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About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts
in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)
Friday, August 4, 2006
TT: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, R.I.P.
I wonder how kindly Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who died yesterday at the age of ninety, will be treated by posterity. In her lifetime she was widely—if by no means universally—regarded as one of the greatest sopranos of her generation. Yet even at the height of Schwarzkopf’s career, there were plenty of critical naysayers who found her singing fussy and mannered to the point of archness, and since her retirement in 1975, it’s my impression that their point of view, which I share, has come to prevail.
Schwarzkopf was also a great beauty, which doubtless contributed to the effect she had on live audiences. Alas, I never saw her on stage or in recital, only on film, so I can’t say whether she made a stronger impression in person. I’ve heard most of her major recordings, though, and I find that I rarely return to any of them save to listen to her colleagues. For my money, Herbert von Karajan’s first recordings of Falstaff and Der Rosenkavalier are the best things she ever did in the studio, and her singing is by no means the most memorable aspect of those deservedly admired performances.
As for her private life, suffice it for now to say that she was a Nazi, that she lied about it for as long as she could get away with it, and that she admitted her youthful affiliation with the Nazi Party grudgingly, evasively, and only when confronted with incontrovertible documentary evidence. Sooner or later a frank, fully informed biography of Schwarzkopf will be written, and my guess is that it will prove devastating to her reputation. (Alan Jefferson’s 1996 book didn’t fill the bill, but it was a start.)
Such things may not matter to you, but they do to me, all the more so in light of the fact that Schwarzkopf was so gifted and admired an artist. As I wrote in Commentary a few years ago apropos of those French artists who collaborated with the Nazis:
One thinks, for instance, of Colette, who blithely published in anti-Semitic magazines during the German occupation, or of the great pianist Alfred Cortot, who went so far as to serve as Vichy’s High Commissioner of Fine Arts and to perform in Nazi Germany….Indeed, the most troubling thing about Colette, Cortot and their fellow collaborationists is that they were not second-tier figures but creative and recreative geniuses whose work remains to this day representative of the quintessence of French art.
On the other hand, none of that stops me from reading Colette’s novels or listening to Cortot’s recordings. We are all flawed creatures, and one of the impenetrable mysteries of beautiful art is that it can be made by ugly souls. So feel free to mourn the death of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and to speak admiringly of her artistry—but when you do so, remember that there was more to her than the music she made.
As Clement Greenberg told an interviewer in 1969:
There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.
UPDATE: Anthony Tommasini's New York Times obituary, which is both lengthy and candid, is here.
For a sympathetic but equally candid appreciation by Tim Page of the Washington Post, go here.
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TT: The ultimate stage mother
Here’s my first official report from last weekend’s voyage to the outskirts of hell, a review of Shakespeare & Company published in this morning's Wall Street Journal. As you can see, I didn’t let my manifold travails interfere with the pleasure I took in what I saw on stage:
Western Massachusetts has long been a center of classy summer theater. In the past two seasons I’ve seen Barrington Stage Company and the Berkshire and Williamstown Theatre Festivals, and last week I made it to Shakespeare & Company, where I saw back-to-back performances of “Hamlet” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” two Shakespeare plays that have about as much in common as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nor were the productions alike save for their excellence—a sign of the adventurousness of the 29-year-old Lenox-based company, which more than lived up to its reputation.
I admit to having had my doubts about Eleanor Holdridge’s staging of “Hamlet.” To begin with, Jason Asprey, who is playing the title role in Shakespeare & Company’s first-ever production of that most familiar and formidable of tragedies, just happens to be the son of Tina Packer, the company’s founder and artistic director, who in turn is playing Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. As if that weren’t suspicious enough, Ms. Packer’s husband, Dennis Krausnick, is playing Polonius. Having digested all this information, I opened my program and found a note explaining that the production “centers the play in the electrical synapse impulses of Hamlet’s dying brain.” This is a family newspaper, so I won’t tell you what I muttered to myself as I read those words, but it wasn’t optimistic.
All at once the theater went dark, followed by an explosion of chilly fluorescent light and a mega-decibel electric-chair zzzzap! Young Hamlet started reciting “To be or not to be.” Then the rest of the cast appeared, bedecked in stylized modern dress with mod touches à la Austin Powers. “Oh, hell,” I said, this time out loud—but stayed to cheer….
No link. You know what to do, right? So do it.
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TT: A tale of two budgets
In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I take note of two developments in Atlanta:
• The Atlanta Ballet has fired its orchestra and will henceforth dance to recorded music.
• The Atlanta Opera is selling its midtown headquarters and moving to a new suburban arts center, in which it will give all of its performances.
Both companies are in financial trouble—but whose fix is smarter? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.
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TT: Almanac
“I have never thought that painting a picture has anything to do with self-expression. It is a communication about the world to someone else. After the world is convinced about this communication, it changes. The world was never the same after Picasso or Miró. Theirs was a view of the world which transformed our vision of things. All teaching about self-expression is erroneous in art; it has to do with therapy. Knowing yourself is valuable so that the self can be removed from the process.”
Mark Rothko (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
| Thursday, August 3, 2006
TT: Satchmo and me
Tomorrow is the one hundred and fifth anniversary of the birth of Louis Armstrong, so Michael J. Bandler of the U.S. State Department interviewed me about Satchmo’s life and work (and about Hotter Than That, my biography-in-progress) for U.S. Life and Culture, one of the many Web pages produced by the State Department’s Bureau of International Information Programs.
To read a transcript of our conversation, go here.
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TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• The Lieutenant of Inishmore (black comedy, R, adult subject matter and extremely graphic violence, reviewed here)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sept. 3)
• 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 Aug. 13)
CLOSING SUNDAY:
• Bridge & Tunnel* (solo show, PG-13, some adult subject matter, reviewed here)
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TT: Almanac
"Andrew had never had any first-hand experience of the majestic frivolity of the law; and his attitude towards it was rather more that of the man in the street than might have been expected in a person of his intelligence. He believed that lawyers everywhere were a pack of rogues, but that once a cause was delivered into their hands, somehow or other the Right must inevitably triumph. At the same time, the mere thought of becoming involved in its processes filled him with horror. The sight of even the most innocent legal document would induce in him a melancholy frame of mind."
Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path
| Wednesday, August 2, 2006
TT: I wish I'd said that
From Stephen Holden, my favorite New York Times critic:
A quintessential Tony Bennett moment comes at the end of “It’s a Wonderful World,” the tender duet he recorded with K. D. Lang for their 2002 Louis Armstrong tribute album, “A Wonderful World.” After they swap greeting-card doggerel celebrating “trees of green,” “skies of blue” and “clouds of white,” Mr. Bennett remarks with a boyish enthusiasm, “Don’t you think Satchmo was right?”
Ms. Lang responds by crooning a final, dreamy “what a wonderful world,” whereupon her partner, speaking in the quiet, choked-up voice of a man visiting the grave of a beloved father figure, declares, “You were right, Pops.”
This gentle burst of affirmation melts your heart and reminds you that sincerity, a mode of expression that has been twisted, trampled, co-opted and corrupted in countless ways by the false intimacy of television, still exists in American popular culture. It can even salvage “trees of green,” “skies of blue” and “clouds of white” from the junk heap of pop inanity….
Read the whole thing here.
It reminded me, by the way, of a paragraph I read earlier today in Elmore Leonard’s Cat Chaser:
How many people did she know who spoke or looked at anything with genuine feeling? Without being cynical, on stage, trying to entertain. Without puffing up or putting down. She wanted to know what he felt and, if possible, share the feeling.
That’s the way I’d like my writing to make people feel.
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TT: One at a time
Courtesy of the increasingly invaluable Kate’s Book Blog, here's a “one-book meme” that tickled my fancy:
• One book that changed your life. W. Jackson Bate’s Samuel Johnson. It showed me how to write a biography, and opened my eyes to the possibility that I might someday want to do such a thing.
• One book that you’ve read more than once. I read every book I really like more than once—usually several times. I suppose, though, that the book I’ve read most often, unlikely as it may sound, is Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being.
• One book you’d want on a desert island. Montaigne’s Essays, which by contrast I haven’t read nearly often enough.
• One book that made you laugh. Kingsley Amis’ Girl, 20.
• One book that made you cry. Books almost never make me cry, even those that move me deeply. I’m much more likely to cry in the theater or while listening to music. I’m sure there’s an exception, but I can’t recall one off the top of my head. (If I think of one, I'll let you know.)
• One book that you wish had been written. Paul Desmond’s How Many of You Are There in the Quartet? He claimed to be working on it for years and years, but all he ever published (except for a half-dozen liner notes) was a lone autobiographical essay for Punch about the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s worst gig ever. It’s reprinted in Doug Ramsey’s wonderful Desmond biography.
• One book that you wish had never been written. I was going to say Mein Kampf, but on further reflection I realized it was probably good for the world that Hitler set down his plans for world conquest in so unguarded a way. (Oh, that mine adversary had written a book!) This being the case, I’ll opt instead for sheer pissiness and pick Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel, which I read in high school and found so time-consumingly awful that I swore I’d never read another word of Wolfe again. Nor have I.
• One book you’re currently reading. Honor Tracy’s The Straight and Narrow Path. It’s a total hoot.
• One book you’ve been meaning to read. Brace yourself: Anna Karenina. If Oprah can do it, so can I.
As always, I tag OGIC. Go for it, Girl!
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TT: In full retreat
I'm still in Connecticut, hiding out from the heat wave and working on my Journal columns and, appropriately enough, Hotter Than That. It's hot here, too, believe me, but not like it is in Manhattan!
I'll continue to blog with reasonable regularity, but not always at my regular times, so watch this space and see what happens.
Later (but not too much later).
UPDATE: I just posted a couple of new Top Fives.
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TT: Almanac
"We dare more when striving for superfluities than for necessities. Often when we renounce superfluities we end up lacking in necessities."
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
| Tuesday, August 1, 2006
TT: Philadelphia, there I went
I boarded a train for Connecticut at Penn Station last Friday afternoon to embark on a long weekend of playgoing. A half-hour later the engine failed, and we crawled back to the station to get a new one. I arrived in Hartford three hours late, having spent the preceding five hours sitting in a jam-packed Amtrak car without benefit of air conditioning.
From that moment on, things started going wrong, and kept going wrong. I presented myself at a rental-car counter in a suburban mall the following morning—and spent fifteen increasingly frustrating minutes waiting for a clerk to materialize. The overworked, well-meaning clerk considerately upgraded me to a convertible—and by the time I got where I was going, I had a nice rosy sunburn. I went looking for lunch in Lenox, Massachusetts, home of Shakespeare & Company—and discovered that there is nowhere to park within the city limits on Saturday afternoons. (No, I’m not exaggerating for a laugh. When I say nowhere, I mean nowhere.) I showed up for a matinee of The Merry Wives of Windsor that I’d mistakenly thought was supposed to start at two o’clock—and found out from the friendly young lady at the box office that it actually started at three.
When I awoke the next day and realized that I had begun the lengthy, exasperating process of passing a kidney stone, it occurred to me for the first time that I might possibly be in a Philadelphia. Anyone familiar with the one-act plays of David Ives will know what I’m talking about, and tremble with awestruck sympathy. In The Philadelphia Ives describes with sadistic relish the kind of day in which “no matter what you ask for, you can’t get it.” This unhappy circumstance, a character explains, is a metaphysical state of mind known as “being in a Philadelphia.” Had I fallen all unknowing into such a dire condition? I nervously swallowed a handful of Tylenol, drove north to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown—and saw as I approached the museum grounds that hundreds of children were playing on the front lawn. It was Family Day. Now I knew: I was in a Philadelphia.
Once I accepted my fate and prepared for the worst, I wondered if perhaps I might only be in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where you get half of what you ask for. Yes, the Clark was jammed—but admission is free on Family Day, and The Clark Brothers Collect: Impressionist and Early Modern Paintings, the show I’d come to see,
was every bit as eye-popping as its reviews had promised. Yes, I spent the evening sitting under the Hudson Valley Shakepeare Festival tent, watching the company perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream in ninety-degree weather as I squirmed in discomfort—but I got a good dinner beforehand, and the kidney stone exited my person after the show without further incident. Yes, the air conditioner in my hotel room was on the blink—but the staff of the Hudson House Inn installed a new window unit while I was watching the play, and thereafter I slept deeply and well. Yes, I’d seen three Shakespeare plays in thirty hours—but seeing Merry Wives, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Hamlet back to back is its own reward.
I arose on Monday, breakfasted on a sunny porch overlooking the Hudson River, and drove back to Connecticut along green country roads, certain that I was on my way out of the suburbs of David Ives’ metaphysical city of frustration. Only time will tell, but as of Tuesday morning, I haven't experienced any further disasters or half-disasters. On the other hand, I've still got to write my review, the country home where I'm staying this week has yet to install a high-speed connection to the Internet, and it's going to be even hotter than it was last week....
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OGIC: Fortune cookie
"It is hard for a writer to call an editor great, because it is natural for him to think of the editor as a writer manqué. It is like asking a thief to approve a fence, or a fighter to speak highly of a manager. 'Fighters are sincere,' a fellow with the old pug's syndrome said to me at a bar once as his head wobbled and the hand that held his shot glass shook. 'Managers are pimps, they sell our blood.' In the newspaper trade, confirmed reporters think confirmed editors are mediocrities who took the easy way out. These attitudes mark an excess of vanity coupled with a lack of imagination; it never occurs to a writer that anybody could have wanted to be anything else."
A. J. Liebling, "Harold Ross—The Impresario"
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OGIC: Home again, home again
Racing to get out of town last week, I neglected to leave word that I was going. Sorry about that. It was my fourth annual sojourn to the utterly involving, continually surprising, and most excellently populated National Puzzler's League convention, this year held in San Antonio, where the heat outside is smothering and the AC inside is headsplitting. Despite climatic challenges, I had a more than wonderful time.
Having arrived back home yesterday, I am faced with a back-breaking beginning of the work week, which was kicked off with a three-hour meeting today and more accumulated emails than I could count or, certainly, answer. After work I went to break the cat out of kitty jail, otherwise known as boarding at the veterinarian's. Anyone one who knows her will attest that this is one ridiculously gorgeous cat, a long-haired butterscotch tabby with golden eyes. Well, after five days at the vet's, being brought out in her kitty caddy, she looked every bit like Bill the Cat—grizzled, askew, and pretty much demented. By now she's close to normal again, and we both need some sleep in a comfortable place. More blogging later this week.
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TT: Almanac
"A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business."
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
| Monday, July 31, 2006
TT: Almanac
"Offhand one would expect that the mere possession of power would automatically result in a cocky attitude toward the world and a receptivity to change. But it is not always so. The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power—a slogan, a word, a button."
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer
| Friday, July 29, 2005
TT: On the air
I'll be appearing on KRCU-FM, the public radio station of Southeast Missouri State University, this coming Sunday at three p.m. CDT (that's four p.m. EDT). The program is Going Public, on which I'll be discussing my work as a drama and film critic and the effects of the new media on American journalism.
If you live in or near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, tune to 90.9 FM.
To listen live on your computer via streaming audio, go here.
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TT: A hot time in the old town
My mother's feeling much better, the heat wave has finally waved goodbye, and all that remains before I return to New York is to post the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This time I report on my recent visit to St. Louis, where I saw the Muny Opera's outdoor production of Mame and St. Louis Shakespeare's air-conditioned Henry V:
It was my bad luck to arrive in the middle of a 12-alarm heat wave. The temperature rose to 102 degrees, and it was still foully hot and chokingly humid by the time I reached my seat, toting a soft-sided cooler full of prophylactic fluids. I wilted almost immediately, but the rest of the 9,000-strong crowd took the weather in its stride….
I found it fascinating to behold the near-scientific exactitude with which the Muny approaches the problem of producing musicals for extremely large audiences. The costumes are brightly colored, the sets big and bold (I especially liked Steve Gilliam's elaborate rendering of Mame's art-deco apartment). Paul Blake and Diana Baffa-Brill, the director and choreographer, kept the stage patterns eye-catchingly simple. The theater itself has flawless sight lines, and a state-of-the-art sound system projects the dialogue all the way to the very last row of the cheap seats (I checked)….
I was in town too early for the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, whose season opens on Sept. 7 with “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” Fortunately, St. Louis Shakespeare, a classical company founded in 1984, was already up and running with an estimable “Henry V.” Robin Weatherall, the director, is better known as a composer (he had a 17-year run with the Royal Shakespeare Company), but you couldn't tell it from this vigorous, unmannered production, played in traditional costumes on the open stage of the Grandel Theatre, a midtown church that has been converted into an attractive performing space….
No link, of course, so to read the whole thing go out and buy a copy of today's Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal (by far the preferable alternative—great paper, great arts coverage, great deal).
Now I've got to catch a plane. See you Monday!
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TT: Almanac
“The ability to shift the audience from thinking Poor him! to Poor us! must surely be a mark of greatness in an actor.”
Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor
| Thursday, July 28, 2005
TT: Local celebrity
“Saw your picture in the paper this morning,” said the driver of the shuttle that runs between the parking lot and the front door of the southeast Missouri hospital where my mother is recovering from surgery. Three more people told me the same thing in the lobby, elevator, and fourth-floor corridor. By the time I finally got to her room, I'd figured out that a reporter from one of our two local papers must have come to my Tuesday-night lecture at the Smalltown Depot, and a quick look at the carefully folded copy of the Southeast Missourian conspicuously placed on her bedside table confirmed it: I'd received what small-town newspaper readers universally refer to as “a write-up.” What's more, it was a good one, meaning that (A) I was quoted accurately and (B) my photo looked rather more like the fellow I see in the bathroom mirror than the one portrayed on my driver's license.
Not that I would have expected anything different. Small-town newspaper reporters rarely go out of their way to publish hatchet jobs, least of all about the Hometown Boy Made Good who comes back for a nostalgic visit. The rules of small-town journalism are very different from those prevailing in the big city. Reporters are not your friends, I've told any number of friends and colleagues preparing to be interviewed by a big-city journalist for the first time. Some of them take my word for it and act accordingly, but others march off to their doom sure that I'm a hardened old cynic and thus not to be trusted. “I just had an epiphany,” one of the latter told me after emerging, somewhat scathed, from the lion's den. “A reporter risks nothing by inappropriate revelations, whereas the subject risks everything.” I was kind enough not to say I told her so.
Be that as it may, I haven't any complaints with the way the Southeast Missourian and the Standard-Democrat wrote me up. Besides, it was fun to be recognized on the street, though I can see how it might get old. Alas, my fame will last only through Friday, when I fly back to Manhattan and resume the genteel obscurity of a middle-to-highbrow critic who can count his network TV appearances on some of the fingers of one hand. I realized long ago that in America, there's no such thing as a famous writer, only famous actors. My all-time favorite joke is about the, er, Polish starlet who, er, slept with the screenwriter. If I ever write a book about Hollywood, which isn't likely, that'll be the title: She Screwed the Writer. (Or something close to that, anyway.)
I returned from the hospital to find an e-mailbox full of increasingly urgent communications. Among other things, it seems that the producers of one of the shows I was supposed to review in next Friday's Wall Street Journal have postponed its opening night, a decision which forced me to spend a full hour rearranging my schedule for the next two weeks, with further juggling in the offing. In addition, I have three thousand words of deathless prose due in the e-mailbox of a Manhattan editor at some point in the next twenty-four hours, though the editor in question was kind enough to call on Wednesday morning and offer me an unsolicited deadline extension, an act of mercy for which he will store up much heavenly treasure. That doesn't mean I'm not going to try to get the piece in on time, but it does mean I can breathe a little easier tomorrow morning, especially since I'm supposed to tape a local radio interview at one o'clock, arrgh….
Sounds like I'm already back in New York, doesn't it? I got a call yesterday from Bass Player, my great friend, kindred spirit, and fellow workaholic, who is somewhere on the West Coast this week for reasons not dissimilar to the ones that brought me to Smalltown, U.S.A., last week. We traded notes on our respective situations, complained about the work we'd brought home with us, then swore up and down to one another that in spite of everything, we were still managing to set aside A Little Time for Ourselves.
“You know what we sound like?” I said. “A couple of drunks bragging about how many days we've been sober.”
She laughed so hard I thought my cell phone was going to explode.
Enough already. It's not too late for me to to get a good night's sleep, so I'll turn off the iBook and give it my best shot. You wouldn't hear from me again until Friday if I had any sense, but who says I have any sense?
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TT: Almanac
“'You Stewart?' he asked.
“'Yeah.'
“'You did a thing in a picture once,' he said. 'Can't remember the name of it, but you were in a room and you said a poem or something about fireflies. That was good.'
“I knew right away what he meant. That's all he said. He was talking about a scene in the picture Come Live with Me that had come out before the war in 1941. He couldn't remember the title, wasn't even sure I was the same guy, but that little thing—didn't even last a minute—he'd remembered all those years. And that's what's so great about the movies. If you're good and God helps you and you're lucky enough to have the kind of personality that comes across, you're giving people little, little tiny pieces of time that they never forget.”
James Stewart (quoted in Donald Dewey, James Stewart: A Biography)
| Wednesday, July 27, 2005
TT and OGIC: New around here, stranger?
If you came here from the New York Times' new Blogs 101 page, welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5-to-7 blog (we come and go on weekends) hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, assisted by Laura Demanski, who writes from Chicago under the no-longer-a-pseudonym "Our Girl in Chicago." (Terry is blogging from his Missouri hometown this week.)
In case you're wondering, this blog has two URLs, the one you're seeing at the top of your screen right now and the easier-to-remember www.terryteachout.com. Either one will bring you here.
All our postings from the past week are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry's start with "TT," Laura's with "OGIC." In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.
You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read, and otherwise do, links to Terry's most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."
As if all that weren't enough, you can write to us by clicking either one of the "Write Us" buttons. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)
The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.
If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. And come back tomorrow.
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TT: Preaching choirward
Attention, Yale University Press: I just sold a caseful of Teachout Readers. The occasion was the lecture I delivered on Tuesday at Smalltown's old train depot, which has been turned into a museum. I spoke about how the new information technology has changed my life as a journalist, and when I was done I spent a good half-hour selling and signing copies of A Terry Teachout Reader. Granted, half the people in the audience knew me when I was in kneepants, but that's still a whole bunch of books.
Four things:
• This is the first time in my life that I've ever given a formal lecture without a script or written notes. I was too busy taking care of my mother last week to do my usual painstaking preparations, so I flew blind. It seems to have gone well, though I would have felt more comfortable reading from a prepared, rehearsed text.
• As always, I spoke for a half-hour and took questions for a half-hour, and I'm pleased to say that I've never been asked sharper or more pertinent questions by a lecture audience. Go, home team!
• In the audience was Dr. Joseph Blanton (known to Smalltownians of all ages as “Doctor Joe”), the kindly, all-knowing pediatrician who looked after me from infancy to high school and beyond. It is an awesome thing to gaze out into the upturned faces of a listening crowd and see for the first time in years a man who used to know you inside and out. I had to bite my tongue to keep from choking up.
• The Smalltown Depot is the place from which I caught my very first train. The year was 1962 and my kindergarten class was taking a field trip. We rode a passenger train thirty miles north to Cape Girardeau and were collected by our parents at the station. I vividly remember thinking to myself that riding a train was the most exciting thing I'd ever done in my life and that I wanted to do it again as soon as possible. Alas, passenger service to Smalltown was terminated a couple of years later, and it wasn't until I grew up and moved to New York that I rode another train, realizing at once that my six-year-old self had been right. I think of that maiden voyage every time I ride the Metroliner between New York and Washington, and I always smile at the memory.
I'm so tired now that I could tip over: I got three hours' worth of sleep last night and have dark circles all the way around both my eyes. (I wore one of my black outfits to the lecture so that I'd look dissipated rather than merely exhausted.) I have to wrench myself out of bed at seven this morning to get my mother's car inspected, after which I'll be putting in at least three hours' worth of hard slogging at the iBook. That spells bedtime to me. I may blog again twenty-four hours from now, or I may not….
P.S. I'm sorry I haven't called, OGIC—I miss you!
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TT: Almanac
“We all have original sin. I would much rather be able to terrify than to charm.”
Sir Ralph Richardson (quoted in Garry O'Connor, Ralph Richardson: An Actor's Life)
| Tuesday, July 26, 2005
TT: Otherwise occupied
I got back from St. Louis at two this morning, having spent the evening watching an outdoor performance of Mame. The temperature in the city climbed to 102 during the day, and it couldn't have been much cooler by the time I got to the theater. Now I have to hit a deadline, give a speech, visit my mother in the hospital, and—if possible—take a nap.
I have a feeling that I'm not going to be blogging again until Wednesday, don't you?
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TT: Almanac
“Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
| Monday, July 25, 2005
TT: Having a heat wave
The weather in southeast Missouri is a constant topic of discussion around these parts, mainly because it tends to change so frequently and unexpectedly. Alas, it hasn't changed at all for the past few days, and we're getting sick of it, in some cases literally. On Sunday the bank thermometers touched 100 for the first time this year, and they weren't kidding, either. I drove up to St. Louis at midday to cover a production of Henry V for The Wall Street Journal, and the weather on the far side of my windshield put me in mind of this passage from Louis L'Amour's Hondo:
It was hot. A few lost, cotton-ball bunches of cloud drifted in a brassy sky, leaving rare islands of shadow upon the desert's face.
Nothing moved. It was a far, lost land, a land of beige-gray silences and distance where the eye reached out farther and farther to lose itself finally against the sky, and where the only movement was the lazy swing of a remote buzzard.
Fortunately, no buzzards pursued me to St. Louis, nor are they wheeling in the sky over the hospital where my mother is recovering from an operation on her spine. Be that as it may, she had a rocky time of it last week. At one point a misjudged combination of painkiller and muscle relaxant caused her to hallucinate off and on for the better part of two days, and even after what she saw started to tally more closely with what was really there, I had more than a little bit of trouble persuading her to stay in bed.
Never having been a parent or spent more than a day or two at a time nursing anyone, I didn't know how enervating it can be to take care of a loved one who is for all practical purposes helpless. Nor can I imagine what it would feel like to nurse someone with no hope of recovery (my mother has every expectation of returning to good health). The hospital is a forty-five-minute drive from the front door of my mother's house, and I come home each night so tired that it's all I can do to take my clothes off. In addition to giving a lecture on Tuesday, I'm supposed to write three pieces between now and Friday, when I fly back to New York, and though I'm sure I'll get them finished, I've only managed to come up with a single sentence so far. Blogging is easier, but not so easy that the prose comes spurting merrily out of my fingertips, polished and ready to upload. I generally have to sit in my late father's easy chair for at least an hour after coming home before I can think of anything much more coherent to say than My God, I'm tired!
Part of the problem is that I've been ripped out of my daily routine and plunged into a radically different one. I sleep in an unfamiliar bed to the accompaniment of unfamiliar sounds, surrounded by shelves full of unfamiliar books. My iBook rests on a creaky, ink-stained card table, plugged into a sluggish dialup connection that makes Web surfing a chore. My stereo, CDs, and DVDs are halfway across the country (though not my iPod and miniature speakers, glory be). So are my friends. The restaurants here close early, the stores even earlier. It's as if I'm experiencing the disagreeable parts of a vacation without any of the offsetting novelties.
Of course it's for the best of all possible causes, and no sooner do I catch myself complaining than I remember why I'm in Smalltown, U.S.A., and feel a pang of shame. For years my mother took care of me whenever I needed taking care of, wiping my brow and mending my scrapes, listening to me gripe about the slightest ache or pain (I was no better a patient as a boy than I am as a man). If she ever complained, it wasn't to me. Now it's my turn, and you'd think I'd be able to face the moderate rigors of two weeks' part-time nursing duty with more grace.
If I were a better person, I could at least assure myself that this is a spiritual exercise, a refiner's fire that will toughen my character and make me more considerate and forgiving upon my return to Manhattan. Would that it were so. I'm sure the sheer relief of shedding my cares will leave me dizzy with joy come Friday, but I'm no less sure I'll be my old impatient self within a week at most, wondering why the world isn't capable of ordering itself with a more comprehensive regard to my immediate needs. We singletons have a way of expecting such consideration, especially those of us who keep neat apartments in which everything is just so. Solitude makes finicky, self-regarding connoisseurs of us: it's our compensation for living alone.
Interestingly, I haven't thought much about the Teachout Museum since returning to Smalltown, perhaps in part because the drive from here to the hospital is so pretty. I steer clear of the interstate and take Highway 61, known to southeast Missourians as “the old highway,” through a couple of dozen miles of rolling farmland. The trees along Highway 61 are so green this week that Technicolor couldn't begin to capture their intensely saturated hue, while the fields really are the “amber waves of grain” New Yorkers sang about so ardently in the days and weeks after 9/11. Art, I'm sure, means more to city dwellers who live far from such natural pleasures, and when I return home to the city, mine will mean more to me. At present, though, I'm happy to revel in the world around me as I drive to and from my temporary job as a caregiver. That seems to be all the beauty I need.
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TT: Almanac
“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
W.H. Auden, “Romantic or Free?”
| Sunday, July 24, 2005
OGIC: Learning from Los Angeles
It's a hundred degrees and I'm writing on deadline! This is what you might call bad planning. We've known for a week, almost, that today would be the hottest day in Chicago in six years. Things might have been arranged in a such a way that I'd be writing in a more leisurely fashion right now. But I didn't arrange them that way, and now I'm affixed to this chair and keyboard for the rest of the day.
And I'm way overdue to blog. There's not too big an opening for this, but I have been compiling a little list of things I learned in L.A., on my recent trip:
1. My hands are the same size as James Mason's—with slightly longer fingers.
2. My feet are the same size as Paul Newman's. Ergo, Newman must be of smaller stature than I realized.
3. Call me philistine, but I can't spend too long inside the Getty Center galleries without itching to get outside to the grounds and gardens again.
4. That said, my favorite room in the Getty is the one containing this still life and this portrait (so to speak). Cool details: the half-translucent lemon at the back of the bowl in the still life, and the tree stump that mirrors the rabbit in the, er, rabbit painting.
5. The staff at the Getty is about a hundred times more tolerant than the security crew at Hollywood and Highland of clusters of people loitering with clipboards in hand, solving puzzles. (I believe we might have been mistaken by the latter for Scientologists.)
6. The weather is perfect. But you knew that.
7. The traffic is intolerable. But you knew that.
What's this about clipboards and puzzles, you say? I'll tell you more about that later. For now, suffice it to say that it doesn't have nothing to do with the man about to be crowned Hottie of the Times (Brain division).
Keep cool!
| Friday, July 30, 2004
TT: Art for Arthur's sake
I’m not here—I’m on the way back from the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where I saw Design for Living last night—but Our Girl has kindly done me the favor of posting the weekly teaser for my Wall Street Journal theater column. This time around, I reviewed the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, an autobiographical play in which Marilyn Monroe figures prominently, and Lincoln Center Festival’s The Elephant Vanishes, a theater piece created by Simon McBurney of Complicite.
Not to put too fine a point on it, After the Fall is a major disaster:
Of the American playwrights who made it big in the ’40s and ’50s, Arthur Miller is the one whose star has dipped lowest. To be sure, he’s still big in Europe, mostly for the obvious reasons (European critics eat up talky plays about how the U.S. is a wasteland of vulgar, small-minded conformism). Yet only three new shows by Mr. Miller have been produced on Broadway in the past quarter-century—none of them successfully—and though several of his earlier plays have had solid runs in revival, the ever-ubiquitous "Death of a Salesman" is the only one that now seems a good bet to hold the stage permanently.
So what possessed the Roundabout Theatre Company to exhume "After the Fall," a lead-plated example of the horrors that result when a humorless playwright unfurls his midlife crisis for all the world to see? Don’t ask me—I’m a critic, not a producer. All I know is that this preeningly self-important play, written in 1964 and revived last night at the American Airlines Theatre, ranks right up there with "Bombay Dreams" on my list of Unendurable Clunkers of 2004….
The only time Mr. Miller manages to break free of his solipsism, however briefly, is in the first couple of scenes involving Maggie/Marilyn. Apparently she managed to get his attention, just as Carla Gugino gets ours. A TV starlet, this is her Broadway debut, and while she makes the mistake of imitating Monroe instead of suggesting her, she does it with powerfully seductive conviction. Once she extricates herself from this misbegotten production, my guess is that Ms. Gugino will soon go on to much better things.
Nobody else in "After the Fall" is memorable, least of all Peter Krause, another Broadway debutant who bears an uncanny resemblance to Greg Marmalard, the smooth-faced, toadying frat boy of "Animal House." Mr. Krause is best known for playing an undertaker in the trendy TV series "Six Feet Under," which seems appropriate enough, since he’s a hopeless stiff on stage. I’m not sure exactly how much secondary blame for the remainder of this mess should attach to Michael Mayer, the director, but there’s more than enough to go around.
The Elephant Vanishes, on the other hand, was almost perfectly wonderful:
No small part of the trouble with "After the Fall" is that Mr. Miller, who hasn’t a poetic bone in his body (though he thinks he does), tried in vain to write a lyrical memory play. True lyric theater is all about poetry—the poetry of the ear and eye alike—and "The Elephant Vanishes," directed by Simon McBurney and co-produced by the Setagaya Public Theatre of Tokyo and Complicite, Mr. McBurney’s London-based theatrical troupe, is one of the most bewitchingly poetic things I’ve been lucky enough to see on a stage.
Presented by Lincoln Center Festival 2004, "The Elephant Vanishes," performed in Japanese with English-language supertitles, was adapted by Mr. McBurney from the short stories of Haruki Murakami, whose surrealistic tales of Tokyo are hugely popular in Japan. Mr. McBurney has turned them into a fine-grained multi-media fantasy about the loneliness and mystery of postmodern Japanese urban life—an avant-garde "Lost in Translation," if you will. Though the New York State Theater was a bit too large for the production to register properly, the eerily discontinous vignettes spun by Mr. McBurney out of Mr. Murakami’s prose somehow managed to fill its cavernous interior to enthralling effect.
No link. Don’t just sit there—buy a copy of the Journal and read me. Or, better yet, subscribe.
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TT: Almanac
"She was a diffused, Salon photograph; and yet she must have had in the depths of her wistful soul a Gift or Daemon that once or twice a year awoke, whispered to her a sentence she could repeat—to the world’s astonishment—and then turned back to sleep. Dr. Rosenbaum had first been aware of this Daemon when Miss Batterson retorted, to a colleague’s objection that all Benton students read that in high school: 'There is no book that all my students have read.' Dr. Rosenbaum knew that it is in sentences like this, and not in the pages of Spengler, that one has brought home to one the twilight of the West."
Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution
| Wednesday, July 28, 2004
TT: Bloggers Anonymous
A reader writes:
Sad to see you succumbing to the powers of the internet. I'm 34, which is on the cusp of the information age, but perhaps more aligned with the younger generation since my undergrad was at MIT and grad school in academia before the internet meant that I've been actively using email since age 17. You're experiencing the joys of the instant communication, but not seeing the loss. A not-very-shy guy asked me out via the web, once, while actually emailing me from another terminal in the same room. Maybe he thought it was cute, but it highlights the fact that our on-line personality matters more than our in-person personality now. When I hated grad school, I went and complained to my friends from college, far away. Good to have as a resource in a way, but a crutch in terms of forcing me to bond with the people I was in grad school with, forcing me to deal with the present.
I see that all the time. I remember one of the earliest times I saw a cell phone user - a mother, eating with her kids (in the college dining hall! must be visitors), talking to someone else about something inane. My brother, the techno-geek, couldn't understand my issues with that scene. You see it everywhere - kids using the library terminals to play games; bored people using it to look at porn sites. Back in the day, it seemed like we used our spare time better. I spend far too much time, myself, on reading blogs - responding like this one, to someone who won't remember me tomorrow. I'm not a new friend, or acquaintance, I'm a face in a crowd. I should be studying, reading - and I just decided NOT to go to a concert tonight because I haven't done the work I should have done today. I'm sure there are similar losses - people who don't write novels or compose poems because that spare time gets spent browsing the net.
But, more obviously, if blogging with me and other far-away-arts-lovers means you DON'T connect with that person next to you - on the bus, in the restaurant, on the plane - there's a real loss. You gain a community, but lose a more important, living breathing community with more diversity. Ya know?
Technology is an absolute good, you say. Maybe. It seems an irreversible good, meaning that if you aren't on the internet, then the community changes without you. I'm without cell-phone or notebook or palm, but the people around me are less open to chatting with strangers because they have them, so I may as well get them….
That's my advice - get out, get out, get out. Life is out there, live it. My advice to myself as well, but I've been hooked for longer than you have. Okay, back to work, or else I have to cancel tomorrow's concert as well.
I’m not quite sure I’m the most logical recipient of this advice. After all, I usually attend at least four performances (and often more) each week, and I almost always bring a friend or two with me. What’s more, I find e-mail an unmixed blessing, not least because it allows me to maintain face-to-face friendships more efficiently. Nor do I think I communicate with strangers at the expense of friends. If anything, I’ve made new face-to-face friends through blogging, including several of the people whose blogs can be found in the "Sites to See" module of the right-hand column. As for the matter of diversity, what could be more diverse than the worldwide "community" of people who read "About Last Night?
Sure, we’ve all seen the way some folks use postmodern information technology to avoid direct human contact, sometimes deliberately and sometimes thoughtlessly, as in the case of the Inconsiderate Cell-Phone Man caricatured in those movie-theater ads. (I almost sang that jingle the other day to a noisy idiot seated immediately in front of me on an airplane.) Everything under the sun—including great art—can be used in life-denying ways.
Still, I can’t go along with the notion that blogs are by definition a waste of everybody’s valuable spare time, which is more or less what my correspondent is implying. Jennicam, maybe, but she’s out of business, while Maud and Sarah and Chicha and all the smart, thoughtful art bloggers whom I read daily are thriving. And well they should be, for what they do, aside from being valuable in its own right, also has the potential to increase the number of people reading good books and going to concerts (and, presumably, chatting with one another at intermission).
Which returns us to the mission of "About Last Night": Our Girl and I write this blog in order to stimulate and diversify the art-related interests of our readers. To put it another way, "About Last Night" is a means, not an end—and I know from our e-mailbox that it is constantly leading people to try new things.
On which optimistic note I’m headed for bed. My cold is marginally better, but I’ve got to rent a car and drive to Massachusetts tomorrow afternoon to see a performance of Noël Coward’s Design for Living (see, I do so get out!), and if I don’t get a whole lot of sleep between now and then, I’m likely to end up in a ditch.
In the meantime, please excuse my intermittent absences from this space, which will continue until Monday. I miss you all—but I’ll be back.
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TT: Who needs to read?
A reader writes:
While listening to Dana Gioia speak on the recent survey on fiction
reading (and his take on what that means), an equivocating thought came
to me. I've been a pastor and teacher for 20 some years, working with
congregations and talking to students in colleges or Elderhostel/Life-Long Learner participants.
As you probably know, survey data on church attendance is far above
what a simple, real world check will reveal (65+% say they go to church
4 times a month or more on surveys, but a worship census shows it
simply can't be above 40%, nearer 30%). Just in the last few years,
the annual Gallup surveys are noting a drop in those long standing
numbers, even as church attendance seems to be perking back up.
What we assume out here in Pastor-land, with a few sociologists of
religion riding shotgun, is that it used to be socially very important
to say you went to church…even if you didn't. As it has become
much more acceptable in general discourse to admit freely that you
don't go to church at all, let alone often, survey data is starting to
track closer to reality.
My suspicion -- which makes the problem no less, only different -- is
that it is now socially much more acceptable to admit that you haven't
read "War and Peace" or "To The Lighthouse" even among educated
company, while similarly there is less social value to claiming you
have…whether you've done so or not.
As a voracious reader of fiction, non-fiction, and lids of tea
packaging or stray receipts if that's all there is to hand, I can
recall many occasions in high school and college where I realized, to
my thrilled horror, that Teacher X or Professor Y had not actually read
the book they were manglingly alluding to. Similar events in dinner
party/backyard conversation over the years made me realize that the
total number of unread books everyone has read is…wait, as you've
pointed out recently, David Lodge has already trod this ground full
well.
But in the last 5-10 years, folks from freshmen students in classes to
my wife's colleagues in academia are likely to say in response to
literary references "Haven't read it," in tones indicating they're not
gonna, you can't make 'em, and whatsittoya?
So my equivocating point is: has fiction reading really dropped off?
Can we correlate for some other variable (sales, library circulation)
to crossreference? And is it possible that the problem is that folks
don't feel the need to fake having read or be seen as a reader of
fiction as a social value -- and if so, I find it double intriguing
that such a loss of felt need to keep up such appearances fictionally
speaking correlated so well with worship attendance trends (or
classical music, fer that matter).
It seems an important distinction, and I don't hear that the survey
response is picking up on the possibility.
As regular readers of "About Last Night" know, I’ve been asked not to comment on the activities of the National Endowment for the Arts—including its recently released survey of changing American reading habits—while my nomination to the National Council on the Arts awaits consideration by the Senate. But the questions this reader poses are so interesting and provocative that I wanted to pass them on anyway.
Any thoughts, OGIC?
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OGIC: Consumer reports
The Wall Street Journal (subscription only) reports today that, without making a big fuss about it, Amazon.com has taken measures recently to encourage users to use their real names when posting reviews:
Earlier this month, the Web retailer quietly launched a new system, dubbed Real Names, that encourages users to append to their product reviews the name that appears on the credit card they have registered with Amazon. A logo saying "Real Name" appears beside such customer comments.
Amazon still allows reviewers to sign their comments with pen names, effectively concealing their identity from other Amazon users. But even these reviewers need to supply a credit card or purchase history. Previously, users could easily open multiple Amazon accounts from which they could post multiple reviews of the same product. The new system is intended to block that practice.
Many of you will remember the brouhaha on Amazon Canada a few months back, when the real names of anonymous and pseudonymous posters were inadvertently revealed, exposing all manner of fixing (authors reviewing their own books under fake names) and sabotage (folks going undercover to savage their enemies' books). Also revealed in the incident was the growing influence of these customer reviews, and the company's new policies only underline how seriously it takes them as part of the service it offers. "What we're trying to do with this is add to the credibility of the content on this site," says a spokeswoman. There's more to the plan:
Over time, reviewers who opt to use pen names could become less visible on the site. Under the system in which users rate the usefulness of reviews, the most highly rated reviews appear in higher, more prominent sections of Amazon's pages. If users believe that reviews with real names attached are more valuable, those will become the most visible on the site.
All of this makes me feel a bit prescient. Several years ago, when Amazon hadn't yet started selling colanders and flip-flops, and "blog" was what I might say when the milk turned, I wrote a little piece about the site's reader reviews for a publication that shall remain anonymous (and thus of dubious credibility). The article was sort of a lite version of the blog triumphalism you see all the time now (including from yours truly): Everyman now has a voice! Sometimes it speaks wisely; sometimes it's absurd! And it just may be revolutionary.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, July 28, 2004 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"There ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it, and ain't agoing to no more."
Samuel Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
| Tuesday, July 27, 2004
TT: Almanac
"The charm of getting home, as I see it, is the charm of getting back to what is inextricably my own—to things familiar and long loved, to things that belong to me alone and none other. I have lived in one house in Baltimore for nearly forty-five years. It has changed in that time, as I have—but somehow it still remains the same. No conceivable decorator’s masterpiece could give me the same ease. It is as much a part of me as my two hands. If I had to leave it I’d be as certainly crippled as if I lost a leg."
H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Fifth Series
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TT: Almost as good as chicken soup
A reader writes:
I want you to know how much I enjoy and appreciate your blog, and now your book. A Terry Teachout Reader was waiting for me when I arrived home from work last night, courtesy of amazon.com. After dinner I read the introduction, the first three essays, and then skipped to the back to read your moving tribute to Nancy Lamott, whom I first heard of reading "About Last Night." At that point I had to put Come Rain or Come Shine on, and it occurred to me while listening that Nancy's music was not the only thing I had to thank you for. I saw Ghost World and The Last Days of Disco, movies I'd never heard of, due to you. I watched, and enjoyed, Out of the Past last week on TCM and I taped In a Lonely Place, which I'll watch this weekend. The last time we were in NYC, my wife and I saw Wonderful Town, based on your review. I'm right now on the web here at work ordering some of Dawn Powell's books because your essay about her intrigued me. I could go on and on but the point is, you are performing a real service for me and (I'm sure) countless others - pointing us towards great art and great performers that we may not have heard about otherwise, and identifying what makes them great in a clear, lucid writing style. Of course, it doesn't hurt that my opinions often match up with yours, evidenced by my TCCI of 65%. At any rate, I felt I must let you know how much you're appreciated. Keep up the good work - lots of people like myself depend on it. And thanks.
Thanks to you, sir. That was just what a sick blogger needed to find in his e-mailbox on a gray afternoon.
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TT: Here but not here
I got back to New York late last night from my family reunion in Smalltown, U.S.A., fell into bed, and arose first thing this morning with what appears to be a summer cold. Great. I'm writing for The Wall Street Journal this morning and the Washington Post tomorrow, after which I head for Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., to see a couple of plays, so a summer cold is just what I need at this juncture, don't you think?
Anyway, I may post a bit later today or some time tomorrow if my head clears, but don't be surprised if I opt for elective mutism instead. In any case, I'll be back for real on Sunday, and you'll hear from me then, assuming this cold, if it is a cold, doesn't prove fatal. (Hey, it could happen!)
See you sometime.
UPDATE: The cold's winning. So far, I've written two paragraphs of my Journal piece. All I seem to be able to do is read proofs and blow my nose. Would anyone care to bring me some chicken soup? Or perhaps a nice mug of cyanide?
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OGIC: More from M.F.K.
The matched set of Fortune Cookies below, once I had posted them, set me to thinking. I yield to no one in my adoration of M.F.K. Fisher—not even to W. H. Auden, who said of her, "I do not know of anyone in the United States today who writes better prose"—but after I typed in and reread the longer of the two quotations, it struck me as haughty and unpleasant. I worried that it might give readers unfamiliar with her work the wrong impression of Fisher.
What I had in mind in putting together the post, of course, was the striking contrast between Fisher's description of herself at nineteen in the first quotation, and her self-assessment at thirty in the second. Only after posting did I recognize the second extract as uncharacteristically off-putting. In context, it serves as the set-up and counterpoint to a self-critical remembrance of one of those men Fisher angers with her independence, and it works very differently than it does in isolation.
In another meditation on the subject of eating alone, Fisher is more her usual self. This appears in An Alphabet for Gourmets, where "A is for Dining Alone."
And the kind people—they are the ones who have made me feel the loneliest. Wherever I have lived, they have indeed been kind—up to a certain point. They have poured cocktails for me, and praised me generously for things I have written to their liking, and showed me their children. And I have seen the discreetly drawn curtains to their family dining rooms, so different from the uncluttered, spinsterish emptiness of my own one room. Behind the far door to the kitchen I have sensed, with the mystic materialism of a hungry woman, the presence of honest-to-God fried chops, peas and carrots, a jello salad, and lemon meringue pie—none of which I like and all of which I admire in theory and would give my eyeteeth to be offered. But the kind people always murmur, "We'd love to have you stay to supper sometime. We wouldn't dare, of course, the simple way we eat and all."
As I leave, by myself, two nice plump kind neighbors come in. They say howdo, and then good-by with obvious relief, after a polite, respectful mention of culinary literature as represented, no matter how doubtfully, by me. They sniff the fine creeping straightforward smells in the hall and living room, with silent thanks that they are not condemned to my daily fare of quails financière, pâté de Strasbourg truffé en brioche, sole Marguéry, bombe vanille au Cointreau. They close the door on me.
I drive home by way of the corner Thriftmart to pick up another box of Ry Krisp, which with a can of tomato soup and a glass of California sherry will make a good nourishing meal for me as I sit on my tuffet in a circle of proofs and pocket detective stories.
Even that, wonderful as it is, suffers some deformation in being yanked out of the full essay it belongs in. I continually encounter this problem with Fisher: she's very difficult to excerpt satisfyingly. It's one mark of a really masterful writer: search as you may, you just can't find the "money graf," or even two such grafs, or three. They're all necessary, and they all droop a bit in isolation. They aren't pearls strung together but a whole interdependent nervous system. You either throw up your hands and reproduce the whole thing—which seems to me neither practical nor ethical—or you compromise as I have done here, gritting your teeth and severing vital cords between the extract and the text around it, despite how violent it feels.
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OGIC: Fortune cookies
"I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me."
M.F.K. Fisher, "The Measure of My Powers" (1927)
* * *
"More often than not people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone. Women are puzzled, which they hate to be, and jealous of the way I am served, with such agreeable courtesy, and of what I am eating and drinking, which is almost never the sort of thing they order for themselves. And men are puzzled too, in a more personal way. I anger them as males.
"I am sorry. I do not like to do that, or puzzle the women either. But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence. Men see me eating in public, and I look as if I 'knew my way around'; and yet I make it plain that I know my way around without them, and that upsets them.
"I know what I want, and I usually get it because I am adaptable to locales. I order meals that are more typically masculine than feminine, if feminine means whipped-cream-and-cherries. I like good wines, or good drinkin'-likka, and beers and ales. I like waiters; I think the woman who said that waiters are much nicer than people was right, and quite often waitresses are too. So they are always nice to me, which is a sure way to annoy other diners whose soup, quite often, they would like to spit in.
"And all these reasons, and probably a thousand others, like the way I wear my hair and what shade my lipstick is, make people look strangely at me, resentfully, with a kind of hurt bafflement, when I dine alone."
M.F.K. Fisher, "The Lemming to the Sea" (1938)
(Both essays appear in The Gastronomical Me.)
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OGIC: Distant cousin of the lipogram
Here's a more revealing version of yesterday's story:
Boulevard Diner, ele_en-forty.
I down a hot cup of java.
It's too quiet.
As a gun barrel whacks my noggin
I realize Dixie set me _p.
And here's another story belonging to the same rarefied genre:
"Jefe—a burro I view like a pet—
vs. a burrow I dig.
I can tell my ass from a hole in the ground!"
Don Qu_xote eyed Sanc_o Panza: "I get it."
Ninety-eight letters—the same ninety-eight letters—and two blanks. That's right, they're Scrabblegrams: they use all the letters and only the letters in Scrabble to tell a coherent if brief tale. Don Quixote was composed by Eric Chaikin, director of Word Wars, who must have felt smiled upon when it struck him that the names of the novel's two main characters took care of the Q, the X, and the Z in one fell swoop. Boulevard Diner was written by Eric's brother Andrew Chaikin, who maintains a website about all his many endeavors here.
Perhaps it's not quite A Void, but it delights and impresses the hell out of me.
| Monday, July 26, 2004
OGIC: Ponderable
This ultra-short story seems simple enough, but it was composed under a rather exacting restriction. Can you figure out what it is?
Boulevard Diner, eleven-forty.
I down a hot cup of java.
It's too quiet.
As a gun barrel whacks my noggin,
I realize Dixie set me up.
I'll post another such story tonight.
(Yes, I concede that you can find the answer through strategic Googling. But wouldn't it be more fun not to?)
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OGIC: A few good links
• James Lileks goes shopping for a new duvet:
Several styles are available for purchase: Laura Ashley having a screaming acid fit, Clown Pelt, creepy-crawly paisley, and one sage-hued item that I can only describe as "ribbed for her pleasure."
Clown Pelt. Heh.
• In Slate, Timothy Noah points out that the Kerry campaign's close-reading skills are in need of a tune-up.
Last month, Chatterbox urged John Kerry to drop the campaign slogan, "Let America be America again." Instead, Kerry has wrapped his arms more tightly around the slogan's regrettable source. As Chatterbox noted in the earlier column, "Let America be America again" comes from a poem published in 1938 by the Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes. But Hughes intended the line ironically. A black man living in the pre-civil rights era would have had to be insane to look back to a golden age of freedom and equality in America, and Hughes was not insane. Hughes was, rather, an enthusiastic cheerleader for the Soviet Union at the time he wrote "Let America Be America Again," which explains the poem's agitprop tone.
• In the Chicago Tribune book section, Scott McLemee looks askance at Dale Peck's Hatchet Jobs and puts the Great Snark Debate in depressing perspective:
What is worrisome about contemporary book commentary is not that someone with Peck's habitual mean-spiritedness has carved out a name for himself--though it does suggest that criticism is now as much a part of the entertainment industry as gangster rap and extreme makeovers. People laugh at his jokes, or at the skinhead Paul Bunyan impersonation on the cover of his book, or both. Yet they overlook his efforts to be thoughtful, which are, if anything, just as funny. Adolescents often feel the need to philosophize, after a fashion. And I'm afraid that is precisely the impression left whenever Peck turns from strident denunciation of a particular novelist to sweeping generalizations about the culture. Still, the latter are a necessary element of criticism--part of the job of sorting and judging literature and of making sense of life itself. Peck may do it badly, but what makes the situation a crisis is that scarcely anyone cares.
| Friday, August 1, 2003
Home stretch
Another week lurches to a close, and I find myself progressively less amazed that "About Last Night," the full-service arts blog, is still coming out every day—it’s getting to be a habit with me. But I did write four pieces this week in addition to what you’ve been reading here (real pieces, for money), and I’m feeling a little zonked as a result, so it’s more than time for the weekend hiatus.
Not, however, before we move to today’s topics, from flammable to inflammable: (1) Potty-mouthed puppets on Broadway. (2) Lilo and Stitch, modernists. (3) Confessions of a country-music fan with a crush on Allison Moorer. (4) A stack of items from my mailbag. (5) The latest almanac entry.
This concludes our broadcast week, but I’ll be back on Monday, which gives you 48 uninterrupted hours to tell everyone you know about www.terryteachout.com. Make someone happy.
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Hand job
Avenue Q, an X-rated musical satire of "Sesame Street" performed by a cast of singing puppeteers, opened last night on Broadway, and I reviewed it for this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt:
"Avenue Q," which opened last night at the Golden Theatre, is as raucously, cruelly, unsparingly funny as "Big River" is sweet and warm-hearted….The songs, written by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, are wicked, often unprintable parodies of such smile-and-be-sensitive ditties as "Bein’ Green" and "The Rainbow Connection." One of them, "Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist," is so dead on target that I halfway expected the theater to be picketed during the last verse: "Everyone’s a little bit racist—it’s true/But everyone is just about as racist—as you!/If we all could just admit/That we are racist a little bit/And everyone stopped being so P.C.,/Maybe we could live in—harmony!"
To read the rest of the review, pick up a copy of the Journal and turn to "Weekend Journal," the Friday arts-and-lifestyle section. Then go right out and get a ticket, because I have a feeling that this show is going to ring the gong very loudly, in its own weird way.
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By the numbers
I’ve seen Finding Nemo twice and liked it both times, yet something about it left me cold, the same way all Pixar animated features leave me cold. That something is the animation itself, which is, as you probably know, digitally created, and looks that way. I don’t mean that it’s rigidly mechanical—the character animation in Finding Nemo is actually quite deftly realized. What bothers me are the three-dimensional backgrounds, which are both fantastically elaborate and hyper-realistic. It’s an impressive achievement, I suppose, but I can’t help feeling a incongruity between the characters, which are obviously animated (meaning unreal), and their environment, which just as obviously aspires to a different set of visual objectives.
Am I being persnickety? Probably. I mean, I really liked Finding Nemo. But every time I see a Pixar movie, I think of the dead end down which the Disney animators of the Thirties and Forties charged so heedlessly. Artist for artist, the Disney team packed a greater technical punch than any animation shop in history, but its product got duller and duller, while the Warner and MGM cartoons of the same period became more vivid and witty with every passing year. What made the difference? Disney’s creative team was fixated on the chimerical goal of realism, whereas Chuck Jones and Tex Avery knew that no matter how well you drew it, an animated cartoon was going to look like drawings of a talking animal.
This sounds like a debate over modernism, doesn’t it? Well, that’s just what it is. You can’t watch a cartoon like Jones’ "Duck Amuck" or Avery’s "King-Size Canary" without understanding that what you’re looking at is a cartoon. Both men accepted the inherent limitations of their chosen medium, thereby freeing their imaginations to run rampant within those limitations. Not so Walt Disney, whose goal was to make his studio’s cartoons look as real as possible, meaning that the imagination of the artists got tied up in knots. (Unlimited virtuosity can be a trap.)
I know there’s more to animation than animation, so to speak. Pixar’s features are good not just because of the way they look but also because of the way they’re written and voiced and scored. In those departments, Pixar stands head and shoulders over just about everybody else’s stuff. But the best animated feature of the past decade, Lilo and Stitch, is just as imaginatively written and voiced and scored—but also makes generous use of hand-drawn characters and hand-painted backgrounds that don’t aspire to Pixar-like hyper-realism. I can’t help but think that this is part of the reason why Lilo and Stitch touched me, whereas Finding Nemo mostly only charmed me.
Dour thoughts for a Friday morning, especially when the subject is a ‘toon. But if art matters to you (and I assume it does, since you’re here), perhaps it’s worth stopping to reflect on the always uneasy relationship between beauty and technology. I remember when the synthesizer was being touted as the ultimate musical instrument. Useful it is, I’ll grant you that, but can you think of a single first-rate piece of classical music that makes use of synthesized sounds? (Speak not to me of Philip Glass.) Sure, lots of people tried to compose classical music intended to be performed on synthesizers, all of which quickly slipped between the cracks and is now forgotten. Among other things, no major composers were attracted to the medium—which might have been the problem, of course. If Aaron Copland or Benjamin Britten had given it a try…but they didn’t. Even now, classical composers stubbornly prefer their music to be performed by flesh-and-blood musicians, just as I prefer my animated cartoons to be drawn by flesh-and-blood artists.
Does that make me a Luddite? Considering that I’m writing these words on a laptop so that I can post them on a blog, I don’t think the charge will stick. I’m not afraid of technology. Hand-drawn animation is a technology. The paint brush is a technology. (So is the novel, metaphorically speaking.) But I also love the old lightbulb joke about bluegrass musicians, who have long been known for their distrust of electronic amplification:
Q. How many bluegrass musicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. Ten—one to change it and the other nine to complain that it’s electric.
I’m with them. Mostly. Sometimes.
P.S. Courtesy of my host, artsjournal.com, here's a fascinating story from the Los Angeles Times about the clash of generational cultures between digital and pen-and-ink animators.
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Truth will out
Speaking of bluegrass, the Washington Post recently ran a great profile of Eddie Stubbs, the 41-year-old fiddler, disc jockey, and Grand Ole Opry announcer whose midnight-to-eight show on WSM is one of the last preserves of traditional country music and bluegrass in commercial radio.
Which reminds me to tell you—and no, this is not a confession, it’s a boast—that I love country music, though not the idiot kind you usually hear on the radio nowadays. I like the hard stuff, the high-stepping honky-tonk anthems and wrist-slitting laments about adulterers and adulterees that you used to hear on the radio back in the parallel universe that was my youth. On the other hand, country doesn’t have to be old to be good. An up-to-the-minute case in point is Allison Moorer, the warm-voiced, hard-rocking young Alabama balladeer whose new album, a two-for-one CD/DVD live set called Show, is absolutely as good as country gets.
I once gave serious thought to writing a book about the contemporary country scene (I wanted to call it Middle-Class Music, because country is so self-evidently by and for people who work for a living), and even went so far as to pitch it to my publisher. A funny thing happened on the way to the band bus, and I ended up writing The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken instead, but I still love country music. And Westerns. And cool jazz and abstract art and George Balanchine and Avenue Q. And Chuck Jones. So there.
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We get letters
Herewith, some snippets from my correspondence of the past three weeks:
- Necessities...an ALN reader competition to come up with a neologism to replace "blog"—surely one of the least attractive terms to (dis)grace the language in quite a while. Sounds more like a condition related to flatulence than anything as consistently fascinating and engaging as this journal. (Where would MGM have gotten with BLOG GRATIA ARTIS, and would Hippocrates [and Goethe] have struck such a resonating chord with "Blog longa, vita brevis"? Now, really!)
- saw "singing in the rain" the other night. is it me, or does o'connor outdance kelly in every number? in fact, doesn't everyone outdance him? i mean, kelly seems to work too hard and appears so flatfooted in there. cyd is breathtaking, of course. but donald o'connor is simply amazing. his ease and grace are a pure joy while kelly spends a lot of time watching his own feet. donald o'connor really should be re-appraised.
- RE: your chuckle over the archaic practice of reporting celebrity-spotting at the theater. Terry—people LOVE that crap! just take a look at how many PEOPLE-type magazines are out there. celebrity talk and spotting seems to make people feel less lonely or somehow more connected.
- I'm too young to remember Harold Schonberg's Times tenure, but have found him a great model (in Facing the Music). I'm a young music critic and trying to find work wherever it is (I'm in the Midwest, but write for websites in NYC and Montreal, but papers around Indiana), and Schonberg's take-no-prisoners approach was wonderful. I'm not convinced that his belief that Schoenberg's and Webern's progeny only alienated audiences, though. I've seen Pierre Boulez pack 'em in in Chicago and at the Ojai Festival to hear his work. And Boulez and Xenakis pieces get good receptions here in Bloomington, Ind. People seem much less scared of this music today than in the time covered by Harold Schonberg. Maybe I'm too young to know abt. the polarization that took place then, but the passage of time seem to have reversed Schonberg's assessment.
- Apropos of absolutely nothing—here's one of those strange coincidences with which life is filled: two artists who shared the same birth date (April 5, 1908)—actress Bette Davis and conductor Herbert von Karajan (!). As it happens, they died the same year, also (in 1989, at the age of 81), about 3-1/2 months apart.
- Orchestral programming today is a vexed problem. No matter what the music director or guest conductor chooses for a concert, someone will complain. If the conductor programs something difficult by say, Carter or Boulez, many subscribers will scream bloody murder. If an "accessible" work by a conservative contemporary composer is played, critics will complain of pandering to the audience with "easy listening." If a warhorse is played, critics complain of unimaginative programming. Conductors are damned if they do, and damned if they don't.
- the website is very New York isn't it? i believe that we provincials can muster an interest in New York about once a week (Sunday New York Times?) and other than that, we're fairly content to live and work in obscurity. if i had anything at all that you might like to hear about the website, that would be it. i believe it’s intended most for New Yorkers.
- I've been enjoying the blog a lot. I can only ask, as I am sure you have been asked by many—how do you do it? I think you must have scored a few bottles of those "go pills" that the fighter pilots use to stay alert. But for those of us outside The City, it is a great way to stay on top of what's going on.
See what cool readers I have? Alas, no controlled substances were used in the writing of this blog—only chocolate sorbet.
Keep on writing, please. And I invite your suggestions for a prettier neologism with which to replace "blog."
| Thursday, July 31, 2003
Denials and salutations
Welcome to the world of art, or mir iskusstva, as they say in Russian. It’s "About Last Night," the blog that brings you all art, all the time.
I begin by reporting a flat, unequivocal, and unconvincing denial. Remember last week’s posting about the party of drunken classical composers who were sitting around singing Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme? Well, the wife of one of the composers in question (herself a superlatively good opera singer) writes to assure me that "he was NOT drunk! He cannot speak for the others!"
Right.
I also want to pass along a piece of e-mail from one of my favorite jazz pianists in New York, whose message follows in its entirety:
Dude—you are SO bookmarked!
Go thou and do likewise.
Now on to today’s topics, from inverse to obverse: (1) The problem of the vicious critic. (2) A totally irrelevant but amusing exercise in anagramming. (3) Writers’ envy, as described by the envious one. (4) Get jiggy with Rapmaster Sylvia P. (5) How to speak fluent PoMo without really trying. (6) Art Tatum, on the cheap. (7) The latest almanac entry.
Tell a friend about www.terryteachout.com. It’ll add years to your life.
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We who cannot do
A reader writes:
Obviously, a critic should be rigorous, honest, and forthright, but how far is not too far? When the critic likes the work, there's not much problem, but what if the work is deemed flawed or worse (an all too common situation in my experience)? Living artists, even those without significant talent, are still human and apt to be hurt. Furthermore, it's always possible for a critic to be wrong, however honestly. It's been said that Art is ruthless and only cares for its own goodness or quality. Should a critic simply serve Art, and artists be damned?
Whenever I think about that question—and any critic who doesn’t lose sleep over it from time to time is a boor and a cad—I think of this couplet by Alexander Pope: "Yes, I am proud! I must be proud to see/Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me."
Terrible words, aren't they? They say a great deal about Pope, and what they say, I don't like. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that they have the rank smell of pathology—that they speak of a man whose ego was badly twisted, and who took it out on the people about whom he wrote. But I'm not going to try to tell you that they don't hit the target: I know a lot of critics, and some of them are just like that. I also know a lot of critics who are incompetent, by which I mean they don't know enough about their chosen art form to responsibly pass judgment on the things they review. Such critics make artists miserable, confuse audiences, and generally add to the sum total of unhappiness on this earth.
It's not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics—not all, but most—have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don't know that—and I mean really know it—you shouldn't be a critic. And you’re more likely to know it when you’ve lived and worked in a city small enough that there's a better-than-even chan | | |
