Collected Miscellany, 68%.
Crescat Sententia, 40%.
Elegant Variation, 47%.
A Fool in the Forest, 64.38%.
Futurballa, 47%.
Gnostical Turpitude, 72%.
Mixolydian Mode, 52%.
Maud Newton, 54%.
MoorishGirl, 44%.
Rake’s Progress, 59%.
The Reading Experience, 43%.
The Rest Is Noise, 55%.
Return of the Reluctant, 54%.
Shaken & Stirred, 73%.
Something Old, Nothing New, 45%.
…something slant, 58% "or thereabouts."
Superfluities, 41%.
James Tata, 49%.
Tingle Alley, "60%ish."
Sarah Weinman, 58%.
To all those bloggers who've posted answers but no score: do your own math if you want to hang with the popular kids!
As for reaction to the TCCI, Ed has converted the results into a USA Today-style graphic, while Gideon Strauss posted this funny response:
I've decided not only to test how far my tastes differ from that of Mr. Teachout, but also how much less informed my tastes are. So I will give myself two scores: my TCCI score, and a score for the number of paired items out of a hundred on Teachout's list for which I had any idea what he is talking about (which I will call the Teachout Cultural Superiority Index or TCSI, so that my TCSI score will measure how close I am to his perfect 100)….
Read the whole thing here.
Gnostical Turpitude actually went to the trouble of writing a longish essay about the TCCI. Among his astute observations:
[T]he questions posed by Teachout reminded me of "Humiliations," a parlor game that appears in the David Lodge novel Changing Places. In that game, players confess the titles of books they've never read, receiving one point for every player who has read the book in question; hence, the winner is the competitor who has never read the books that are most familiar to his opponents.
There's a certain odd thrill to announcing that I've never read anything by Thomas Mann, that I've never read either Huck Finn or Moby-Dick, and that I've never been to (or read) an Edward Albee play. (As the professor in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe might say, "What do they teach them in the schools these days?!") I'd imagine that the thrill I've just described is similar to the feeling one experiences after winning a round of Humiliations!…
Read the whole thing here.
This seems as good a time as any to confess that I once organized a game of Humiliation (I'm not positive, but I think it's in the singular) at a garden party of budding young New York intellectuals who were all friendly enough to play honestly. I thought I’d die laughing, or at least throw up. No, I won’t tell you who was playing or what other sordid admissions were made, but I will admit that I stopped the show by acknowledging that I once reviewed a literary biography of an author with whose novels and short stories I was totally unfamiliar. It was a long, long time ago….
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TT: Remnants
I’ve always been oddly unsentimental about objects, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s simply a manifestation of a preference that I mentioned
a few months ago apropos of the rise of pay-per-song Web sites and the resulting decline of the record as art object: "I’m old-fashioned—but my attachment is to essences, not embodiments." Or maybe it has more to do with the fact that I’ve spent the past quarter-century moving from one small apartment to another (two in Kansas City, one in Illinois, four in the New York area), a practice that tends to inhibit the accumulation of superfluous stuff.
Whatever the reason, I haven’t kept many souvenirs of my past life. Nearly all those dating from my childhood and adolescence—my old Roth violin, my high-school yearbooks, a scraggly pair of stuffed cats named Russell and Louise—are at my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A, which is where I expect they’ll stay. Beyond that, next to nothing remains. I’ve never saved the manuscripts of my books, for instance, and I got rid of all my tattered old clippings after putting together A Terry Teachout Reader. I sold two-thirds of my library when I moved to my present apartment, mainly in order to have room to hang the art I was starting to collect. I don’t keep programs from the performances I review, nor do I have any photograph albums (in fact, I don’t even own a camera). The only pictures I have on display are the ones of my parents, Our Girl in Chicago, and my old friend Nancy LaMott
that are on my desk, plus a snapshot taken in an old-time photo booth immediately after I completed my first roller-coaster ride. A mottled, surf-pocked stone from the shore of Isle au Haut, the Maine island to which I traveled last fall in search of the spot that Fairfield Porter portrayed in a lithograph I own, rests atop my incoming mail. One of my paintings was done by a friend. And outside of a few inscribed books and a bare handful of unsorted photos crammed randomly in a drawer, that’s pretty much it. Except for these few relics, I live almost entirely in the present, surrounded by books, CDs, and the art on my walls.
If my uncluttered existence strikes you as austere, all I can say is that I’m not unsentimental about other things. I’m the easiest of weepers, always ready to turn on the taps while watching an old movie or listening to a piece of music with personal associations. Nor am I shy about quarrying my past life for literary purposes (one of my books is a memoir). Yet for whatever reason, I prefer to travel light—as lightly, that is, as a man who owns twenty prints, two paintings, a pastel, a Max Beerbohm caricature, a small assemblage by Paul Taylor, a cel set-up of Jerry Mouse, several hundred books, and a couple of thousand CDs is capable of traveling—and I never think about the things I haven't saved.
So it was with no small amount of surprise that I found myself confronted the other day with three grocery sacks full of miscellaneous papers retrieved from an old desk I’d left behind in my previous apartment. I’d completely forgotten the contents of that desk, and though I didn’t expect them to include anything important, I thought I ought to give them a quick sifting just to be sure.
I threw out most of what I found. I saw no reason, for instance, to hang onto a two-inch-thick stack of photocopied pieces I’d written for the New York Daily News during my tenure as its classical music and dance critic, though I did shake my head at the thought of the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve published in the twenty-seven years since my very first concert review appeared in the Kansas City Star. Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you’re not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote, and for a few years I even kept an up-to-date bibliography of my magazine pieces! Now I marvel at the vanity that once led me to think my every printed utterance worthy of preservation.
Only one of those pieces held my attention for more than the time it took me to pitch it in the nearest wastebasket: a copy of the first piece I wrote for Commentary, a review of James Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket published in December of 1985, six months after I moved to New York. I remember how hard I worked on it, and how proud I was to have "cracked" Commentary. Today it sounds hopelessly stiff and earnest, which is why I left it out of the Teachout Reader. What on earth could have possessed Norman Podhoretz to find a place for that immature effort in his book-review section? He told me the first draft was too "knowing," the best piece of advice any editor has ever given me, and I revised it nervously, hoping to pass muster, never imagining that I would write hundreds more pieces for Commentary, eventually becoming its music critic. Would it have pleased me to know these things back in 1985? Or might it have dulled the tang of my first sale?
I didn't expect to find a Metropolitan Opera program among my forgotten papers, though no sooner did I look at it than I knew why I’d saved it. I went to the Metropolitan Opera House on the evening of January 5, 1996, fully expecting to review the company premiere of Leos Janacek's The Makropulos Case for the Daily News. Instead, I ended up writing a front-page story about how one of the singers in the production died on stage, a minute and a half into the first act. The opening scene of The Makropulos Case is set in a law office where Vitek, a clerk, is looking up the files for a suit that has been dragging on for close to a century. To symbolize the tortuous snarl of Gregor v. Prus, designer Anthony Ward turned the entire back wall of the set into a forty-foot-high filing cabinet containing hundreds of drawers. Enter Vitek, played by a character tenor named Richard Versalle. As the curtain rose, he made his entrance, climbed up a tall ladder and pulled a file out of one of the drawers. "Too bad you can only live so long," he sang in Czech. Then he let go of the ladder and fell mutely to the stage, landing on his back with a terrible crash.
Three thousand people gasped. David Robertson, the conductor, waved the orchestra to a halt and shouted, "Are you all right, Richard?" Versalle didn't speak or move, and the curtain was quickly lowered. I sat frozen in my aisle seat, stunned by what I had seen. Then I pulled myself together and ran to the press room to find out what had happened. A company spokesman told the rapidly growing band of critics and hangers-on what little he knew: Versalle had been rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital. We started firing questions at him. How old was Versalle? When did he make his Met debut? Did he have a wife and children? I scribbled the answers (63, 1978, yes) on my program and pushed through the crowd to the nearest pay phone, where I dropped a quarter in the slot, dialed the number of the Daily News city desk, and spoke three words that had never before crossed my lips other than in jest: "Get me rewrite." Eight years later, I leafed through the program of that unfinished performance, looking at my barely decipherable notes. As souvenirs go, it was a good one, and I decided to keep it.
Almost as evocative was a sheaf of birthday cards given to me on my fortieth birthday, a month and a day after The Makropulos Case’s abortive opening night. It was a strange and somber event, for my friend Nancy had died only a few weeks before, and I was nowhere near getting over the shock of her loss. Still, you only turn forty once (if at all), and I didn’t want to disappoint the friends who’d planned a party to mark the occasion, so we went through with it and had a surprisingly good time, considering. Tucked inside the cards was a short stack of photographs, most of them of my parents, my niece, and the various cats I’ve owned over the years. I saved four of the best ones, along with a fading snapshot of Harry Jenks, a half-blind Kansas City jazz pianist with whom I used to sit in back in my college days (he could play just like Art Tatum, by which I don’t mean sort of like Art Tatum), and a picture of Our Girl in Chicago standing in front of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, Illinois, dressed in white from head to toe and looking like a warm summer day come to life.
I also found two wallet-sized photos of Libby Miller, an adored friend from Smalltown, U.S.A., with whom I ran a lemonade stand once upon a time. I had a crush on her but was too shy to do anything about it. Libby joined the Air Force after graduating from high school, and I played piano at her wedding. Then she vanished from sight, as the friends of our youth are all too prone to do, and I heard nothing more from her for a quarter-century. Not long ago she called me up from out of the blue, and I learned that she’d divorced and remarried, retired from the Air Force, settled down in rural Washington, and taken up watercolor painting as a full-time hobby. I Googled her as we talked, found one of her watercolors
on the Web, and saw with a start that my long-lost friend had somehow transformed herself into Elizabeth Michailoff, a bonafide artist. Now I held two of her fresh-faced high-school pictures in my hand, marveling at the myriad changes that thirty years’ worth of living had wrought.
I slipped the pictures and birthday cards into my Makropulos Case program, left everything else for the garbage collector, and headed back to my apartment, feeling wistful and unsettled, the way we so often feel after a brief immersion in the irretrievable past. Two packages awaited me on my return. I slit open the first one and was astonished to find a gorgeous, near-abstract marine watercolor by Libby—or Elizabeth, as I suppose I ought to call her now. With it was a note: "I painted the tide flats in February—and I have enjoyed how it turned out. When I started thinking of a painting to send to you, I kept returning to it. I don't know why. But I do know why I wanted to send you one. You were such a great friend to me at a time when I dearly needed someone I could go to and just be me. You gave me that gift and now in a very small way—I wanted to return the kindness. So I hope you do enjoy it." I do, dear Libby, I do.
The second package contained a handsomely carpentered wooden box with an elegant latch and a Georgian-blue lid on which was pasted a label reading as follows: "‘TT Reader’ Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle. 42 pieces, hand cut by Jack-in-the-Box Puzzles." Inside it was a jigsaw-puzzle version of the dust jacket of the Teachout Reader—but no invoice or accompanying cover letter. Who could have sent me so ingenious a present? I racked my brain for an answer, and at last the light dawned: this was the belated birthday present that Our Girl in Chicago had been promising me ever since February. We usually give one another books or CDs, but my last present to her had been rather fancier than that, and she had evidently been inspired to respond in kind.
Our Girl and I met fifteen years ago, back when she was the assistant to my then-editor at my then-publishing house, fresh out of college and wet behind the ears but already full of cleverness and life. Since then we've been the closest of friends, even though half a continent has separated us for the past decade. Not a day goes by that we don’t exchange e-mail or talk on the phone. Yet her inescapable absence from my daily life still saddens me, and the presence of her picture on my desk can only do so much to make up for it. Now she had sent me the perfect present, wholly personal and characteristic in every possible way, and I knew I would keep it for as long as I lived and think of her every time I looked at it.
"I sometimes feel the temptation to live in the past," I wrote in the introduction to the Teachout Reader, "but one can truly live only in the moment." I stand by that sentence, but surely the beginning of wisdom lies in knowing when to make an exception to even the soundest of rules. So I placed my summer snapshot of Our Girl inside the wooden puzzle box and put it on my bookshelf, right in front of my uniform edition of the complete works of Henry James, her favorite writer. I wrapped up Libby’s watercolor and took it to the neighborhood framer. Then I spent the rest of the day basking in the warmth that two unexpected presents had brought to the uncluttered, austerely beautiful home in which I live.
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TT: Almanac
"I'm no intellectual, you understand, but I like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, John P. Marquand, Louis Auchincloss, and Simenon."
Bing Crosby (quoted in Nat Hentoff, Listen to the Stories)
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TT: Consumables
Though I didn’t go to any plays last weekend or this week, I managed to keep busy. Here’s some of what I’ve been up to:
• On Thursday I went to Birdland to hear Roger Kellaway and Bill Charlap play two-piano jazz. Both of
them have figured prominently on this blog in recent months, so I won’t sing their individual praises. What I will say is that the set I caught last night was the best live two-piano jazz performance I’ve heard in my life—including a concert that Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones gave together in Kansas City back when the world was young. Their version of "Blue in Green" suggested an off-the-cuff collaboration between Bill Evans and Maurice Ravel, while the ferociously competitive up-tempo "Strike Up the Band" with which they set the proceedings in motion sounded like two guys shooting Roman candles at each other in a locked room. ("Lotta black notes on that page," Charlap said to me afterward, grinning slyly.) As if all this hadn't been more than sufficiently awe-inspiring, the remarkable young classical violinist Yue, about whom more another day, sat in on "Nuages" and "In a Sentimental Mood" and made an equally strong impression.
Words to the wise: Kellaway, Charlap, and Yue will be at Birdland through Saturday. Do not miss this gig.
• I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the Metropolitan Opera House, watching the first two nights of Lincoln Center Festival’s Ashton Celebration, a two-week-long minifestival of the ballets of Sir Frederick Ashton, England’s greatest choreographer. Both performances were mixed bills danced by the Joffrey Ballet, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and K-Ballet, a Japanese troupe. I plan to write at length about what I saw over the coming weekend. For now, take a look at Seeing Things, the artsjournal.com blog for which dance critic Tobi Tobias is covering the Ashton Celebration. I don’t agree with everything Tobi says, but she’s damned smart and always to be taken very seriously.
In addition, you might also be interested in reading
"Scènes de Ballet," a review-essay about Julie Kavanagh’s Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton that I wrote for the New York Times Book Review in 1997.
• I’m reading the bound galleys of Robert McCrum’s Wodehouse: A Life, out in November from Norton, and rereading Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time (which I do every couple of years) in preparation for reviewing Michael Barber’s Anthony Powell: A Life, out in September from Duckworth Overlook.
• I spent the weekend catching up with movies, past and present. Among other things, I saw Before Sunset (Sleepless in Seattle for eggheads) and Napoleon Dynamite (see my concise rave on top of the Top Five module in the right-hand column) in the theater, as well as Louis Malle’s Atlantic City (sentimental fluff, but Burt Lancaster is soooo good) at home.
• Now playing on iTunes: Donald Fagen’s "Century’s End," a little-known but way cool song from the soundtrack of the spectacularly misbegotten film version of Bright Lights, Big City. Even though it’s a solo track by Fagen, it’s currently available on CD as part of Steely Dan Gold.
That ought to hold you for a while.
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TT: AWOL
In case you bought this morning's Wall Street Journal to read my drama column...it's not there. I took a week off, the first time I've skipped a Friday since January. I earned it.
Not to worry: I'll be doing business at the same old stand next Friday. And you can still buy the paper, you know! It's got all the usual cool "Weekend Journal" stuff, only minus me.
| Thursday, July 8, 2004
TT: Almanac
"There can be no doubt that the dedicated Balzacian must accept a torrent of vulgarity, but, in matters of situation and behaviour, a great deal of improbability too. Never mind. Balzac's improbabilities do not prevent many of his least likely climaxes from being the best ones. Besides—something never to be forgotten—with all novelists one must put up with something."
Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day
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TT: Closing notices
The Public Theater’s well-reviewed revival of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s 1984 AIDS play, closed abruptly last week after just sixty-three performances, none of which sold out. "I'll tell you one thing: I will never write another play again," Kramer told the New York Times. "I mean, when are we all going to realize that people don't want to go to the theater anymore?" That is, you might say, a trifle solipsistic. I remember the original production of The Normal Heart vividly, and also unfavorably, it having been little more than a noisy piece of sermonizing. Hence I didn’t bother attending, much less reviewing, the revival. Once was enough.
Conversely, I didn’t catch the original run of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins a decade and a half ago, which was why I went out of my way to see and write about the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival at Studio 54. While I thought the show itself had major problems, I was as impressed by the production as were my fellow critics. But ordinary theatergoers begged to differ, and so Assassins will close, barring a miracle, on July 18.
To date, Sondheim has made no whiny public statements about the failure of Assassins to find an audience, that not being his style. He did, however, express concern prior to opening night that the show might give offense to those whom he considers politically benighted. "I live in a liberal community, which is happy to bring into question things about this country," he told a reporter for Time, a statement I found—well, smug. I called him on it when I reviewed the show for The Wall Street Journal:
Whenever Mr. Sondheim and John Weidman, his librettist, attend to the twisted souls of John Wilkes Booth (Michael Cerveris), Lee Harvey Oswald (Neil Patrick Harris), and their partners in ignominy, "Assassins" holds you in its grip like a demented strangler—but no sooner do they seek to use these sad creatures to score debating points than it turns as jejune as a college revue.
If you think I’m being harsh, you haven’t seen "Assassins," which takes the form of a carnival sideshow whose brass-voiced barker (Marc Kudisch) invites unhappy passers-by to forget their troubles by stepping right up and taking a potshot at the man in the Oval Office: "No job? Cupboard bare?/One room, no one there?/Hey, pal, don’t despair—/You wanna shoot a president?" That’s the message of "Assassins," such as it is: if only there were ice cream for everyone, Camelot would still be with us! Instead, we preach the American dream, and some of those born losers who find it hollow seek to even the score with a gun: "And all you have to do/Is/Squeeze your little finger./Ease your little finger back—/You can change the world."
Aside from being sophomoric, this rigidly reductive thesis clashes with the core of "Assassins," a series of nine sharply drawn sketches of successful and would-be presidential assassins. Not surprisingly, this is the part of the show where Mr. Sondheim finds his footing, since his other musicals are exclusively concerned not with ideas but feelings (or the inab
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