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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, May 5, 2006
TT: Bliss comes to Broadway
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I bang the gong for one new show, The Drowsy Chaperone, and grumble about two others, Hot Feet and The Importance of Being Earnest:
At last—at last!—a new musical that is both utterly frivolous and entrancingly clever has opened on Broadway. “The Drowsy Chaperone,” an affectionate, encyclopedically knowing send-up of the who-cares-if-the-plot-makes-sense musicals of the ’20s, is funny, brainy, tuneful, concise (one hour, 40 minutes, no intermission) and performed with bewitching skill. You’ll love it even if you don’t know Jerome Kern from Jerome Robbins, though you’ll get more of the inside jokes, of which there are several thousand, if you do. Either way, “The Drowsy Chaperone” is deservedly destined for a long, profitable run….
Maybe I was simply grateful not to be seeing “Lestat” again, but “Hot Feet,” Maurice Hines’ dumbed-down, funked-up jukebox-musical version of “The Red Shoes,” turned out to be not quite as bad as I’d feared….
I couldn’t be more surprised to find myself saying so, but the Theatre Royal Bath/Peter Hall Company’s touring production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Harvey Theater, is a slow-moving bore….
No link. Buy the paper, or subscribe to the Online Journal by going here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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TT: Flashback
I just finished reading Peter Richmond’s Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee. I wish it were better—it is, like most pop-music biographies, gushingly overwritten and musically underinformed—but at least it’s thorough, and when you finish reading it you’ll know a whole lot more about Peggy Lee than you did when you first picked it up.
I suppose it’s possible that some readers of “About Last Night” have never heard a Peggy Lee album. If you’re among them, try this one, which is a pretty good and fairly wide-ranging complilation of some of her best-known records. Among other things, it contains Lee’s greatest hit, “Fever,” about which I wrote for the New York Times four years ago, the Sunday after she died. I didn’t include this piece in A Terry Teachout Reader because it’s too short, but I like it anyway, even though I was fighting a frighteningly tight deadline and didn’t have any time for second thoughts. I hope you like it, too.
* * *
Peggy Lee taught me all about sex. I was twelve at the time, and had just made the earth-shaking discovery that my father’s record collection was of more than merely historical interest. This was in 1968, the year of the White Album, and I was still trying to figure out how to play “Rocky Raccoon” on my brand-new guitar, but I was also chewing my way through the selected works of Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, whose recording of “Fever” was—shall we say—instructive.
Not that she was obvious about it, or anything else. If a Hitchcock blonde could have raised her voice in song, then Peggy Lee, who died last Monday at the age of eighty-one, would have sounded pretty much like that, cool and self-possessed and…amused. But even at twelve, I got the message, and then some: what the lady on the record had in mind was pretty much what I had in mind twenty-four hours a day, except that her point of view was more informed. That was when I realized my father knew a thing or two about music.
Thirty-four years later, I know a lot more about Peggy Lee, the English division of EMI having finally deigned to transfer the best of her albums to compact disc. I now know that “Fever” was the least of her. She was exquisite—there is no other word for her. She floated atop a rhythm section like a soap bubble on a warm breeze, never raising her alto-flute voice a decibel more than absolutely necessary in order to get the exact effect she intended. She was a smart singer, the very opposite of all the cruel jokes some jazz instrumentalists like to tell about the women with whom they so often grudgingly share a bandstand. She chose her material with painstaking care, writing some of the best of it herself, and when she sang a song, it usually stayed sung. Other people do “Don’t Smoke in Bed” and “I’ve Got Your Number” and “You Came a Long Way from St. Louis,” but when I hear them in my mind’s ear, hers is the voice I hear.
I know all that—and yet when I learned of her death, the first thing that popped into my head was a dirt-plain bass-and-drum riff and a soft, sly voice half-whispering “Never know how much I love you/Never know how much I care/When you put your arms around me/I get a fever that’s so hard to bear.” I didn’t need to go looking for that record on my shelves: it was burned into my memory, together with a mental picture of the beautiful woman who sang it. I remember how sure of herself she sounded, sure enough—and strong enough—to smile at the thought of playing with fire. Is this really what women are like? I wondered, and decided I’d better find out.
That’s quite a lesson to have learned from a three-minute single—but, then, Peggy Lee was quite a teacher.
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TT: Acquisition
When I was a boy, my father bought me a statuette of W.C. Fields. I liked it fine and managed to hang onto it for a number of years, though I remember wishing even then that he’d given me the Louis Armstrong statuette from the same series. They were made by a company called Esco (which still exists, as I recently discovered). Needless to say, the statuettes long ago became collectors’ items, but I forgot about them until I saw a photograph of the Satchmo model in Gary Giddins’ Armstrong biography. As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted one of my own, and the desire grew stronger when I started writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
A Satchmo statuette turned up on eBay the other day, and I bought it on the spot. Those who know what Armstrong looked like in the flesh won’t need to be told that it is an extremely faithful depiction of the way he appeared on stage, with only a slight, self-evidently affectionate dash of caricature added by the anonymous artist. (It’s considerably truer to life than the po-faced, hyper-respectful Armstrong statue erected a few years ago in New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong Park.) It turns out that Esco's Satchmo is coveted by collectors of black memorabilia, and I can see why: I’ve never seen a rendering of Armstrong that did a better job of conveying his irrepressible joie de vivre.
I've placed my latest acquisition on the corner of my desk, where I expect it to fill me with inspiration from now to the day next March when, God willing, I finish Hotter Than That and ship it off to Harcourt. No, it isn't art, not in the Teachout Museum sense, but it does make me smile, for which there is ever and always much to be said. As I wrote in my last "Sightings" column for The Wall Street Journal, apropos of the so-called "Mozart effect":
Maurice Ravel put at the head of his Valses nobles et sentimentales this lovely epigraph by the French poet Henri de Régnier: “…the delicious and always new pleasure of a useless occupation.” Ravel knew that in the end it doesn’t matter whether or not art is “good” for you, so long as it gives you pleasure.
Even in the most elegantly decorated of homes, there should always be room for a little bit of fun. This is mine.
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TT: Almanac
“In Hello, Dolly! the movements and the jive with the audience clapping—aw, it’s all in the fun. The people expect all that from me—coming out all chesty, making faces. That’s me and I don’t want to be nobody else. They know I’m there in the cause of happiness. And I don’t worry what anybody thinks. There’s an old saying. ‘I’ll be the horse’s head—and you be yourself.’”
Louis Armstrong, interview with Richard Meryman (Life, April 15, 1966)
| Thursday, May 4, 2006
TT: Procrastination meme
Courtesy of the ever-readable Little Professor, here goes nothing:
• I am getting ready to go downstairs and catch a cab that will take me to a midtown recording studio, where I’ll be taping an episode of a new radio show hosted by John Pizzarelli.
• I want a Morandi etching.
• I wish I lived by a river, a lake, or the sea.
• I hate cell phones used in inappropriate places and fashions.
• I love my family, my friends, my work (and the art it requires me to consume), and the Teachout Museum.
• I miss my home town.
• I fear death. (Why beat around the bush?)
• I hear the faint sound of traffic on Columbus Avenue and the soft purr of my iBook.
• I wonder if the weather will be nice when I take a couple of days off next week and head for one of my Secure Undisclosed Locations.
• I regret not having spent more afternoons in Central Park.
• I am not quite as patient as I wish I were.
• I dance under no circumstances whatsoever.
• I sing in tune, but in an uninteresting bass-baritone voice.
• I cry fairly often, usually for no good reason.
• I am not always considerate (though I try to be).
• I make with my hands the occasional omelet.
• I write in a near-micrographic hand that my friends claim is attractive-looking. (To me it looks like a scrawl.)
• I confuse…er, nothing that comes immediately to mind, though I find that the names of good friends slip my mind from time to time. Such is middle age!
• I need to take a shower and eat a little something before I head for the studio. (It might also be a good idea to put on some clothes.)
• I should start writing the sixth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong—but not yet!
• I start reading more books than I finish.
• I finish writing Hotter Than That eleven months from now (D.V.!, D.V.!).
• I tag Our Girl, of course.
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OGIC: Adolescence is a foreign country
My review of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green appeared in last weekend's Baltimore Sun. I loved it, here's why:
The time is 1982 in the English Midlands, the era of Margaret Thatcher, Chariots of Fire, the Falklands War, and Talking Heads. Jason Taylor is about to turn 13 when the novel opens, and at the mercy of the mob of Wilcoxes, Redmarleys and Broses. In an adolescent jungle where hardness reigns, Jason is heartbreakingly soft. He's plagued by a capricious stammer he personifies as an inner villain called Hangman, who wreaks gleeful havoc with his confidence. He doesn't know what certain popular epithets favored by his peers mean and is afraid to ask. He unfashionably cares about people, beauty, and, worst of all, poetry. If his peers knew this, he recognizes, "they'd gouge me to death behind the tennis courts with blunt woodwork tools and spray the Sex Pistols logo on my gravestone." So he writes poems under a pseudonym and publishes them in a local journal.
It's convenient for Mitchell that Jason is a budding poet and an instinctive naturalist to boot, a sort of English Wendell Berry in the making. Jason's poetic leaning makes plausible all kinds of verbal flourishes and fine observations that might otherwise be a stretch coming from a 13-year-old. But Mitchell takes the liberty and makes the most of it; in fact, one of the most striking and beautiful things about his novel is the entirely plausible and disarming way in which Jason's voice blends the resourceful and calibrated expression of a poet - "some way-too-early fireworks streaked spoon-silver against the Etch-A-Sketch gray sky" - with the occasionally colorful but essentially rote slang favored by a kid. The rich hash that results is, on just about every page, ordinary and extraordinary and ravishing.
Though Mitchell is best known for his previous novel, Cloud Atlas, he began building a following with his earlier books Ghostwritten and Number Nine Dream. Black Swan Green both cements and complicates his reputation as a painstaking formalist and a writer's writer. On one hand, it is narrated more traditionally than any of the previous works, and dwells, more conventionally, on the inner life of a single character. Black Swan Green is an unapologetically realist novel and a hugely satisfying one. On the other hand, for all the naturalism of its effect, the book is every bit as elaborately stitched together as Mitchell's more formally showy books. It has intricate patterns to reveal that might not surface on a first reading.
The whole thing can be read here. As you see, I found the novel generally excellent. But it also found an inside track to my heart in its preoccupation with Alain-Fournier's enigmatic 1913 wonder of a novel Le Grand Meaulnes—a book that, if read at the right age, permanently enters the bloodstream. I read it as a high school senior, which seems to have been just young enough. Reading Alain-Fournier's and Mitchell's novels together would be a very cool small-scale reading project for the summer, no matter one's age.
For a smart dissenting view on Mitchell's novel, see Jenny Davidson's generous-minded but ultimately lukewarm assessment at her blog Light Reading.
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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. (No, there aren't any asterisks this week!)
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Awake and Sing! (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes June 11)
• Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes July 9)
• Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter and sexual content)
• Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter and implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here)
• The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult 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:
• I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, reviewed here)
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON:
• Defiance (drama, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes June 4)
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TT: Below the radar
Many of you who read yesterday’s posting about Pandora, the new Web-based streaming-audio “music discovery service,” have already written to tell me that you tried it and liked it, for which much thanks.
One well-informed reader, however, told me quite a bit more:
i just figured out how pandora got itunes and amazon to let them run wild. it's genius really and i've used the same strategy in marketing projects for corporations.
pandora gets to use whatever it wants (within limits, of course) and in exchange, they are feeding demographic data to itunes and amazon. if you don't sign up, the demo data is raw. in other words, itunes learns what types of music is favored with other types as well as mismatches. this helps them market to those who download.
so, for example, if you download prez, you may be interested to learn that a stan getz disc was also favored by most people who dug prez. it gets better. those who do sign up is where the real action is. when you log in and indicate what you like and dislike. in short, you are telling itunes and amazon exactly what terry teachout likes.
so, when you log in at itunes or amazon, cookies read it's you and itunes and amazon tempt you with stuff you may have listened to and liked or similar stuff that the data says you should like. it's brilliant. the end user gets free music, pandora gets ad revenue and a percentage of each vote from itunes/amazon and itunes/amazon get database gold.
not bad eh?
Not bad at all—though I’m sure that certain readers will bristle at the thought of such data being mined without their explicit permission, even if the process does lead to their musical horizons being expanded for free.
To these people I say, Better disable your cookies and hide in the root cellar! That’s the future of marketing, cultural and otherwise, and unless you go off the new-media grid altogether, you can’t escape it. For better and worse—in proportions that have yet to be made fully manifest—it’s already here.
UPDATE: Another reader writes:
I tried it. I wasn't happy. Not because of the choices, but because
they didn't know even one of the people/groups I was suggesting to
give me any choices. Granted, these were not your usual American
bland artists, they were Belgian, French, Quebecois, Algerian and
Lebanese. And not one of the 15 made it into their list.
Still, it seems to me that if you're even slightly adventurous, you
might not do so well with this service because it won't give me (for
example) someone like Liane Foly or Rachid Taha that I might enjoy.
Given the diversity of musical tastes and cultures here, I'm surprised
that they're not broader in selection.
Er, well...yikes!
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TT: A clock without a key
I take six pills a day and a seventh every other day. If I don’t, I’ll die, not right away—my cardiologist says I’m in great shape—but considerably sooner than I’d like. I don’t resent so modest a regimen, especially since I know lots of people who have to take two or three times as many pills as I do. When I think about it, I’m mainly grateful that six and a half pills a day, plus regular exercise and a sensible diet, are all it takes to keep me out of a coffin, at least for the present. Nevertheless, I'm having a certain amount of trouble adjusting to the fact that I've joined the ranks of those who can no longer take their health for granted.
For years I abused myself, though not in any of the more immediately devastating ways. Overwork and overeating were my tipples of choice, and whenever I indulged to excess, I simply laid off for a couple of days, after which I became my normal self once again. Or so I thought. Like most of us, I preferred to ignore the signals of impending doom that were starting to show up on my screen with increasing frequency, and on the morning when the roof fell in
and I was forced to call an ambulance in order to save what was left of my life, it had been at least two years—maybe more—since I’d last seen a doctor of any kind.
In short, I used to think I was bulletproof, and now I know I’m not. The best I can say is that I somehow managed last December to dodge a bullet aimed at my heart, and should I stop following doctor’s orders, the next one will almost certainly hit its target. So I take my pills twice a day, and each time I do, I hear the words Remember you must die in my mind’s ear.
Dame Muriel Spark, who died a couple of weeks ago after a long and artistically fruitful life, wrote a remarkable novel in 1959 called Memento Mori. It’s about a group of old people who, for no apparent reason, start to receive anonymous telephone calls from a person who says “Remember you must die” to them, then hangs up. The novel tells how each of the recipients of these mysterious calls is affected by them. Toward the end one of the characters makes the following remark, which has been much on my mind of late:
If I had my life over again I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practise, as it were, the remembrance of death. There is no other practice which so intensifies life. Death, when it approaches, ought not to take one by surprise. It should be part of the full expectancy of life. Without an ever-present sense of death life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.
I don’t think my life was insipid prior to last December, but I’m pretty sure that I was taking large parts of it for granted, and I know I’d been abusing the work I love, in much the same way that a drunkard abuses the nectar that once added savor to his daily rounds. Yes, there were times when I pierced the veil and awoke to what Mr. Anecdotal Evidence calls the thisness of things, but those times were too rare, perhaps in part because I took for granted that I would be around for a long time to come.
Needless to say, I hope and expect to be around for a very long time to come. But twice a day, just like clockwork, I open my medicine cabinet, take out my seven-day pillbox, and swallow the tablets that remind me, whether or not I care to be reminded at that particular moment, that my clock, just like yours, is running down. I know there will always be stretches of my life that I take for granted—that’s in our nature—but until I die there will also be those twice-daily visits to the medicine cabinet to warn me, if I care to listen, that the night cometh, when no man can work. Or listen to music, or take a walk in Central Park, or linger over dinner with a friend and talk idly and happily about nothing in particular.
That’s a good thing to keep in mind, if not exactly a comforting one.
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TT: Almanac
"He was a prisoner of his belief in realities rather than appearances. He had never cared what anyone thought of him, only what he thought of himself."
Brian Garfield, Hopscotch
| Wednesday, May 3, 2006
OGIC: Guess who?
Here's a pop quiz. What well-known actor is being discussed by his director in this excerpt from a current interview?
On some level, when he’d say, "Ah, that’s a wonderful idea," and get that smile on his face, I’d think, "Oh boy, he hates my guts."
But I’d tell him what I wanted, and he’d do it instantly. He’s incredibly accomplished.
I'll publish the answer, with a link, before bed tonight. In the meantime, send your guess. I'm curious whether the degree of difficulty will prove to be what I suppose.
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TT: The future, ahead of schedule
I’ve been playing with Pandora, the new Web-based streaming-audio "music discovery service." Based on a week’s worth of hands-on experience, I’ve decided that (A) it works and (B) it’s going to be a Very Big Thing.
To use Pandora, you start by inputting the name of a pop artist or song that you like. This creates a “station” that you can “tune in” on your computer at will. The station then plays a record by that artist, followed by similar-sounding songs by different artists. You respond in turn by telling Pandora whether or not you like each song it plays. At any time you can input additional artists or song titles, which automatically increases the size of your station's playlist. The more information you supply about your tastes, the more accurately Pandora can analyze them and select new songs you’re likely to enjoy.
How does Pandora work? It has access to 300,000 songs available through iTunes and amazon.com (you can use either service to purchase the songs you hear). According to Pandora’s Web site, these songs have all been analyzed in the following manner:
We ended up assembling literally hundreds of musical attributes or "genes" into a very large Music Genome. Taken together these genes capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song—everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony. It's not about what a band looks like, or what genre they supposedly belong to, or about who buys their records—it's about what each individual song sounds like.
Over the past five years, we've carefully listened to the songs of over 10,000 different artists—ranging from popular to obscure—and analyzed the musical qualities of each song one attribute at a time. This work continues each and every day as we endeavor to include all the great new stuff coming out of studios, clubs and garages around the world.
Believe it or not, this isn’t just hot air. When I “asked” Pandora why it was playing The Band’s “Look Out Cleveland,” for instance, it responded as follows: “Based on what you’ve told us so far, we’re playing this track because it features country influences, a subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, acoustic rhythm piano and mixed acoustic and electric instrumentation.” All true. Of course, it was also playing "Look Out Cleveland" because I’d already told Pandora that I liked The Band, but the very next song it played, Albert Lee’s “The Victim,” contained the same musical features, and I liked that one, too.
Once I’d inputted the names of a dozen artists and given thumbs-up and thumbs-down responses to the songs Pandora was playing in response, it became clear to me that the analytic algorithm it uses to choose new songs was sufficiently sophisticated to second-guess my musical tastes with an accuracy that bordered at times on the eerie. As I write these words, Pandora is playing me Frank Sinatra’s live recording with Count Basie of “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Why? Because it features “swing influences, smooth vocals, romantic lyrics, a horn ensemble and” (wait for it) “acoustic guitar accompaniment.” Sure enough, Freddie Green’s rhythm guitar is very prominent in the mix on the Sinatra-Basie recording of “The Shadow of Your Smile.” Needless to say, that’s not a detail a casual listener would be likely to notice, but it happens to be one of the aspects of this particular recording that I find most engaging.
All this points to the accuracy of another claim made by Pandora:
Together our team of thirty musician-analysts have been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound—melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics...and more—close to 400 attributes!
Allowing for a certain amount of what Joseph Epstein calls “blurbissimo,” I’d say this self-description is more than mere self-praise.
Pandora is a two-tiered system: you can use it for free by agreeing to listen to occasional advertisements, or you can skip the ads by paying a very reasonable fee. I’m not sure the company has started selling air time yet—I’m a free user, and I have yet to encounter any commercials—but presumably ads will start to appear as soon as a sufficiently large number of listeners are using the service. I can already tell you, though, that should I find them obtrusive when that time comes, I’ll definitely subscribe.
What I find most attractive about Pandora is that it offers the best of two worlds. I like choosing my own music—that’s why I have three thousand songs on my iPod—but when you do that, you’re never surprised by what you hear. Shuffle play is a way of getting around this problem, but only within a realm of choice predetermined by you; satellite radio offers a much greater degree of surprise, but only within one musical genre at a time. Pandora, by contrast, allows you to mix genres at will. By telling Pandora that I like (for starters) Louis Armstrong, The Band, Count Basie, Donald Fagen, Robert Johnson, Lyle Lovett, Nancy LaMott, Erin McKeown, Aimee Mann, Pat Metheny, Nickel Creek, and Luciana Souza, I’ve ensured that it will play a very wide variety of music—but never anything I know I don’t like. Radio Teachout plays no heavy metal or hip-hop. Within the parameters I’ve specified, though, it is constantly surprising me, usually in good ways—and when it plays something I don’t care for, I simply give that song a thumbs-down, thus ensuring that I’ll never hear it again.
Like blogging, Pandora is easier to experience than it is to explain, so I suggest you give it a hands-on try, bearing in mind that you’ll need to spend twenty minutes or so interacting with the program before it knows enough about your taste to start making intelligent music choices. Don’t let that throw you: the Pandora interface is both user-friendly and fun to use. My guess is that within a half-hour or less, you’ll be addicted.
A couple of years ago I came to the conclusion that terrestrial radio, as conventional broadcast radio is now known, was doomed, at least in its historic capacity as a mass medium for the dissemination of recorded music. Judging by this story, I’d say I was right on target. After spending a few days playing with Pandora, I now think the demise of music-oriented terrestrial radio will come even sooner than I expected. What’s more, I think Pandora could conceivably threaten the emergence of satellite radio as a major player on the home-music scene (unless some genius at XM or Sirius figures out a way to make satellite radio interactive, which seems highly improbable).
Yes, these are strong words, but wait until you’ve tried Pandora before you dismiss them as technophilic hype. I have no doubt—none at all—that it’s the most potentially significant music-delivery system to come along since the introduction of iTunes and the iPod. You heard it here first.
UPDATE: Sarah tried Pandora, and is impressed.
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TT: Almanac
"The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur. God lurks in the gaps."
Jorge Luis Borges, “Creation and P.H. Gosse”
| Tuesday, May 2, 2006
TT: Alone in a crowd
Everybody likes Paul Klee. He is the most approachable of the major modernists, I suspect because his paintings are not only modest in scale but contain the kind of verbally paraphrasable content that makes them easily describable, if not explicable. (They are in fact utterly and wonderfully mysterious.) You don’t have to know anything about art to talk about a Klee painting. All you have to know is the title: Magic Garden. Ancient Sound. Twittering Machine. What’s not to get—or to like? Yet for all his accessibility, few have questioned his stature, not even the notoriously picky Clement Greenberg, who at first thought Klee provincial, “an eccentric but respectable bourgeois,” but ended up deciding that he was “major…in his funny way. In a pamphlet I called him a keinmeister [small master]. But he’s major all the same.”
The Neue Galerie, which I last visited five months ago in the company of my favorite blogger, is currently putting on a retrospective called “Klee and America,” mounted in collaboration with the Menil and Phillips Collections. It consists of paintings and works on paper drawn from American museums and private collections. That’s a smart idea. Klee has long been widely collected in this country, with good reason, though there was a time when many dismissed his art as the scribblings of a lunatic. Take a look at what Time wrote about the first American exhibition of Klee’s work to be held after his death in 1940:
Last week Manhattan’s Buchholz and Willard Galleries gathered together the largest Klee exhibition ever placed on view. The 100-odd drawings and canvases in the exhibition ranged from mad, wire-worky diagrams to basket-textured abstractions….All had a look of quiet, pastel-shaded insanity. The show was posthumous: short, sharp-faced Artist Klee had died at his Swiss home four months before. It was also posthumous in another sense. To the red-cheeked, goose-stepping Nazis who after 1933 scrubbed individualism from Germany’s art galleries, Paul Klee had been the most degenerate of degenerate artists. Some day history will have to decide whether Hitler was right—about Artist Klee.
Times have changed, and "Klee and America" is drawing noisy crowds, not of blockbuster magnitude but obtrusive nonetheless, especially seeing as how Klee’s intimate, confidential art all but begs to be viewed in silence. The Phillips Collection, which owns a goodly number of Klees, usually hangs them together, a half-dozen or so at a time, in a small side gallery that is invariably quiet, just as it should be. Perhaps that’s the best way to look at a Klee, short of actually owning one—and it strikes me that it would be frightfully immodest to own more than one or two. I read on a wall panel at the Neue Galerie that Clifford Odets, the left-wing playwright who wrote Awake and Sing! and Waiting for Lefty, owned sixty Klees at one time in his life. Somehow that strikes me as vulgar, not to mention incongruous.
I should also mention that the Neue Galerie is piping music into the galleries where “Klee and America” is hanging, a practice for which vulgar is not even close to the word. Yes, I like Schumann’s Carnaval, but I’m damned if I know why anybody thinks the paintings of Paul Klee profit from being viewed with Carnaval playing in the background.
To be sure, "Klee and America" is marvelous, very well chosen and by no means too big for its britches. Even so, I was distracted by the talkative crowd and the canned music, and so I walked briskly through the show, lingering longingly in front of four or five extra-special paintings. Then I went back downstairs, bought a copy of the excellent catalogue, and hit the road. I crossed Fifth Avenue and plunged into Central Park, where I spent a blissful hour wandering through the Ramble and down the bridle path. It never ceases to amaze me that you can be alone in Central Park, not just at odd hours but pretty much any time you want, simply by departing the main thoroughfares and heading down an unbeaten path.
I thought about Klee all the way home, where I opened my mailbox and found a review copy of Nancy King's new CD (about which more below). I popped it in my stereo and plopped down on the couch with the “Klee and America” catalogue, all alone and happy to be.
* * *
“Klee and America” is up at the Neue Galerie (86th St. at Fifth Ave., closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays) through May 22. For more information, go here. To purchase the catalogue, go here.
After closing in New York, "Klee and America" will travel to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (June 16-Sept. 10) and the Menil Collection in Houston (Oct. 6-Jan. 14).
* * *
UPDATE: A reader writes:
I LOVED the Klee, but LOATHE the Neue Galerie. It had such potential. However they have made it such an unpleasant place to experience art. There are too many guards and they are WAY too intrusive. I was once stopped THREE times in one visit and told to display my little badge more clearly by three different guards. Also, they don’t just look in your purse/bag, they root around in it. My handbag and I are rarely as threatening as we seem to be on Fifth and 86th.
The trick, I’ve found is to go a half an hour before closing. The guards are busy with text messaging their afterwork plans and other visitors are unwilling to fork out the admission price for 30 minutes. But the music, well, no way around that. When I was there, they had looped the overture to The Magic Flute. How many times in a row can you listen to that and not succumb to museum-rage?
Apply hammer (A) to head (B) of nail (C).
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TT: Words to the wise
• If you’ve been following the latest plagiarism scandal and feel the need for a bit of historical context, I strongly recommend that you read Stolen Words, Thomas Mallon’s 1989 study of literary plagiarism, which is not only full of fascinating stories but (like all of Mallon’s books) wonderfully well written to boot.
• Jazz vocalist Nancy King
and nonpareil pianist Fred Hersch
are performing together May 9-11 at the Jazz Standard. It’s a CD-release gig: MaxJazz is about to release a live album recorded at their last Jazz Standard engagement.
Hersch is, of course, a known and much-admired
quantity, but King, who lives and works in Oregon, is virtually unknown save to her colleagues and a small but ardent band of admirers. I only know about her because she performed at the wedding of a musician friend of mine a couple of years ago, and blew me right out of the water. She is a major, major talent deserving of the widest possible recognition, a warm-voiced contralto whose gifts are nicely summed up in Hersch’s liner notes for Live at the Jazz Standard:
Nancy King epitomizes to me what real jazz singing is all about: fearless risk-taking; a pround connection with the words she is singing; using the many colors in her voice to put a new spin on old chestnuts; a flawless harmonic sense; off-the-hook improvisational skills; and complete openness to interplay. Add to the above her amazing sense of swing and rhythm (and the wisdom and experience that comes from more than more than forty years of singing) and you have one of the greatest jazz singers ever.
I second all that, fervently.
For a little taste of Nancy King’s singing, go here and click on any of the links. Then go here and place an advance order for Live at the Jazz Standard, which will be released on May 9. Then go to the Jazz Standard and hear for yourself.
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TT: Almanac
"He has found his style, when he cannot do otherwise."
Paul Klee, diary entry (1908)
| Monday, May 1, 2006
TT: Lost artist
Cy Walter, who died in 1968, specialized in a style of popular piano playing for which there has never been a satisfactory name. Because he and others like him spent most of their lives working in the lounges of high-priced hotels, most people now refer to their kind of music as “cocktail piano,” which is accurate as far as it goes but fails altogether to suggest the elegance and technical wizardry of Walter’s own playing.
I suppose one might call it “cabaret piano,” since he was closely associated with singers like Mabel Mercer, whom he accompanied with exquisite taste, and it’s certainly no coincidence that he figures so prominently in the pages of James Gavin’s Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret. Walter himself didn’t much care for labels, but when pressed he would call himself "a specialist in show tunes." For my part, and even though I don’t much care for neologisms, I like to think of the genre in which he worked as “New Yorker music.” Needless to say, the New Yorker I have in mind is the one founded and edited by Harold Ross, a rough-hewn newspaperman from Colorado who by some miracle of grace contrived to bring into being the most sophisticated magazine in the history of American journalism. It didn’t survive him for long, at least not in its original form: William Shawn took it in directions that proved alien to Ross’ tutelary spirit, and today’s New Yorker, for all its virtues, is greatly different in tone and approach from the magazine Ross edited between 1925 and his death in 1951.
Among many other things, Ross’ New Yorker promoted the kind of music performed by the artists chronicled in Intimate Nights. Rogers Whitaker, who covered cabaret (though it wasn’t yet called that) for the magazine, loved Walter’s piano playing and plugged him regularly in the "Goings On About Town" section. Alec Wilder, a New Yorker-endorsed songwriter who also wrote wisely and well about American popular song, contributed a set of liner notes to one of Walter’s albums in which he remarked that “anyone who has heard his own songs played by Cy immediately has a greater respect for his own work.” That is one hell of a compliment, and there were plenty of equally illustrious folk inclined to echo it. The mailing list of fans to whom Walter sent postcards announcing his gigs (it’s preserved in his papers) includes Tallulah Bankhead, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Katharine Cornell, Lynn Fontanne, Elia Kazan, Frank Loesser, Agnes De Mille, Arthur Miller, Cole Porter, Jerome Robbins, and Tennessee Williams.
Walter recorded extensively from the Forties on, but until now none of his albums had ever been reissued, meaning that his name is virtually unknown today save to those lucky New Yorkers who once upon a time heard him live. Now Shellwood, an independent record label in England, has produced the first Cy Walter CD, a compilation of the pianist's Liberty Music Shop 78s called The Park Avenue Tatum. All twenty-eight tracks are show tunes, among them “Begin the Beguine,” “Body and Soul,” “I Can’t Get Started,” “Liza,” “’S Wonderful,” and medleys from such half-remembered Broadway shows as Jerome Kern’s Very Warm for May, Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie, and Richard Rodgers’ By Jupiter.
Except for the last two cuts, on which Walter is joined by Gil Bowers, all of the performances on The Park Avenue Tatum are unaccompanied piano solos, though the casual listener could be forgiven for suspecting that there might have been a second pianist lurking in the shadows of the studio. Peter Mintun’s superb liner notes reprint a 1940 thank-you note that Richard Rodgers sent to a friend who had given him a copy of one of Walter’s records:
Who are these fellows, Cy and Walter? For you’re certainly not going to stand there and tell me one man plays all that piano. I resent the whole experience, anyway. Here I’ve been yelling with pain at the way the “stylists” kick hell out of [my] original harmonies and you have to send me a record that stinks with style and still manages to leave all the harmonies intact. Further, I have never heard better taste. Why don’t you leave a man and his hates alone?
It’d be hard to describe Walter’s style more wittily, or exactly, than that. He plays a song the way the songwriter wrote it, embedding the tune in a richly textured accompaniment from which it shines forth like a well-lit, well-framed painting. Though his playing often recalls the similarly virtuosic style of Art Tatum, his good friend and favorite pianist, Walter rarely indulged in the iridescent substitute chords Tatum loved to pull out of his hat, nor does his playing swing the way Tatum’s did. He generally sticks to bouncy, danceable medium-brisk tempos, and his most staggering feats of technical prestidigitation, unlike Tatum’s, are tossed off with the unobtrusive discretion of a gentleman’s gentleman: you can listen and marvel if you like, or you can sip your drink and chat.
Such playing is typically appreciated more by musicians than critics, who are so put off by the imagined taint of commercialism that they too often throw out the baby with the bathwater. It didn't surprise me, for instance, that Ethan Iverson, who plays piano with The Bad Plus, that quirkiest and least predictable of jazz bands, should have sent me an e-mail in response to the posting of last week in which I mentioned that Shellwood had offered to send me a review copy of The Park Avenue Tatum. “I have heard Cy Walter solo,” he wrote, “and it was amazing. You will be glad to get that one!” It figured that Iverson, who blithely disregards stylistic pigeonholes in his own bedazzlingly eclectic playing, would appreciate Walter. No, he wasn’t a jazzman, at least not in the ordinary meaning of the word—but who cares? As any number of wise musicians have been credited with saying, there are only two kinds of music, and Walter’s was the good kind.
Rogers Whitaker called cocktail piano “a minor art, but one of the more important ones.” I like that, and I like The Park Avenue Tatum enormously, not just because it’s so beautiful but because listening to it fills my mind’s eye with fetching pictures of a classier world, the same great good place that is chronicled in Intimate Nights, Rick McKay’s Broadway: The Golden Age, and The Complete New Yorker. My older friends, the ones who rail against rock and roll whenever you give them half a chance, are forever telling me how much nicer New York was in the Forties and Fifties. Me, I love it just as it is, especially when I saunter into the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room or stroll into a Broadway theater and plant myself on the aisle, notebook in hand. Every once in a while, though, I catch myself thinking, Yes, I have the greatest job in the world—but I still wish it was 1947 again. That’s how listening to Cy Walter makes me feel.
* * *
To purchase The Park Avenue Tatum, go here.
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TT: Everywhere you go, there we are
I’ve been peeking at the “About Last Night” world map, which shows that in recent days we’ve been visited by readers from the following places:
• Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Urmston, Trafford, United Kingdom
• Parow, Western Cape, South Africa
• Yehud, HaMerkaz, Israel
• Vaihingen an der Enz, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany
• Gilan, Keyhan, Islamic Republic of Iran
• Merville Subdivision, Rizal, the Philippines
• Jordanville, Victoria, Australia
• Franco da Rocha, Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Bovolone, Veneto, Italy
• Jaipur, Rajasthan, India
• Seoul, Seoul-t’ukpyolsi, Republic of Korea
Hello out there! Come back soon! (And forgive the missing diacritical marks!)
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TT: Almanac
Ah, there ain't no gentlemen
To open up the doors
There ain't no ladies now,
There's only pigs and whores
And even kids'll knock ya down
So's they can pass
Nobody's got no class!
Fred Ebb, “Class” (music by John Kander)
| Friday, April 29, 2005
TT: Handoff
In case you've forgotten, or haven't been paying attention, the brainy and beauteous Our Girl in Chicago, who has a new job that's keeping her busy all the way from Monday to Friday, is now occupying the "About Last Night" blogger's chair on weekends, while I devote myself exclusively to chronicling the life, times, and dietary practices of Louis Armstrong. I don't know what she's got planned for this weekend, but I know it'll be good, so come take a peek.
As for me, I'll be back on Monday, probably neither rested nor refreshed, though I do plan to engage in a whole lot of cool activities when not whacking away at the old iBook. To be perfectly honest, I'd rather stay in bed, but duty calls. In the meantime, be sure to look in on OGIC while I'm doing the town.
(By the way, Girl, I miss you!)
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TT: Wrong guy, nice try
Here's how busy I am: I almost forgot to post the weekly teaser for my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column. Yikes! Fortunately, I came to my senses at half past midnight, possibly because I'd been listening to a live recording by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony of Sibelius' Fourth Symphony, an experience not altogether dissimilar to having a bucket of ice water dumped over your head on a really hot day.
Now that I'm reconnected with my cerebral cortex, please allow me to draw your attention to my reviews of A Streetcar Named Desire and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, both of which are definitely worth seeing, albeit for very different reasons:
Most of the people I know who've seen (or heard about) the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” which opened Tuesday at Studio 54, agree that John C. Reilly, who plays Stanley Kowalski, should have played Mitch instead. Nor do I beg to differ: Mr. Reilly is one of the best actors around, but he looks and sounds like a natural-born nice guy, just the kind of fellow who in real life might well make the mistake of falling for a loosely screwed dame like Blanche DuBois. That's Mitch all over, whereas Stanley is trouble on a stick, a walking, talking phallus who's as likely to knock a girl down and rape her as give her a lecture on the vices and versas of the Napoleonic Code. A Stanley who lacks the hard edge of sexual threat can't be right, no matter what else he has to offer.
Mr. Reilly, with his smiling eyes and bulbous clown nose, is all wrong as Stanley. But because he's also a smart, thoughtful artist with lots and lots to offer, he finds things in the part that previous actors, Marlon Brando included, have hitherto failed to suggest. Do you remember, for instance, what Stanley does for a living? No? Well, he's a traveling salesman—and Mr. Reilly brilliantly conveys his glad-handing, back-slapping side, an aspect of his character that's easy to overlook. He's also desperately, even abjectly in love with Stella (played to prize-winning perfection by Amy Ryan), and Mr. Reilly nails that, too. Never do you doubt that he'd do anything to hold onto his similarly obsessed wife. If this be miscasting, then Mr. Reilly, for all his inescapable limitations, makes the most of it….
I don't have any kids of my own, but I think I know a good time when I see one, and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” now playing at the Hilton Theatre, has fun written all over it. For openers, there's that car, a $1.4 million racer that, uh, flies. (I know, I know, it isn't really flying, but the illusion of flight contrived by designer Anthony Ward is jaw-droppingly persuasive.) There's also a flying villain, fancy sets, two confetti drops, and—not least—a high-octane cast led by Raúl Esparza as Caractacus Potts, the eccentric inventor who put the bang bang in Chitty Chitty….
No link. (You knew that.) Buy a copy of today's Journal to read the whole thing, of which there's oodles more. Or go here to subscribe to the Journal's online edition, the best bargain in newspaper journalism. Either way, you can't miss.
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TT: Too much information (and that's just tough)
Until last week I hadn't peered into Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu (familiarly known in Shakespearean English as Remembrance of Things Past for reasons known only to Proust's first translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff) since college days, save to check the odd quote from time to time. Don't ask me why, but when I flew my Upper West Side coop for a couple of days of silence and sunshine by the Hudson River, I tossed the first installment of the Modern Library's 1934 two-volume omnibus edition of A la recherche into my shoulder bag. I cracked it open as I sat by the river, and since then I haven't looked back.
No sooner did I return to Manhattan than I was filled with an irresistible desire to listen to the piece of music that is the real-life model for the imaginary sonata by M. Vinteuil with whose “little phrase” the narrator of A la recherche is obsessed (and which is the subject of today's almanac entry). If you've read George Painter's biography of Proust, you know what it is. If not, read on, bearing in mind that Reynaldo Hahn, the musician referred to below, was Proust's lover:
Reynaldo's traditionalism was no doubt salutary for himself, but would only have been disastrous for Proust: it could never have led to the invention of Vinteuil. To please Reynaldo he did his best to like Saint-Saëns: he wrote two articles in Le Gaulois of 14 January and 11 December 1895, in which, however, his attempts at praise only succeeded in displaying his reservations. “Saint-Saëns uses archaism to legitimise modernity; he bestows upon a commonplace, step by step, through the ingenious, personal, sublime appropriateness of his style, the value of an original creation…he is a musical humanist,” says Proust very truly. And yet, it was from Reynaldo's tuition and from the charming, meritorious but secondary music of Saint-Saëns, that the “little phrase” of the Vinteuil Sonata took its beginning.
It was perhaps at Mme Lemaire's, and played by [Eugène] Ysaÿe (“his rendering is splendid, majestic and luminous, with admirable form,” wrote Reynaldo in his diary), that Proust first heard the Saint-Saëns Sonata in D Minor for violin and piano. His imagination was captured by the chief theme of the first movement, a mediocre but haunting melody whose only musical merit is its simplicity, and whose fascination comes from its very banality, like that of a popular song or dance-tune, and its incessant repetition….Afterwards, in Reynaldo's room at 6 Rue du Cirque, with its enormous stone fireplace, or in the dining-room at 9 Boulevard Malesherbes, Proust would say: “Play me that bit I like, Reynaldo—you know, the 'little phrase.'” So the little phrase of Saint-Saëns became the “national anthem” of his love for Reynaldo, as Vinteuil's became that of Swann's love for Odette.
I yield to no one in my admiration for Painter's skills as a biographer, but as a music critic he left something to be desired. For this reason, I suggest you listen Saint-Saëns' D Minor Violin Sonata and try hearing for yourself what Proust heard in it. Alas, Jascha Heifetz's zephyr-swift, supremely aristocratic recording is currently out of print, but this version ought to be quite serviceable. (The “little phrase” is heard for the first time about a minute and a half into the first movement.) I put it on as soon as I got back from Cold Spring, and I've been listening to it ever since.
Would that Eugène Ysaÿe himself had recorded the “little phrase,” but his recordings all date from 1912 and 1913, back when nobody thought a whole violin sonata was worth waxing. He did, however, record 15 short encore pieces, four of which are included on a two-CD anthology called The Great Violinists: Recordings from 1900-1913. The sound is dim and Ysaÿe himself was rather past his prime, but they still offer a treasurable glimpse of the immensely characterful playing of a legendary turn-of-the-century artist.
While we're on the subject of Proust-related recordings, I delight in telling you that Reynaldo Hahn also cut a double handful of ancient, scratchy 78s on which he can be heard singing, among other things, some of his own songs, all of them sung to his own deft piano accompaniment. He had a small, throaty baritone voice that didn't amount to much, but listen to his 1909 performance
of “Offrande” (the text is by Verlaine) and you'll hear what I can do no better than to describe as the quintessence of all things French. Alan Blyth conveys its quality nicely:
Hahn's dry, evocative baritone runs through the song rather more quickly than one would expect; I cannot make up my mind whether that is because he wants it to be heard as a single, trancelike supplication to the loved one with many phrases taken in a single breath, or whether his frail voice simply could not sustain it at a slower pace. I incline to the former view. Whatever the reason, it is a reading that is so haunting that repeat performances are imperative, like the need to drink yet another glass of a dry eau de vie.
Exactly.
By the way, you'd probably better get used to hearing way the hell too much about Proust for at least the next couple of weeks. I'm totally immersed, and happy to be. To be sure, it's kind of strange to be revisiting A la recherche at the same time that I'm working on my Louis Armstrong biography, but the six-degrees-of-separation game will take you from Marcel to Louis in two easy steps, by way of Armstrong's friend Bix Beiderbecke…but I'll save that one for another day.
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TT: Almanac
“When the least
obvious beauties of Vinteuil's sonata were revealed to me, already,
borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those
that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were
beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive
moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never
possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less
disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving
us all their best. In Vinteuil's sonata the beauties that one
discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired,
and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different
from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have
withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its
composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to
our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and
this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it,
which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force
of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this
comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall
relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have
taken longer to get to love it.”
Marcel Proust, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)
| Thursday, April 28, 2005
TT: Waving goodbye
Here's Rick Brookhiser in the New York Observer:
Terry Teachout has a lively arts blog called "About Last Night" (www.terryteachout.com), in which he reviews the passing scene and his own life. When he is not doing these things, he urges artists and other readers to get with the Internet age. We are slow learners, so he can sound like the sergeant-major barking orders at the native levies. But since he is always interesting and often right, these exhortations to obey our online overlords are worth reading, too.
Mr. Teachout linked a speech by Rupert Murdoch to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on the future of daily newspapers. Mr. Murdoch owns more newspapers than you do, so his opinions on the medium are not an idle thumb-suck….As I read it, Rupert Murdoch was being polite. What he was telling his colleagues was: Newspapers are dead.
Newspapers were more than the particular paper you read. They were part of the dawn, with toothpaste, coffee and trying to find the right sock. You got a rape and a war, weather and box scores, James Reston or Jimmy Breslin. If you read The Times, you got "Reports From Greenland Are Unclear." If you read the tabs, you got "RIPS OUT HEART, STOMPS ON IT." Now that's all gone. Now, three or six times a day, you get Glenn and Jonah and Mickey and Andrew and Drudge and Debka. You get Page 3 and hyper-Catholics, Bush Lied and Iraq the Model, hobbits in prehistoric Indonesia and elephants who foresaw the tsunami. You definitely do not get Thomas L. Friedman. If you need to, you can check a line in Blackstone's Commentaries or The Duke of Earl. It's like channel surfing, only there are thousands more channels and you spend even less time on any of them. It all takes 15 minutes, and after a meal or a trip to the water cooler, you do it all again….
Read the whole thing here. Then go here for Jay Rosen's up-to-the-minute survey of the “instant literature” on the mainstream media's “big digital migration.” It's a must.
Remember how things feel right this minute. You're watching a revolution in progress.
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TT: A week in the life
THURSDAY: Up early for breakfast with Laura Lippman, who's in town for the Edgar Awards. Spend remainder of morning working on dummy layout for new Wall Street Journal capsule-review box. Lunch with Naomi Schaefer Riley to celebrate publication of her first book, God on the Quad (I helped!). Spend afternoon and evening frenziedly writing 10,000-word essay for Commentary about future of blogging, due next Monday. (It was supposed to be the first half of a two-part 7,000-word essay due this Monday, but my editor developed an acute case of folie de grandeur when I turned in the first installment, and now I'm tied to the tracks of the next issue.) Write, code, and post tomorrow's Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, along with witty reminder that Our Girl in Chicago now blogs on weekends only. Try to remember to take walk, look at Teachout Museum, read more Proust, call Mom in Smalltown, U.S.A., and go to bed no later than midnight. Do not hang by thumbs.
FRIDAY: Spend whole day frantically trying to polish off Commentary essay ahead of schedule, thus making it possible to spend weekend working on first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (which I rashly promised to deliver by hand to my editor at Harcourt over lunch next Thursday). Nap as needed. Meet newest friend (in whom I am well pleased) for dinner and preview of Broadway transfer of The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Be sure to tell her how megacool she looked on TV the other night.
SATURDAY: Brunch with out-of-town jazz friends, followed by matinee preview of Glengarry Glen Ross, followed by as much writing as I can stand.
SUNDAY: Finish Commentary essay if it's not already done (if not, why not?). Otherwise, spend morning working on Hotter Than That. Cross fingers and pray that press preview of Sweet Charity takes place as expected this afternoon (it still hasn't been confirmed!). Catch Dena DeRose's first set at the Jazz Standard (see below). Blog if possible. If not, post unapologetic link to this posting.
MONDAY: D-Day at Commentary. Spend morning working on Hotter Than That and afternoon writing Wall Street Journal book review from scratch. Dinner in neighborhood, followed by in-house movie with visiting friend from deepest Brooklyn (viewing options include The Lavender Hill Mob, Sherlock, Jr., and The Palm Beach Story).
TUESDAY: Write Wall Street Journal theater column for Friday. If Sweet Charity preview took place on Sunday, catch train to Washington, D.C., to see Shakespeare Theatre's production of The Tempest. Otherwise, spend afternoon working on Hotter Than That, followed by evening preview of Sweet Charity (in which case this week's drama column will get written and filed tomorrow instead of today).
WEDNESDAY: Return to New York (if not already there) and finish first chapter of Hotter Than That. Suicide is not an option!
THURSDAY: D-Day No. 2. Go to bed after lunch. Stay there. Do not go out for dinner. Do not answer phone. Do not surf Web. Do not blog.
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TT: Words to the wise
• I just got back from Birdland, where Gary Burton is appearing with his new quintet through Saturday. If you took my advice and bought their brand-new CD, Next Generation, you won't need any further urging to go. Burton is, as ever and always, one of jazz's most thoughtful and creative virtuosos, and he never fails to surround himself with high-class sidemen. Teenage whiz-kid guitarist Julian Lage, for instance, has come a long, long way since I first saw him with Burton a year ago: he's now officially a monster. (For those of you who don't speak jazz, that's a good thing.)
This was, by the way, the first chance I've ever had to watch Burton play vibes up close and from the front. Seeing him manipulate his four mallets at something approaching Mach 2 is like chatting with a member of a more highly evolved species, which is why I found it oddly comforting when he accidentally dropped two mallets on the floor midway through his solo on Lage's “First Impression.” It made me feel, oh, maybe one-tenth of one percent less clumsy than usual. It also reminded me of George Bernard Shaw's suggestion to the young Jascha Heifetz (probably apocryphal, but it's the sort of thing Shaw would have said to Heifetz) that he play at least one wrong note every night before going to bed “because the gods are jealous of perfection.” Me, too.
• Dena DeRose, one of my favorite singer-pianists, opens Friday at the Jazz Standard for a three-day run. She, too, has a new CD, A Walk in the Park, on which she demonstrates the tremendous growth in her singing since she first hit Manhattan a decade or so ago. Her sidemen for the album and the gig are Martin Wind and Matt Wilson, to whom the cognoscenti need no introduction. I'll be there on Sunday.
P.S. Both clubs have good kitchens. Take advantage of them.
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TT: Almanac
“If, however, despite all the analogies which I was to perceive later
on between the writer and the man, I had not at first sight, in Mme.
Swann's drawing-room, believed that this could be Bergotte, the author
of so many divine books, who stood before me, perhaps I was not
altogether wrong, for he himself did not, in the strict sense of the
word, 'believe' it either. He did not believe it because he shewed a
great assiduity in the presence of fashionable people (and yet he was
not a snob), of literary men and journalists who were vastly inferior
to himself. Of course he had long since learned, from the suffrage of
his readers, that he had genius, compared to which social position and
official rank were as nothing. He had learned that he had genius, but
he did not believe it because he continued to simulate deference
towards mediocre writers in order to succeed, shortly, in becoming an
Academician, whereas the Academy and the Faubourg Saint-Germain have
no more to do with that part of the Eternal Mind which is the author
of the works of Bergotte than with the law of causality or the idea of
God. That also he knew, but as a kleptomaniac knows, without profiting
by the knowledge, that it is wrong to steal. And the man with the
little beard and snail-shell nose knew and used all the tricks of the
gentleman who pockets your spoons, in his efforts to reach the coveted
academic chair, or some duchess or other who could dispose of several
votes at the election, but while on his way to them he would endeavour
to make sure that no one who would consider the pursuit of such an
object a vice in him should see what he was doing. He was only
half-successful; one could hear, alternating with the speech of the
true Bergotte, that of the other Bergotte, ambitious, utterly selfish,
who thought it not worth his while to speak of any but his powerful,
rich or noble friends, so as to enhance his own position, he who in
his books, when he was really himself, had so well portrayed the
charm, pure as a mountain spring, of poverty.”
Marcel Proust, A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs (trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff)
| Wednesday, April 27, 2005
TT: Up to the nanosecond
Last night I tuned in the CBS Evening News, that cobwebby bastion of Old Media, and what did I see? A segment on podcasting featuring none other than the Lascivious Biddies, whose new CD, Get Lucky, sports liner notes by none other than…yours truly.
Memo to posterity: I soooo knew them when.
UPDATE: To view the story, go here. (Jeepers, but Bob Schieffer looks his age....)
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TT: Eleven perfectly lovely records
• Benjamin Britten, Nocturnal after John Dowland (played by Julian Bream)
• Frank Sinatra and the Hollywood String Quartet, “With Every Breath I Take” (from Close to You)
• Paul Dukas, Villanelle (played by Dennis Brain and Gerald Moore)
• James Taylor, “Something in the Way She Moves” (remade for Greatest Hits)
• Franz Schubert, Rondo in A Major, D. 951 (performed by Artur and Karl Ulrich Schnabel)
• The Byrds, “It's All Over Now, Baby Blue” (from Ballad of Easy Rider)
• François Couperin, Les baricades mistérieuses (played by Igor Kipnis)
• Stan Getz and Bob Brookmeyer, “Who Could Care” (from Stan Getz/Bob Brookmeyer, Recorded Fall 1961)
• Emanuel Chabrier, Idyll (performed by Paul Paray and the Detroit Symphony)
• Luciana Souza, “Doce de Coco” (from Brazilian Duos)
• Stephen Sondheim, “Fear No More” (from the original-cast album of The Frogs)
Why eleven, you ask? (You did ask, right?) Because I've decided to strike a blow against ten-item lists. Down with arbitrary limitations! My next list may contain seven items, or thirteen....
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TT: Entry from an unkept diary
I noticed the other day that I'd stopped taking time off on weekends. No, it's not that I'm in the vise-like grip of an obsession: it's that my weekly routine gradually changed without my quite realizing it. Now that I'm a working drama critic, I usually see press previews of Broadway and off-Broadway shows on Saturday and Sunday, making it all but impossible for me to get out of town (save by complicated prior arrangement) or do much of anything else. Of course this doesn't preclude my knocking off for a couple of days in the middle of the week, but since I've never in my life had a job that required me to work on weekends, I'm finding it hard to get used to thinking in terms of taking, say, Wednesdays and Thursdays off. My recent trip to Cold Spring was a step in the right direction, but the fact that I hadn't been there since November says something unpleasant about my continuing failure to adjust to the rhythms of my new life. More often than not I spend the entire week writing and going to other performances, then glance at my schedule on Friday night and suddenly remember that I'm not done yet.
An old friend of mine used to take every Friday night off without fail. He'd come home from work, retire to his study, eat dinner from a tray, and spend the whole evening listening to his huge, meticulously organized collection of 78s, through which he worked his way in strict alphabetical order every few years. No matter what else was happening in the world, however dire it might be (or seem to be), he shut the shop down one night a week and disappeared from the world. I spent many Friday nights with him in the last two years of his life, and I enjoyed them not only because he was a great listener, but also because spending the evening with him prevented me from spending it in an aisle seat or a noisy nightclub, or at my desk.
In the years since my friend died, I've never had a night of the week I could always call my own, and though I have countless excuses for my inability to do as he did, I know it's really my fault—just as it's my fault that I'm writing this paragraph when I know I should be snuggled up in my loft, reading Proust in preparation for a good night's sleep. Perhaps my first novel will start like this: For a long time I used to go to bed really, really late....
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TT: Almanac
“It is glory—to have been tested, to have had our little quality and cast our little spell. The thing is to have made somebody care.”
Henry James, “The Middle Years”
| Tuesday, April 26, 2005
TT: Elsewhere
Time once again to upend the bag and pour out a pile of v. cool and/or amusing links.
• Michael Blowhard on the mysterious profession:
Actors generally don't know who they really are. They find a center only when they pour themselves into the container of a "character"; they become most fully who they are when they turn themselves into someone else. Actors are often charming and gifted creatures, but they'll drive you crazy too. An actress might say one thing at 8 a.m. and then say something completely contradictory at 4 p.m. She wouldn't be bothered by this because in both cases she's been true to her feelings of the moment—and because being "true to the moment," whatever it happens to be, is what being an actor is all about. Men in romantic relationships with actresses often find these women a terrific turn-on—the passion! The excitement! The responsiveness! Yet the men often spend a lot of time scratching their heads in bewilderment too, wondering if anyone's truly home….
This has not been my experience with actors, but I know plenty of people who beg to differ. Maybe I've just been lucky. (Or not.)
• Mr. Alicublog finally catches up with Sideways (what kept him?), and has some objections mixed with praise:
So what's good? Mostly stuff that (forgive me) ripens over the course of the film. The dramaturgy is wicked smart. For example, throughout most of Sideways I wondered, what do these two guys see in each other? They spend most of the movie savagely attacking each other's actions and motivations. Good friends may do that, of course, but underneath it all you expect to see traces at least of the ties that bind.
Payne was subtle about this—maybe over-subtle. The big clues came late: the attack at the golf course, and especially Miles' reclamation of Jack's wallet. After these the rest of their relationship, and the whole movie, made more sense. Jack may seem like a heedless horndog and Miles a volatile lush, but each has a strain of madness that the other can enjoy, if only because it's different and thereby more exciting to him than his own….
• Mr. Thinking About Art has had it up to here, or maybe there, with theory:
What in the world does it add to the art viewing experience of 99.9% of the general public? Not much, I think. Certainly there is a place for theory in our academic institutions and surely contextualizing art among all the various -ism's is valuable. But Jerry Saltz's piece blasting Damien Hirst is a perfect example of why theory in art criticism and reviews in mostly useless. Give me Saltz's 885 words without theory any day of the week. Saltz's article actually means something to me. I can feel his experience of Hirst's work. I can connect to his opinion. I can sense Saltz's emotional response to the work.
Anyone can learn art theory if they wish. I'd venture a guess that if you took 100 art historians and asked them to write a theory-based critique of Hirst's show, you'd get 100 very similar writing samples. It's not unique like economic theory isn't unique. We can all learn it. For me, econometrics is much more exciting and insightful. You can use some theory and techniques, but without some creativity and a personal approach, you'll get stale results. Art for me is the same way and it's why I write my reviews from a personal, opinionated viewpoint. Some may say, "We've all got opinions!" And my response would be, "That's the point!" We don't all have knowledge of theory….
• Guess who?
Confession time: We've never been able to finish, or even get half of the way through, a novel by Saul Bellow. Maybe it's the language, which seems a bit overdone to us. Maybe it's how discursive and repetitive the books are. Maybe the alleged revolution that he brought to the writing of the American novel has already been so thoroughly absorbed that we're unable to appreciate how groundbreaking it truly is. In any event, we're prepared to admit that the fault must lie with us: Enough of the people we admire and respect claim him as a genius; perhaps he's the sort of writer that demands more attention be paid than our usual reading style (naked on the couch, a flask of bourbon at our side, Motorhead's Orgasmatron blasting from the hi-fi) allows….
• Admirers (and non-admirers) of Truman Capote will have a field day with the Lawrence Journal-World's elaborate package of freshly reported stories commemorating the 40th anniversary of the publication of In Cold Blood. Here's the beauty part: they were all written by college students. Print-media journalism may not be dead after all….
• Supermaud stumbles across a copy of another of my beloved books, the Viking Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I wonder why it went out of print?)
• “Heather,” the semi-anonymous California pianist who blogs at in the wings, one of my current faves, describes what it feels like to turn pages for another pianist:
The requirements for this duty are straightforward enough: make yourself invisible, make sure you never turn too early or too late, make sure you never turn two pages at once, make sure to turn back pages when repeats are taken, and make sure to turn ahead to codas. Considering how long I've been reading music, page turning ought to allow me the lucky opportunity to study the pianist's technique, from fingering to pedaling to words muttered under the breath, but really, my levels of attention and perception rise near to performance level when I take that seat. And damn but I forgot how fast the second and fourth movements of Fauré's C minor piano quartet move! Stand up. Reach across. Flip. Sit down. Stand up. Reach across. Whew!...
BTDT, Heather. Way.
• Speaking of pianists, Michael Kimmelman, an amateur pianist who has also been known to write about art, has an essay
about William Kapell in The New York Review of Books that's a must:
Was there any greater American pianist born during the last century than Kapell? Perhaps not. Certainly he was the most famous American-born player until Van Cliburn. He was a jukebox star during the 1940s, thanks to his performance of Khachaturian's Piano Concerto, a noisy showpiece that Kapell came to resent, in the way that Rachmaninoff came to loathe his own Prelude in C-sharp Minor.
He was also a stereotype of a native New Yorker: bright, brash, tactless, competitive, funny, cocky, and thin-skinned. He could be exceptionally generous and also nasty. He was a nervous, obsessive person—and meticulous (he kept a diary to record, down to the minute, how long he practiced each piece, toting up the numbers month after month)….
• Oh, just in case you were wondering, the Mozart Effect is a fraud.
• Needless to say, quite a few people have sent me this (which doesn't make it any less funny).
• Greg Sandow, my fellow artsjournal.com blogger, talks sense:
You can't blame people as individuals for not liking the music you think they should like. Or at least you can't blame them without understanding why they feel the way they do. This becomes quite a conundrum, I think, because abstract expressionist painters (whose style might be more or less analogous to atonal modernist music) have a much easier time with the public. People like their work. As I've mentioned many times in many contexts, there were lines around the block when MoMA had a Jackson Pollock show. So why doesn't music work that way?...
• Tobi Tobias, another artsjournal.com colleague, offers a close reading of Rock of Ages, Mark Morris' new dance, that leaves me with nothing more to say (which puts me in a hell of a spot, since I have to say something about it later today!). Here's a snippet:
This year, the Mark Morris Dance Group brought no brand-new, grand-slam work to its annual season at BAM. The sole novelty was a piece that had its premiere last fall, way west, in Berkeley, California. But it's a honey. Rock of Ages, set to the adagio movement of Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat, is a small, quiet dance that, like meditative deep breathing, expands the consciousness until it seems to reach the deepest feelings and an ever-widening understanding of how the world works.
Its population of four, plainly dressed, enters one by one from the four corners of the stage, briefly converges at the center of the space, then moves on (though a pair pauses briefly, side by side), each person simply continuing along the diagonal path prescribed by his or her first step. The ending reiterates this action, which is clearly the simple message of the dance: We exist alone; we meet when we occupy a common space; we interact in passing, our identity left essentially unaltered; we part-because it is only natural that we should….
• In related news, Maccers makes a major dance-related discovery:
Anyway, someone please remind me next time I am plugging in credit card numbers into websites that I don't like the story form of dance. I like abstract. And short skirts. Let me see the legs.
Me, too, mostly, except when otherwise.
• Spam, spam, spam:
Sender: Alrick.M.Bwalugari
Recipient: benedictxvi@vatican.va
RE: I NEED YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE PLEASE
Dear Mr. XVI,
I am Alrick Mohammed Bwalugari, the son of the late Nigerian Los Angeles Head of Sacristans who died on the 6th of June 1999 while in active services. Following the sudden death of my father, Usher Bullem Shitika, the present Diocean Government has thrown my family and I into a state of utter confusion, frustration, and hopelessness, much like the state your detractors are in. I have been subjected to inhuman physical and physiological torture, like being forced to listen to the Protestant hymns and hippy folk tunes and being forced to view liturgical dancing girls….
• Finally, here's a truly great time-waster. Warning: I soooo defy you to blow less than five minutes on it….
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TT: Entries from an unkept diary
• A good friend of mine is friendly with the significant other of a person to whom I gave a bad review the other day. (Sorry to be so roundabout, but I don't want to leave any tracks.) Shortly thereafter, my friend made the mistake of mentioning to her friend that we were friends, whereupon—as Lester Young used to put it—she felt a draft. I was sorry to hear it, but glad she told me. Too often those who do what I do for a living overlook the fact that we're writing about real people. We should never forget, or be allowed to forget, that we are capable of causing hurt and doing harm. Even the famous have feelings.
• My colleagues are forever encouraging me to make embarrassing taste-related revelations along the lines of the treasurable fact that Lionel and Diana Trilling were Kojak fans. (This reminds me to report the stop-press news that Sir John Gielgud liked Cheers, in part because he found Ted Danson sexy.) Alas, I never seem able to oblige, not because I'm unwilling but because I simply can't come up with anything sufficiently uncultivated on the spot. So when I thought of a good one the other day, I resolved to pass it on to you at the earliest opportunity: two of the very first songs I downloaded from iTunes were Blue Öyster Cult's “Before the Kiss, a Redcap” and “I'm on the Lamb (But I Ain't No Sheep).” Those were the only Blue Öyster Cult songs I wanted, but I definitely wanted them.
Satisfied?
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TT: One of these days
I haven't read my blogmail for the past few days. I won't read it for the next few days, or at least not until I finish writing my three remaining print-media pieces. It's nothing personal, I swear. I promise to read it all and get back to you all, sooner or later.
(O.K., later. But not too much later.)
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TT: Almanac
"The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life—and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course again finally directs itself! This loneliness (since I mention it)—what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper, about me, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my 'genius,' deeper than my 'discipline,' deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art."
Henry James, letter to W. Morton Fullerton (1900)
| Monday, April 25, 2005
TT: Twentieth
I moved to New York twenty years ago this month. It never occurred to me as a young man that I would someday live here, and I'm still capable of being taken aback by the improbable fact that I do. Just the other day I was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab, and as I glanced out the window at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the city suddenly looked strange to me, as if I'd never seen it before. Perhaps you can never feel completely at home in a city to which you move at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.
I celebrated my twentieth anniversary as a New Yorker by slipping out of town for a few days—an appropriate gesture, I think, since Manhattan, for all its myriad wonders, has a way of getting on your nerves after a couple of months' worth of continuous exposure. As I sat on a park bench by the Hudson River, basking in the sunshine and idly turning the pages of Du côté de chez Swann, I caught myself thinking about how different the world was when I came to New York. Among other things:
• The World Trade Center was still standing.
• So was the Berlin Wall.
• I was using the first VCR I'd ever owned.
• I hadn't bought my first CD player or fax machine.
• I had yet to use a personal computer, much less buy one.
• Cell phones didn't exist.
• None of my books was written. (For that matter, none of the pieces collected in the Teachout Reader was written.)
• I'd never seen a ballet by George Balanchine (not counting The Nutcracker) or a painting by Pierre Bonnard.
• Our Girl in Chicago was still in high school—and three of the people whom I now number among my closest friends weren't yet old enough to go to grade school.
Since then, my life has undergone countless other changes, a few of them fairly dramatic. I buried a parent and a best friend. I became a drama critic, and acquired a niece. I was investigated by the FBI, voted on by the Senate, and sworn in by a Supreme Court justice. I started a blog. And I began to think of myself as a New Yorker, which some might say was the biggest change of all.
What surprises me most, though, is that I don't spend all that much time thinking about such things. Some, yes—I'm as susceptible to unexpected attacks of acute nostalgia as any other middle-aged guy—but for the most part I tend to be preoccupied with the next piece I have to file and the next show I have to see. What I wrote about Balanchine a year ago is in many ways true of me as well:
Of all his oft-repeated refrains, the most familiar was Do it now! “Why are you stingy with yourselves?” he would ask his dancers. “Why are you holding back? What are you saving for—for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.” His ruthlessly practical approach to running a dance company was rooted in the hard-won knowledge that his next breath might be his last. He worked within the means available at the moment, using them to the fullest, never wasting time longing for better dancers or a bigger budget: “A dog is going to remain a dog, even if you want to have a cat; you're not going to have a cat, so you better take care of the dog because that's what you're going to have.” He ran his private life along the same lines: when he had money, he spent it lavishly, on himself and others, and when he didn't, he lived frugally. “You know,” he said, “I am really a dead man. I was supposed to die and I didn't, and so now everything I do is second chance. That is why I enjoy every day. I don't look back. I don't look forward. Only now.” This dance, this meal, this woman: that was his world.
Perhaps my tendency to live in the present is merely a phase I'm going through. My impression is that most people grow increasingly preoccupied with the past as they grow older. It may be that my work helps to anchor me in the present moment, and I'm sure that living in New York and spending so much of my time in the company of younger people have had a similar effect. But whatever the reasons, I mostly like my life, and most of the time I like it very much indeed, which is why I enjoy sharing bits and pieces of it with you.
Marcel Proust, in whose imagined world I am currently immersed, assures us that happiness “serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.” He might be right, but I prefer to think otherwise. At least for the moment, I propose instead to cast my lot with Justice Holmes, who in old age told an old friend,
I was repining at the thought of my slow progress—how few new ideas I had or picked up—when it occurred to me to think of the total of life and how the greater part was wholly absorbed in living and continuing life—victuals—procreation—rest and eternal terror. And I bid myself accept the common lot; an adequate vitality would say daily, “God, what a good sleep I've had,” “My eye, that was dinner,” “Now for a fine rattling walk”—in short, life as an end in itself.
Of course I hope I can do a bit better than that, but at the very least I'll gladly aspire to accepting the common lot. Today I'll do my best to write a piece, take a walk, call my mother, read a couple of dozen pages of Proust, and spend a few minutes looking at the Teachout Museum. If at day's end I've accomplished all these things, I'll go to bed content—and if I haven't, I'll do the same. Like the cops say, Rule No. 1 is to go home alive at the end of your shift. Every day is a victory over the abyss.
See you tomorrow.
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TT: Bark and the world barks with you
For those who've been elsewhere of late, we're batting around
the possibility of coming up with a more striking name for the mental disorder known as “clinical depression.” One reader wrote to remind us that Winston Churchill referred to his own depression as “the black dog,” and a couple of classicists obligingly translated that homely phrase into resonantly medical-sounding Latin.
Now my brother writes:
The phrase you wrote about a few days ago, "black dog”: Truckers use that term when they have been on the road, usually past their legal hours, too long. It's whe
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