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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, December 8, 2006
TT: Hootie hits the road
Anyone who played jazz in Kansas City in the Seventies ran into Jay McShann
from time to time, and was invariably the better for it. A great, genial presence on the bandstand, he played no-nonsense piano and sang the blues in a slyly insinuating manner that never failed to give pleasure.
History mainly remembers McShann as the man who led the big band with which Charlie Parker made his first studio recordings back in 1941, but he and his group were far more than just a footnote to bebop. Their Decca recordings of “Hootie Blues,” “Sepian Bounce,” and “Swingmatism” (reissued a couple of years ago as part of Jumpin’ the Blues, a budget-priced two-CD set from Proper Records)
are as ear-catching now as they were six and a half decades ago—and not just because of Parker’s solos, either.
After dropping out of sight for a long, dry spell, McShann resurfaced in 1969, subsequently recording an all-star comeback album called Last of the Blue Devils whose well-deserved success made him a fixture on the festival circuit. It was around then that I first heard him in person, marveling at the fact that he was still around, and still swinging. Those were the days when I’d just started playing bass professionally, and though I never got the chance to work with McShann, I was sinfully proud to be able to say that I was, like him, a Kansas City jazzman.
McShann died in a Kansas City hospital yesterday. He was ninety years old. The Kansas City Star’s obituary is here, along with a package of related stories and video clips. It leaves out a few things, including the fact that Alvin Ailey made a dance in 1988, Opus McShann, set to several of McShann’s recordings, but it gets the important stuff right, and it also includes a characteristic quote from the man himself, courtesy of the Associated Press obit:
You'd just have some people sitting around, and you'd hear some cat play, and somebody would say, “This cat, he sounds like he's from Kansas City.” It was the Kansas City style. They knew it on the East Coast. They knew it on the West Coast. They knew it up north, and they knew it down south.
They still do.
UPDATE: The New York Times obituary is here. It’s serviceable, though short. Nothing from the Washington Post, which surprises me—they tend to be quick on the uptake, but this time they dropped the ball. (The Post finally got in the game on Sunday.)
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TT: Gospel truth
I reviewed two shows this week, one terrific (Two Trains Running) and one so-so (High Fidelity). Here’s the scoop, straight from this morning’s Wall Street Journal:
Not long after launching this column, I coined the Drama Critic’s Prayer: Dear God, if it can’t be good, let it be short. In fact, today’s playwrights are well aware of the shrunken attention spans of TV-conditioned playgoers, and so their plays are growing shorter by the season. I don’t have a problem with that—I like artists who stick to the point, assuming they have one—but the Signature Theatre Company’s revival of “Two Trains Running,” August Wilson’s 1990 play, is anything but boring even though it runs for three hours and ten minutes. If I hadn’t checked, I would have taken for granted that it clocked in at two hours and change.
What makes “Two Trains Running” so engrossing? It’s not the plot, because there isn’t one. All Wilson does is put his characters in a rundown Pittsburgh diner and set them to mulling over past misfortunes and present frustrations, swapping stories in the time-honored manner of working-class people who can afford no amusement but conversation. The time is 1969, and political implications are scattered throughout this snapshot of a ghetto neighborhood gone to seed, but Wilson never forces them on you. Like all great artists, he trusts you to connect the dots….
Stephen Frears’s film version of “High Fidelity” is on my Top Five list of good movies based on good books, in between “Strangers on a Train” and “Out of Sight.” (I actually prefer it to Nick Hornby’s novel.) The script is smart, the cast impeccable. What’s not to like? Nothing—so why turn it into a musical? Alas, the producers of “High Fidelity” came to a different conclusion, and now seem likely to lose their shirts….
The unfamiliar faces taking up space on the stage of the Imperial Theatre are bland TV-type actors who mostly do their best to remind you of John Cusack, Jack Black, Tim Robbins, Todd Louiso and Lisa Bonet. And that’s what’s wrong with “High Fidelity”: It’s good enough to make you want to go home and watch the movie again—but no better.
As usual, no free link, so buy the paper and read the rest of my review, O.K.? Or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you abracadabra-type access to my review, among innumerable other good things, including Joe Morgenstern’s super-smart film reviews. (If you’re already a subscriber, the review is here.)
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TT: The artist next door
The occasion for my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, is a new program recently announced by Carnegie Hall and the Juilliard School that will send young musical professionals into New York City’s public schools to teach—and, hopefully, to inspire by example.
Aside from the intrinsic merits of the program, what interests me about it is the fact that it is designed to inject artists into the community, thus helping to break down the wall that separates them from the people they serve. How many practicing professional artists do you know? If you read “About Last Night,” your answer is likely to be different from that of the average concertgoer. And why does that matter? To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.
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TT: Almanac
Q. You speak of your early plays as being poetic. What caused the change?
A. When I first started writing plays I couldn’t write good dialogue because I didn’t respect how black people talked. I thought that in order to make art out of their dialogue I had to change it, make it into something different. Once I learned to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I let them start talking. The important thing is not to censor them. What they are talking about may not seem to have anything to do with what you as a writer are writing about but it does. Let them talk and it will connect, because you as a writer will make it connect. The more my characters talk, the more I find out about them. So I encourage them. I tell them, "Tell me more." I just write it down and it starts to make connections.
August Wilson, interview, Paris Review (Winter 1999)
| Thursday, December 7, 2006
TT: Ears on the prize
This year’s Grammy nominations
are even duller than usual, but there are some highlights among the dross. I was amazed and delighted, for instance, to see that Karrin Allyson’s Footprints, Nancy King’s Live at Jazz Standard with Fred Hersch, and Diana Krall’s From This Moment On were all nominated as Best Jazz Vocal Album.
Here are some other noteworthy nominations:
• BEST COUNTRY INSTRUMENTAL PERFORMANCE: Chris Thile, “The Eleventh Reel,” from How to Grow a Woman From the Ground (Sugar Hill)
• BEST JAZZ INSTRUMENTAL ALBUM, INDIVIDUAL OR GROUP: Jack DeJohnette, Larry Goldings, and John Scofield, Trio Beyond—Saudades (ECM)
• BEST LARGE JAZZ ENSEMBLE ALBUM: Bob Brookmeyer and the New Art Orchestra, Spirit Music (ArtistShare)
• BEST SOUTHERN, COUNTRY, OR BLUEGRASS GOSPEL ALBUM: Del McCoury Band, The Promised Land (McCoury Music)
• BEST CONTEMPORARY FOLK/AMERICANA ALBUM: Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac (Capitol)
• BEST MUSICAL SHOW ALBUM: The original-cast albums of The Drowsy Chaperone (Ghostlight) and the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd (Nonesuch)
• BEST ALBUM NOTES: Fats Waller, If You Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It! (Bluebird/Legacy, notes by Dan Morgenstern)
• BEST CLASSICAL VOCAL PERFORMANCE: Ian Bostridge, Britten Orchestral Song Cycles (EMI Classics)
Somehow I doubt that any of these folks will be seen on the Grammy telecast!
Speaking of niche marketing, I was fascinated to learn that in addition to such hair-splitting categories as Best Rap/Sung Collaboration and Best Surround Sound Album, there are now Grammies for the best albums in the following categories: Tropical Latin, Mexican/Mexican-American, Tejano, Norteño, Banda, Native American, Hawaiian, and Polka.
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OGIC: Chilling with Caroline Blackwood
New York Review Books, which is doing some of the most interesting publishing today, has launched a blog that should be worth keeping an eye on: A Different Stripe. As it happens, the last book I finished was an NYRB Classic and a curious specimen. Here's a review/reflection.
Caroline Blackwood's taut, efficient Great Granny Webster (1977) is a novel with a void and a chill at the center. Autobiographical to an unknown degree, it is narrated by the great-granddaughter of the title character. About the narrator's great-grandmother, grandmother, and aunt, we learn a great deal, none of it favorable. About the orphaned narrator herself we know little more than her appalled apprehension of her female forebears. The book is in some ways reminiscent of Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—notably in the perspective it adopts of the preternaturally observant orphan imprisoned in a a secondhand family of unsympathetic relative strangers—but substitutes a vague air of disaffection for the young Mary's sense of persecution and injustice. Unlike McCarthy's book, it purports to be a novel, but reportedly lost the Booker Prize by the tiebreaking vote of Philip Larkin, who admired it but bestowed his favor elsewhere because he suspected Blackwood of having written nonfiction.
The novel doesn't so much unfold as unfurl, swish, swish, swish, in three rather static character studies followed by a brief coda that brings us graveside to descend into the vertiginous pitch-dark slapstick on which this odd reading experience ends. The first and dominant portrait is of Great Granny Webster herself, with whom the fourteen-year-old narrator is deposited to convalesce following an illness. In a great, grim house in a suburb of Brighton with a single servant, Great Granny Webster lives as a kind of carefully preserved monument to thrift and propriety, the embodied inverse of plenty and pleasure—"fiercely joyless," the narrator calls her.
And yet—is Great Granny really altogether without her charms, however unintentional?
...sometimes after meals had been served she would wait for the crippled figure of Richards to go limping out of the room, and she would suddenly start to make a few bleak and deadpan statements without appearing to expect any answer. I had the feeling that if I had not been with her, she would still have made the same remarks aloud to herself.
"Now-a-days," she would suddenly say, "people have been spoiled. They don't want to be servants any more. It's all the fault of the war. It's this last beastly war that has given them all such a taste for working in munitions."
She would take some saccharine from her silver sugar-bowl and drop it carefully into her tiny china coffee-cup and stir it slowly until it dissolved. She never took more than one frugal little tablet. She often told me she could not abide waste."
"I know exactly how to answer them, when now-a-days they ask me how I would like to be their servant!"
She would pause dramatically, like an actress who expects to be clapped for her line. Her pursed little discontented mouth would give a twitch, the only movement it seemed able to make that faintly resembled a smile.
"Poor silly things! I know exactly how to answer that! If I ever had to be their servant—I would only be the most excellent servant!"
Something in this, and in other details about the matriarch Webster, I found oddly disarming. And at the end of the narrator's eight-week stay at Hove, she startles the narrator at the train station by recalling her grandson, the narrator's father, dead in the war, with real emotion. The narrator's response: "Goodbye." She's fourteen, so this is understandable. What's less so is how untouched by this show of feeling her mature, retrospective account of her great-grandmother is—so invested is it in the picturesque extremity of the bleakness it paints.
In their own distinct ways, the portraits that follow—of the narrator's suicidal, fast-living aunt Lavinia and her unpicturesquely insane grandmother—are also sad descriptive tours de force. The sketch of the grandmother comes secondhand from the tales of an old school chum of the narrator's father. While we hear almost nothing of her mother, her father is the painfully missing piece whose absence exacerbates all of the characters' worst tendencies and miseries. He's doubly a cipher, not only absent but mysterious to the narrator—specifically in the attachment he demonstrated to Great Granny Webster, who, in the explanatory narrative the narrator would like us to believe, is the ultimate agent of all the dysfunction besetting the family.
She doesn't quite fit into that narrative, however, just as in the queasily comical horror of the final scene, she exceeds the space—in the ground and in the ceremony—allotted for her:
And then there seemed to be too much of Great Granny Webster to be emptied into the ground. There was something almost obscene in the sheer quantities in which she was emerging. I had expected that the clergyman would just take one handful of her ashes and throw them into the grave as a symbol. But instead he kept impatiently tipping the urn and his frozen face looked exasperated at the way that her white powdery substance would not stop flowing out.
Blackwood was a talent, no doubt, and Great Granny Webster is a bracing read in its chilly way: remorseless, fiendishly precise, generously larded with memorable scenes and characters, and frequently funny in an awful way (see especially the Lavinia chapter). The funeral scene on which it ends introduces into the mix lasting, intertwined notes of comedy and despair. By emphasizing the narrator's undying dread of the woman being put to rest it raises the possibility that what seems the book's cold climate belongs more precisely to the narrator.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, December 7, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Turnabout
Time Out New York has just published a multi-part feature called “Critiquing the Critics”
in which New York-based arts professionals (including publicists) were invited to grade the critics who cover them. The participants in the survey are identified by name, but their comments about specific critics are anonymous—with good reason, too, in more than a few cases.
This is, in theory, a nifty idea. I was going to comment on the methodology of the survey, which is (to put it mildly) problematic, but it seems that fellow blogger Apollinaire Scherr, the dance critic of Newsday, has already done it for me. As for the actual results, they’re both interesting and on occasion highly suggestive. If you’re curious, you can read what the panelists had to say about New York’s drama critics, myself included, by going here.
I should add, by the way, that I don’t quarrel with any of the specific comments that were made about me, which is—I suppose—a pleasant surprise.
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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 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)
• A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
• Company (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter and situations, reviewed here)
• The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)
• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)
• The Vertical Hour* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Apr. 1)
• Voyage (The Coast of Utopia, part 1)* (drama, G, too intellectually complex to be suitable for children of any age, reviewed here, closes Mar. 6)
• The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Dec. 31)
OFF BROADWAY:
• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, 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, closes Jan. 14)
CLOSING SATURDAY:
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here)
CLOSING NEXT WEEK:
• Heartbreak House* (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)
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TT: Almanac
"There is, indeed, an art to being an aware and responsive audience. In recent years, we have fallen into a simple-minded equation of 'participation' with overt activity. But one participates more meaningfully in really seeing one great work than in turning out a hundred mediocrities."
Thomas Albright, On Art and Artists
| Wednesday, December 6, 2006
OGIC: Breakfast links
More blogging to come this evening, but for now here are some links to go with your cup of joe:
• I agree with Dan Green of the Reading Experience probably half the time, but I always read him. He can be counted on, for one thing, to seethe eloquently about what's wrong with academic literary studies, as in his post today:
What now passes for literary criticism in the learned journals does less than nothing to encourage active reading, much less rereading. It wades around in the shallow waters of ideology and second-hand social analysis, leaving serious readers of literature to swim for themselves.
• I know, I know--some of you don't want to hear about hockey! But far more estimable arts bloggers than your present interlocutor occasionally must need blog on such lesser matters. A new entry in the wide world of hockey blogs is A Theory of Ice. It's turned my head with consistently elegant writing, and is particularly good on the culture of the game and its followers, as here on physicality as a two-sided coin and here on fandom and love.
• Mr. Quiet Bubble wasn't bowled over by Borat. Can't say I was either, though I giggled plenty. The Saunders link is well worth following. Part of the reason it's been hard to blog lately is that so many of my recent literary and cinematic excursions have proven so blah. I crave a transformative art experience, but it turns out this doesn't happen on demand. I do have a new lead or two, though, about which more soon.
See you tonight!
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, December 6, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Sorry about that
Yes, I'm in Connecticut, but something came up that I thought was worth sharing. The critics of the Chicago Tribune recently published a series of columns called “Critical Reversals” in which they confessed—sort of—to having changed their minds about pieces they’d written in the past. (For links to the individual columns, go here.)
Not surprisingly, these columns have provoked a certain amount of comment in the blogosphere, much of it skeptical. As for me, I have a personal interest in “Critical Reversals,” for in 2002 I published a column in The Wall Street Journal called “The Contrite Critic” in which I discussed one of my own blunders:
The big news for balletomanes is the coming of the Mark Morris Dance Group to Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival. Tonight, the company will be giving the first of four performances of "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato," Mr. Morris's evening-long stage version of the Handel oratorio. "L'Allegro" is one of the most important dances of the past quarter-century, so this week's performances are by definition a great occasion.
They will also be an occasion for me to eat crow, since I am, so far as I know, the only critic ever to have given "L'Allegro" a bad review. Seven years ago, I covered the Lincoln Center premiere for the New York Daily News, and I just didn't get it. I called "L'Allegro" "impressive in its seriousness, stunning in its inventiveness--and, ultimately, disappointing in its emotional flatness." I've written my share of wrongheaded reviews, but that's the one I regret most, because I was too dense to know a masterpiece when I saw it….
I mention this because it is a good thing for critics to abase themselves in public, even though we do it so rarely. I've changed my mind about art more than once, and I've learned that I not infrequently start by disliking something and end up liking it. Not always—sometimes I decide on closer acquaintance that a novel or painting isn't as good as I'd thought. More often, though, I realize that it was necessary for me to grow into a fuller understanding of a work of art to which my powers of comprehension were not at first equal….
The Journal posted a free link to this column, and you can still read the whole thing here. More recently, I revisited the subject here.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, December 6, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“The great man who can only be succeeded by a ‘lieutenant of Marines,’ a chief clerk, or a tired servile hack, is not a necessity. But the leader who himself has strength and leaves behind strength—the truly ‘great man’ and genuine ‘leader’—looks completely different and acts completely differently from the ‘great man’ of popular myth. He does not lead by ‘charisma’—an abomination and phony, even when it is not a press agent’s invention. The truly strong man leads by hard work and dedication. He does not centralize everything in his hands but builds a team. He dominates through integrity, not through manipulation. He is not clever, but simple and honest.”
Peter F. Drucker, Adventures of a Bystander
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, December 6, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, December 5, 2006
TT: Empty holes
Like most prolific authors of a certain age (i.e., middle), I've written dozens of uncollected essays, articles, and reviews that vanished into the Black Hole of Forgotten Journalism shortly after they saw print. The posting that follows is cobbled together from a couple of pieces I wrote back in the Nineties, neither of which made it into A Terry Teachout Reader. In the unlikely event that any of you read either one of them when they were originally published, pardon my redundancy. Otherwise, I hope you find this recycled version interesting.
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The surprising thing about American movies is not that most of them are stupid, but that any of them are smart. This blinding flash of insight came to me a few years ago as I sat in my neighborhood movie house and watched a more than usually boneheaded reel of trailers advertising the summer’s coming attractions. I wouldn’t have willingly paid a quarter to see a single one of them, even with free popcorn thrown in. Of course they were dumb. They’re supposed to be dumb, so as to attract the largest possible audience of paying dummies.
Just because I’m not a cynic doesn’t make me an optimist, though. I know I’m betting against the house every time I walk into a theater. For this reason, I sometimes find myself temporarily disarmed by a movie that is smart on the surface; less often, a film may simulate smartness so effectively that I go home thinking it was good, and only later realize that I’ve been hornswoggled. Joel and Ethan Coen fall between these two stools. I’ve seen most all of the Coen brothers’ movies, and in nearly every case I had the same sequence of mixed feelings, not after the fact but on the spot. First came a rush of something like relief, usually within the first minute or two: whatever else Blood Simple, The Hudsucker Proxy, and Fargo were, they weren’t stupid. Thus reassured, I relaxed and started to enjoy myself—but then second thoughts started to creep in, not about how smart the Coens were, but about the ends to which their smartness was being put.
The movie that finally caused me to make up my mind about the Coen brothers was The Big Lebowski, in which they explicitly satirized the film noir conventions with which they played in Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing. In case you've forgotten, The Big Lebowski is the story of Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski, a former SDS member who spent his undergraduate days occupying administration buildings and smoking dope by the kilo (his sole achievement in life is to have helped write "the original Port Huron Statement—not the compromised second draft"), has renounced his dreams of revolution and retired to Los Angeles, the paradise of sloth and disillusion, where he draws unemployment, slurps down White Russians more or less continuously and hangs out at the neighborhood bowling alley with his foul-mouthed friends. But someone has been telling lies about the Dude, for one fine day a pair of hired thugs, mistaking him for a self-made millionaire of the same name, smash up his apartment and urinate on his rug. He thereupon seeks out "the big Lebowski" for a chat and promptly finds himself swept up in a kidnapping.
What follows is straight out of Raymond Chandler—the wheelchair-bound client, the blonde trophy wife, the sex-crazed daughter, the rich pornographer, the impossibly complex plot whose various elements never quite mesh—except that Philip Marlowe, the sardonic knight errant of The Big Sleep, has been replaced by the Dude, an unfailingly amiable slacker who reacts to the chaos swirling around him with a combination of befuddlement and good humor, pushing his remaining brain cells to the limit as he endeavors to puzzle out who did what to whom.
Like all of the Coens' movies, The Big Lebowski crackles with disdain for the irredeemable banality of American mass culture. Even Fargo, the first of their films to appeal to a popular audience—and the only one to suggest a certain grudging respect for the traditional values it portrays—took a decidedly dim view of life in small-town Minnesota. It's surely no coincidence that the Dude, who is alienated to the point of paralysis, is also the only person in The Big Lebowski for whom we are meant to feel anything more than amused scorn. Far more representative of the Coens' now-familiar stock company of blithering idiots is Walter Sobchak, the Dude's bowling partner, a pistol-packing Vietnam vet whose impenetrable stupidity is matched only by his unshakable conviction that he knows the one best way to do everything. Leave it to the Coens to make a joke out of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Scorn is the gunpowder of satire, and The Big Lebowski is so keenly observed that it's tempting to treat it as a serious critique of the moral emptiness of American life. It helps that there's so much to satirize in the apathetic lifestyles of such hapless members of the contemporary lumpenproletariat as Walter and the Dude, not to mention the latter-day cult of noir: both phenomena, after all, are expressions of the homegrown quasi-nihilism that is fully as intrinsic to the American national character as the Puritan work ethic which is its inversion.
But noir, for all its tiresome affectations, really does pose a challenging ethical question: how can a man conduct himself with honor in a radically corrupted society? This, needless to say, is the whole point of Chandler's novels, The Big Sleep very much included. Philip Marlowe may talk in wisecracks, but there is nothing frivolous about the way he struggles to preserve his integrity in the face of temptation. Nor are the unhappy children of the Sixties who inhabit The Big Lebowski wholly deserving of our contempt. Though they made desperate messes of their lives, their foolishness arose from genuine idealism, however misbegotten, and if they failed to appreciate the values of the society they proposed to dismantle in the name of peace, love, and understanding, it was in no small part because their parents, worn down by the Great Depression and World War II, proved unwilling to defend those values when push came once again to shove.
As for Joel and Ethan Coen, it turns out that they, too, are nihilists, albeit in the postmodern manner: believing in nothing, they find everything funny. This is why their movies so rarely engage the emotions, and thus lack the dangerous edge of real satire. Satire occurs when scorn is ignited by passion, a commodity rarely found in the work of the Coens, who prefer Gen-X cool to baby-boom angst. The last thing they'd want is to be caught feeling something intensely.
"He's a nihilist," Maude Lebowski says of one of the heavies in The Big Lebowski, to which the Dude cheerfully replies, "Oh, that must be exhausting." Indeed it is, and the Coens, like the Dude, are too tired to do anything but poke clever but ultimately pointless fun at the morally null world in which they live. True postmodernists, they look into the abyss and laugh.
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TT: Almanac
"Nihilism as a symptom that the losers have no more consolation: that they destroy in order to be destroyed, that without morality they no longer have any reason to 'resign themselves': that they put themselves on the level of the opposite principle and for their part also want power in that they compel the mighty to be their hangmen. This is the European form of Buddhism, renunciation, once all existence has lost its 'meaning.'"
Friedrich Nietzsche, unpublished note (June 10, 1887)
| Monday, December 4, 2006
TT: Reprieve
New York City can be a vexing and unnerving place to live. Helicopters woke me at six-fifteen this morning, a bit earlier than my usual rise-shine-and-write time, and yesterday afternoon I shared a subway with a fellow who kept shouting "Kill 'em all! Kill 'em all!" as he walked briskly from one end of the car to the other and back again.
Be all this as it may, I'm in a thoroughly benign mood, for I just returned from a visit to my cardiologist, one year to the week after my busy life was interrupted by an unexpected ambulance ride to Lenox Hill Hospital. He tells me that my heart is now completely normal, with no irregularities of any kind. So long as I keep taking my medicine, eating right, and going to the gym, it'll stay that way.
It was snowing when I arrived at the doctor's office—but by the time I got back home, the sun was out. No fooling.
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TT: Not guilty
A reader writes, apropos of this posting:
Your iPod list and brief commentary brought to mind an interesting question. I notice you list “S.O.S.” as a “guilty pleasure.” It seems that whenever I encounter this phrase regarding a piece of music, it is always applied to rock and roll (by which I mean rock and roll in its broadest definition—the momentum-based forms of music that have dominated pop culture since 1955). My question is this: as far as you know, is there such a thing as a "guilty pleasure" in any other essentially populist musical genre? I've never once heard a jazz, country or blues record described thus. Same for show tunes or traditional Tin Pan Alley pop or any brand of folk or gospel. I'm interested because quite often when I see something described as a guilty pleasure, it's a record I like a lot (“S.O.S.” included) and if there are some of them lying around in other forms I'd certainly like to get to know them!
This is a wonderful question, one that makes a point that had never previously occurred to me. The phrase “guilty pleasure,” of course, is itself inherently problematic, because it implies that we ought to be hypocrites when it comes to our artistic responses. Kingsley Amis said the last word about this deeply wrongheaded attitude: "All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt." The inverse is also true. I really do like “S.O.S.,” which I believe to be a beautifully crafted pop single, so why should I feel guilty about it?
Generally speaking, though, I don’t fall victim to either error, partly because I don’t give a damn about received opinion and partly because it’s unusual for me to like fundamentally dishonest art. It occurs to me that this might point in the direction of a working definition of bonafide “guilty pleasures” and our responses to them: guilty pleasures let us off too easy by pandering to our innate longing for unearned simplicity. They are the Krispy Kreme donuts of art.
Most commercial movies, for instance, are made on the assumption that audiences want to see moral struggle—but not too much of it. Much more often than not, we know as soon as the credits roll exactly what we're supposed to think the star ought to do (kiss the girl! give back the money!), and we spend the next hour and a half waiting for him to finally get around to doing it. When he does, we go home happy; if he doesn't, we go home feeling cheated, and tell all our friends to pick a different movie next weekend.
Smooth jazz, like minimalist music, works in something of the same way, but I don’t know that I’d call either genre a guilty pleasure because I don’t find either one pleasurable, any more than I find reality TV pleasurable. As for the pop and country music of my youth—the kind that used to be played on AM radio—I didn’t like most of it back then and don’t like it now, but I always made an exception for simple, well-crafted songs like "S.O.S." whose “catchiness” was a function of their musical integrity.
And are there guilty pleasures to be found in other musical genres? I’ll end by handing out hostages to fortune: here are fifteen stylistically wide-ranging records of variously dubious artistic merits from which I nonetheless derive wholly guilt-free pleasure. Brace yourselves:
• George Strait, “All My Ex’s Live in Texas”
• Henry Mancini, “Baby Elephant Walk”
• Kim Carnes, “Bette Davis Eyes”
• A Taste of Honey, “Boogie Oogie Oogie”
• The Carpenters, “Close to You”
• Rupert Holmes, “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)”
• Hal Kemp, “Got a Date With an Angel”
• Melissa Manchester, “Nice Girls”
• Al Dexter, “Pistol Packin’ Mama”
• Hall & Oates, “Private Eyes”
• Young-Holt Unlimited, “Soulful Strut”
• Carmen Miranda, “South American Way”
• Vladimir Horowitz, “The Stars and Stripes Forever”
• Classics IV, “Stormy”
• Bing Crosby, “Sweet Leilani”
Make of that list what you will.
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TT: They've got a great big list
Speaking of lists, the cover story in the December issue of the Atlantic is a feature called “They Made America” for which ten “eminent historians” were invited to draw up lists of “the most influential figures in American history,” which were then combined into a giant-sized über-list
of America’s Top One Hundred Influentials. Such lists are scarcely more than an intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual) party game, but it’s always fun to play, and if you go here you can see who made the cut.
Here are the artists:
16. Mark Twain
22. Walt Whitman
26. Walt Disney
33. Ralph Waldo Emerson
41. Harriet Beecher Stowe
49. Frederick Law Olmsted (he designed Central Park)
59. Louis Sullivan (he invented the skyscraper)
60. William Faulkner
65. Henry David Thoreau
66. Elvis Presley
76. Frank Lloyd Wright
79. Louis Armstrong
83. James Fenimore Cooper
85. Ernest Hemingway
92. John Steinbeck
95. Sam Goldwyn (I suppose you could call him an artist)
97. Stephen Foster
100. Herman Melville
Eighteen people, ten of them writers, including three bad novelists. No playwrights. No film or stage directors. No painters (unless you count Samuel F.B. Morse, No. 45 on the list). No sculptors. No choreographers. Only one songwriter, and no other composers of any kind. Do I detect the least little whiff of philistinism on the part of those eminent historians? At least Satchmo made the cut!
In addition to the main list, the magazine published five secondary rosters of influential architects, filmmakers, musicians, poets, and critics. David Thomson chose the filmmakers, and his picks, as always, were illuminating: D.W. Griffith, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, and (here’s the ringer) Andy Warhol. I chose the musicians, and after a good deal of preliminary thought, I opted to play it down the ringerless center: Armstrong, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan.
This, incidentally, is the second such collective venture in which I have participated. Back in 1998 and 1999, Time ran a series of tributes to what it claimed were the one hundred most important people of the twentieth century, including twenty “artists and entertainers”: Armstrong, Dylan, Lucille Ball, the Beatles, Marlon Brando, Coco Chanel, Charlie Chaplin, Le Corbusier, T.S. Eliot, Aretha Franklin, Martha Graham, Jim Henson, James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Bart Simpson, Frank Sinatra, Steven Spielberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Oprah Winfrey. I wrote the article on Graham, but not before begging the editors to choose George Balanchine instead. Alas, I couldn’t change their minds, so I bit my tongue and did my duty.
Fortunately, I was allowed to make the final calls on three of the items included in the “Best of the Century” list that Time published on the last day of 1999. For what it’s worth, I chose Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments as best dance of the century (with Paul Taylor’s Esplanade and Antony Tudor’s Jardin aux lilas as runners-up), Britten’s Peter Grimes as best opera (with Berg’s Wozzeck and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly as runners-up), and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms as best classical composition (with the Ravel String Quartet and Copland’s Appalachian Spring as runners-up). I’d stand by those choices today, though I can easily imagine other, equally satisfactory rosters.
Like I said, it’s only a game—but a good one.
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TT: Almanac
"Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless. It has nothing to do with melodrama—with wicked villains, persecuted maidens, avengers, sudden revelations, and eleventh-hour repentances. Death, in a melodrama, is really horrible because it is never inevitable. The dear old father might so easily have been saved; the honest young man might so easily have brought in the police five minutes earlier.
"In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's destiny is known. That’s because hope, that foul, deceitful thing, has no part in it. There isn't any hope. You're trapped. The whole sky has fallen on you, and all you can do about it is to shout.
"Don't mistake me: I said 'shout': I did not say groan, whimper, complain. That, you cannot do. But you can shout aloud; you can get all those things said that you never thought you'd be able to say—or never even knew you had it in you to say."
Jean Anouilh, Antigone (trans. Lewis Galantiere)
| Friday, December 2, 2005
TT: AWOL
I haven't been absolutely forthcoming with you about my current state of mind and body, so here goes: I have a little problem called "reactive airways syndrome," which is a kind of respiratory alarm that goes off whenever I let myself get run down and underslept. It started clanging loudly two weeks ago. As a result, I spent the past few days slumped on my couch in a slack-jawed semi-stupor, watching undemanding movies, doing as little as possible, and letting my batteries recharge themselves.
The good news is that I'm finally starting to bounce back, but I'm not quite there yet. In order to ensure a more perfect recovery, I've decided not to blog at all between now and next Friday, December 9, when I'll return to the 'sphere with the weekly drama-column teaser. I'll miss you, but I know you'll understand.
Have fun while I'm gone. Visit some of the other blogs listed in the "Sites to See" module. Come goggle at Maud and me on Tuesday night. And fear not: I shall return next Friday!
UPDATE: In addition to all those other cool blogs, you'll find lots and lots of new stuff in the right-hand column to keep you busy in my absence. Enjoy.
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TT: The color green
Time again for my weekly drama-column teaser, in which I post titillating snippets of today’s Wall Street Journal reviews of The Color Purple and Abigail’s Party:
Today’s musicals usually feature actors who can sing instead of singers who can act. LaChanze, like Kristin Chenoweth, does both with awe-inspiring conviction. I’d believe anything that came out of her mouth—anything, that is, except “The Color Purple,” which is best described as two hours and 45 minutes’ worth of high-priced phoniness….
I can’t say enough nasty things about the music, which consists of generic gospel, scrubbed-up blues and fake-fur jazz, all somewhat less memorable than the score to a made-for-TV movie….
It’s hard to believe that Mike Leigh’s “Abigail’s Party,” originally written in 1977, is only now receiving its New York premiere. In England it’s considered something of a modern classic, a ferociously funny skewering of middle-class manners, but over here Mr. Leigh is mostly known—if at all—for “Topsy-Turvy,” his extraordinary 1999 biopic about the private lives of Gilbert and Sullivan. Fortunately, the New Group has produced several of his plays Off Broadway, all of them staged by Scott Elliott, the company’s artistic director, and this one belongs on your short list of shows that mustn’t be missed….
No link, so stick a dollar in your pocket and head for the nearest newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to the complete text of my review (along with all sorts of other cool art-related stuff).
UPDATE: The Journal has posted a free link to this review. You can read the whole thing here.
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TT: Message in a bottle
Television can make you famous, but it can’t keep you famous. It’s more like an opiate—as soon as you stop taking your daily fix, you get all pale and clammy, and before long you vanish in a puff of near-transparent smoke. So far as I know, there’s never been a TV star, no matter how big, who stayed famous for very long once he or she went off the air. (Remember Daniel J. Travanti? I sure hope he had a good financial adviser.) If you’re in it for the long haul, you’ve got to make films or records. Otherwise, you’ll end your days as the answer to a trivia question, remembered only by a soft core of fast-graying fans who knew you when.
I had occasion yesterday afternoon to recall the name of Harry Reasoner, who at one time was quite famous indeed and now is almost entirely forgotten. Not only was he one of the smartest people ever to sit in an anchorman’s chair, but he was also a damned good writer, albeit in a genre that no longer exists: he used to wrap up his TV newscasts with a brief, pithy commentary on some aspect of the day’s news. A few of them made it into Before the Colors Fade: A Look Back, his graceful 1983 memoir, which is out of print but still worth reading. He died in 1991, and now he’s remembered, if at all, for having been one of the original co-anchors of 60 Minutes, together with a much better-known fellow by the name of Mike Wallace.
That’s the trivia question, and if you know that much about Harry Reasoner, you know a lot more than most people. For all his considerable gifts, his fame was almost entirely a function of the fact that he appeared on TV, and once the appearances came to an end, so did the fame. Such is the fate of everyone who chooses to spend his adult life talking into a TV camera. Time was when I admired Reasoner greatly, as I did his colleague Charles Kuralt—but how often do I think of them now that they’re gone?
At any rate, I thought of Harry Reasoner yesterday, and automatically did what all of us Web-dependent creatures do whenever a half-forgotten name floats into our stream of consciousness: I Googled him. The pickings, not surprisingly, were pitifully slim, but I did run across two things he said that made me smile:
Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.
If you're a good journalist, what you do is live a lot of things vicariously, and report them for other people who want to live vicariously.
Nicely said—and anyone capable of speaking with such wry detachment about my line of work probably had a similarly realistic view of his own modest place in the grand scheme of things. So I’ll try not to let it bother me too much that Harry Reasoner has taken his place in the memory hole alongside so many of the celebrities of my youth. After all, I remember him, and the next time someone has occasion to Google his name, they’ll see these words. I wonder when that will be?
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TT: I hate to keep reminding you
Actually, I don't, so here we go again: I’ll be teaming up next Tuesday night with litblogger Maud Newton and Sasha Frere-Jones of The New Yorker for a joint performance at Makor, the Upper West Side outpost of the 92nd Street Y. Our subject is “The Art of Online Criticism.”
Says the press release:
Cultural critics find themselves in the same predicament as other members of the traditional media who now must play a new game. Hear three influential critics who write both online and for print discuss how the cultural conversation is evolving and what the future holds when everyone's a critic.
Bryan Keefer is the moderator. The show starts at seven p.m. Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door.
For more information, or to buy tickets online, go here.
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TT: Number, please
• Price paid by Chick Austin of the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1938 for Soap Bubble Set, the first work by Joseph Cornell to be purchased by a museum: $60
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $772.29
(Source: Eugene R. Gaddis, Magician of the Modern)
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TT: Almanac
"What the mass media offer is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten and replaced by a new dish."
W.H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand
| Thursday, December 1, 2005
TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
• Dirty Rotten Scoundrels* (musical, R, extremely vulgar, reviewed here)
• Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)
• The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes Mar. 26, reviewed here)
• Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, 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 Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language, closes Dec. 31, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• See What I Wanna See (musical, R, adult subject matter, explicit sexual situations, strong language, closes Dec. 4, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON:
• Absurd Person Singular (comedy, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
• Bach in Leipzig (comedy, G, too complicated for any but the brightest children to follow, closes Dec. 18, reviewed here)
• Hamlet (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Dec. 11, reviewed here)
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TT: Deal of the decade
Everybody’s talking about new ways to present classical music, but now the Manhattan-based Thalia Music Series is, er, putting its music where your mouth is. Here’s the scoop, straight from the press release:
In December and January, if you try a new dish at a participating restaurant and attend one of the composer=performer: plugged & unplugged concerts (Thalia Music Series, Thursday evenings, December 15, 2005 and January 19, 2006, at 7:30 p.m. at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway), you are entitled to a free CD. Just present your receipt from one of the participating restaurants along with your ticket stub to receive the disc at the end of the performance.
Expand your musical palette and hear composers talk about and share their own works in an evening of chamber music. Clarinetist Derek Bermel, flutist Valerie Coleman, and pianist Beata Moon will perform their compositions on December 15, 2005.
Participating restaurants:
• Ouest: 2315 Broadway (at 84th St., 212-580-8700)
• Regional: 2607 Broadway (at 98th St., 212-666-1915)
• Saigon Grill: 620 Amsterdam (at 90th St., 212-875-9072)
• Mill Korean Restaurant: 2895 Broadway (at 113th St., 212-666-7653)
• Turkuaz: 2637 Broadway (at 100th St., 212-665-9541)
January's concert features electric guitarist John King, vocalist Joan La Barbera, and electro-violinist Todd Reynolds. Tickets are $21, or $30 for a pass to both performances. For more information about the programs, go to the Symphony Space Web site.
I should add that I recently heard Beata Moon’s Dinner Is West, a new piano trio that will be performed on December 15, and liked it enormously. I’ve also eaten at Ouest and the Saigon Grill, and can endorse both places no less enthusiastically.
This is a great idea. Give it a try, won't you?
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TT: You'd do it for Randolph Scott
Mr. Rifftides has Randolph Scott on his mind. Me, too, so mark your calendar for December 21 at eight p.m. EST, when Turner Classic Movies will be airing the premiere of Budd Boetticher: A Man Can Do That, a documentary about the great Hollywood director who made a series of Westerns starring Scott that rank high on the list of insufficiently known classic American films. A Man Can Do That will be followed at 9:30 EST by Seven Men From Now, the first of the Boetticher-Scott collaborations, digitally restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and soon to be released for the first time on DVD. (I've seen a screener of the documentary, by the way, and it's a solid piece of work.)
To commemorate these twin events, American Cowboy has made the text of my essay “What Randolph Scott Knew” available on its Web site:
Scott was secure enough to let his colleagues do the talking, knowing that his gritty, hard-faced on-screen presence would speak for itself. The dashing young leading man of the Thirties now looked as though he’d been carved from a stump, and every word he spoke reeked of disillusion. Yet he continually found himself forced to make moral choices that were always clear but rarely easy. What Scott should do at any given moment is never in doubt, but we also understand that doing it will never make him “happy” in any conventional sense of the word: he must do the right thing for its own sake, not in the hope of any immediate reward….
If you don’t own a copy of A Terry Teachout Reader (and if not, why not?), you can read the complete essay by going here.
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TT: Number, please
• Top ticket price for a performance of New York City Ballet at City Center in 1948: $2.50
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $20.68
(Source: Lynn Garafola with Eric Foner, Dance for a City)
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TT: Almanac
"Celebrity: the advantage of being known by those who do not know you."
Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization (trans. W.S. Merwin)
| Wednesday, November 30, 2005
OGIC: The sea inside
What's that you say? You could really stand to read just one more review of John Banville's Booker-winning novel The Sea? Well, you're in luck. I threw my two cents into that crowded field in last Sunday's Baltimore Sun.
I found the book lovely and absorbing, but its denouement deflating:
It takes a sure hand and an absolutely arresting style to make this sort of highly interior, small-scale fiction compelling. Banville, his sentences strikingly visual and perfectly tuned, is more than equal to the challenge. Moreover, the character in whose mind we spend the whole of this short novel is neither remarkable nor likable. Having made the climb to the middle class, Max is a bit of a snob. He is comically self-absorbed, squeamish and habitually condescending to women. The book doesn't invite us to identify with him, so when his interior monologue hits a nerve, it has to do with the truly universal aspects of human experience - vanity, ambivalence about mortality, awe of the natural world, romantic and sexual infatuation.
In a sense, despite its narrow point of view and mundane subject matter, burrowing psychological fiction like this is more ambitious than fiction with a wider lens. For most of The Sea, Banville succeeds brilliantly at making quite gripping reading out of the dwindling, ordinary life of an ordinary man. The drabness of Max's present existence is offset by the heady, luminous quality of his memories. The day he kissed Chloe Grace "had been sombre and wet and hung with big-bellied clouds when we were going into the picture-house in what had still been afternoon and now at evening was all tawny sunlight and raked shadows, the scrub grass dripping with jewels and a red sail-boat out on the bay turning its prow and setting off toward the horizon's already dusk-blue distances."
Of course, everyone's memories seem splendid and suggestive to them, and for most of the novel it doesn't appear that Banville is making any special claims for the extraordinariness of Max's past, however much the character may be rapt at the ongoing slide show in his head.
At the end of the book, however, we learn that the memories Max has immersed himself in are part of an extraordinary story indeed. Secrets are revealed, and The Sea snaps into focus as a very different book than it had appeared to be, a book with a twist and a scandal at its core. To my mind, it becomes a lesser one: no less intelligent and skillful, but less moving and ambitious than when it was apparently scrutinizing mundane experience.
But still well worth reading. This line, quoted earlier in my review, was one that particularly interested me: "Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still." Although this seems to be intended in part as a reflection of the protagonist's vocation as an art historian—of Bonnard specifically, with his sensual stolen domestic moments—it's close to my experience, too, of very intense memories. They're snapshots, frozen motion. I loved the rich texture of the ordinary in this novel, and wished that Banville had been content to convey that. The mystery unveiled at the end felt distinctly superfluous.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, November 30, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Number, please
• Tennessee Williams' weekly share in 1945 of the box-office receipts from The Glass Menagerie: $1,000
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $10,504.82
(Source: Donald Spoto, The Kindness of Strangers)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 30, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"It makes me very aware of my wasted life as an artist; I should have chucked security and settled for Bohemianism in which my talents might have flowered more originally. Perhaps wife and child and the desire for roots have been a mistake. I should have given an adventurous Lear by now and invented a clown. Ah well. What I have is a dear good wife, a dear good son and a house with views of rolling downs, trees, grass, and open skies. And a pretty good collection of books."
Alec Guinness (diary entry, Jan. 1, 1981)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, November 30, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, November 29, 2005
TT: I'd rather be right
Joseph Epstein has published a sharply negative reconsideration of the criticism of Edmund Wilson (whom he once admired) in the December issue of Commentary. The essay isn’t yet posted on the Web, but it doesn’t matter, because I don’t want to talk about Wilson. Instead, I’m interested in the following passage:
One of the advantages artists have over critics is that they can be nearly complete damn fools and still produce interesting and important, even lasting, art. Critics are not permitted such large margins of stupidity. It matters that they get things right; their opinions, which is all they chiefly have, are crucial.
These three sentences need a certain amount of unpacking. For starters, they contain a planted axiom—critics aren't artists—which some readers will find controversial. Not me, though I think criticism can be artful, and should be. Nothing is more tiresome than a badly written review of a well-written book. In general, though, it seems to me self-evident that criticism normally derives its meaning and significance from the works of art about which the critic writes. It doesn't stand alone. Great art, by contrast, always stands alone, in the sense that it contains within itself all the information necessary for it to be meaningfully experienced. You’ll get more out of All the King’s Men if you know who Huey Long was, but you don’t have to know anything about him—or Robert Penn Warren—to grasp the point of the novel, or be moved by it, just as you don’t have to know anything about Mozart to appreciate the G Minor Symphony.
Having said this, I’m not entirely sure I agree with Epstein when he suggests that the most important thing about criticism is that it “get things right.” Of course it’s desirable to be right, and I don’t see how it’s possible to take seriously a critic who’s wrong about most things. Nevertheless, I’m uneasy with the notion that “getting things right” is the ultimate test of a critic’s worth, just as I’m not entirely willing to go along with the notion that criticism isn’t art. George Bernard Shaw and Virgil Thomson, the two greatest music critics of modern times, got all sorts of things wrong, but even at their most willful they never failed to be both interesting and artful. I’d rather read Thomson on, say, Paul Hindemith (whom he completely misunderstood) than Olin Downes on anything, even though Downes was more likely than Thomson to be “right” on any given subject. The trouble with Thomson is that he was violently prejudiced and thus unreliable. The trouble with Downes is that he was boring. Whom would you rather read?
Of course Thomson wasn’t just a critic, he was also a composer, and I think that makes a difference, though I’d be hard pressed to say exactly what it is. It’s easier to explain in the case of Shaw, who was, like him or not (and I don’t), an imaginative writer of high style and memorable personality. These things cannot be separated: a memorable personality is the enabling condition of a great style. We read Shaw’s music criticism for what it tells us about music, but it’s no less worth reading for what it tells us about Shaw.
This is part of what I was getting at in the last chapter of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken:
He was, of course, something more than a memorable stylist, if something less than a truly wise man. Daniel Aaron speaks of “the great comic writer who as time passes will be remembered less for what he said than how he said it,” but the fact remains that his charm is inseparable from his habits of thought. However perverse or excessive his underlying ideas may be, they retain much of their impelling force. One cannot help being impressed by the stubborn way in which Mencken the self-made philosopher grapples, in his unpretentious, take-no-prisoners way, with the permanent things: the limits of art, the rule of law, the meaning of life. The simplicity, one comes to realize, is inseparable from the message. In Mencken, style and content are one, and the resulting alloy is more than merely individual: it is a matchlessly exact expression of the American temper.
That’s where the art comes in. If you can write like Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, and if you have a personality as interesting as theirs, you don’t have to be "right" in order to be taken seriously as a critic. You are, in fact, an artist—a personal essayist whose subject matter is art.
But what about the rest of us? I can turn a pretty phrase, but I’m not nearly as stylish a writer as Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, or as interesting a personality. Hence I’m obliged to attend more closely to the pedestrian virtues, the first of which is being right. Maybe that’s what Epstein meant. Anybody who thinks he’s as good as Mencken or Shaw or Thomson, after all, is probably delusional. Of course you might be that good—but you’d better not count on it. I sure don’t.
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TT: Unsullied
I doubt that many people under the age of forty remember Victor Borge, the comedian-pianist who died in 2000 at the miraculous age of ninety-one. He was a star for a very long time, first on radio, then TV, and Comedy in Music, his 1953 one-man show, ran for 849 consecutive performances on Broadway, a record which so far as I know remains unbroken. From there he went on the road and stayed there, giving sixty-odd concerts in the season before his death. Borge spent his old age basically doing Comedy in Music over and over again, which never seemed to bother anybody. I reviewed it twice for the Kansas City Star in the Seventies, and loved it both times. His Danish-accented delivery was so droll and his timing so devastatingly exact that even the most familiar of his charming classical-music spoofs somehow remained fresh, as you can see by watching any of the various videos of his act.
It’s hard to imagine that there was a time when so popular a comedian started out as a serious musician, much less one who became popular by making witty fun of the classics. Such a thing could only have happened in the days when America’s middlebrow culture was still intact and at the height of its influence. Back then the mass media, especially TV, went out of their way to introduce ordinary people to classical music and encouraged them to take it seriously—which didn’t mean they couldn’t laugh at it, too, as Borge proved whenever he sat down to play.
Borge’s act resembled a straight piano recital gone wrong. He’d start to play a familiar piece like Clair de lune or the "Moonlight" Sonata, then swerve off in some improbable-sounding direction, never getting around to finishing what he started. Yet he was clearly an accomplished pianist, though few of his latter-day fans had any idea how good he'd been (he studied with Egon Petri, Busoni’s greatest pupil). He usually made a point of playing a piece from start to finish toward the end of every concert, and I remember how delighted I was each time I heard him ripple through one of Ignaz Friedman’s bittersweet Viennese-waltz arrangements, which he played with a deceptively nonchalant old-world panache that never failed to leave me longing for an encore. Alas, he never obliged, and in later years I found myself wondering whether he’d really been quite so fine as my memory told me.
This story has a happy ending. I saw Borge on an old What’s My Line? episode the other day, which inspired me to look him up on the Web. Within a few clicks I’d made my way to a Danish Web site that contained a page of sound clips, the first being an unpublished live recording in which Borge can be heard playing (surprise) a Friedman waltz. Now I know a whole lot more about golden-age piano playing now than I did back in the Seventies. Among other things, I’ve gotten to know Friedman’s own recordings, including his marvelously mercurial performances of three of the same waltz arrangements that Borge liked to play. Could he possibly have been up to the standard set by Friedman? I clicked on the link with some trepidation, only to discover that my youthful ear hadn’t played me false: Borge, it turns out, could play with the utmost stylishness and sensitivity whenever it suited him to do so. You'll never hear a more elegant piece of piano playing—not even from Ignaz Friedman himself.
I can’t tell you how glad I am to know that. It would have been too sad to find out long after the fact that Victor Borge’s playing had been no better than adequate. Life is hard enough without having to suffer purely gratuitous disillusionments. What joy, then, to discover that some things in this world really are as good as they're cracked up to be.
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TT: Number, please
• Commissioning fee paid to Martha Graham by the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University in 1946 for choreographing Cave of the Heart: $500
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $5,134.32
(Source: Barbara B. Heyman, Samuel Barber)
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TT: Almanac
"The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic."
Oscar Wilde, letter to the editor of the Scots Observer (1890)
| Monday, November 28, 2005
TT: Elsewhere
As you may recall, I took the last few days off, during which I tinkered extensively with the right-hand column (result: four fresh Top Five picks and several new blogs in the "Sites to See" module) and rummaged through my overflowing basketful of accumulated links. Here's a snootful of what a bunch of other interesting people have been writing in recent weeks.
I really should do this more often….
• Ms. Critical Mass takes a cold-eyed look at the effects of the spread of adjunct teaching on academic freedom:
Almost half of all college teachers are entirely unprotected by the vaunted "academic freedom" that is so often touted as the philosophical mainstay of academic life. Add to the number of adjuncts the number of grad students and non-tenured assistant professors who are also teaching college courses in the absence of job security, and you get a picture of an academic world where very, very few people actually have the freedom to speak, write, research, and teach as they see fit (by "see fit" I don't mean to defend those teachers who abuse their positions to proselytize, or who are incompetent in some way; I mean to defend those who might have legitimate reasons for pursuing unorthodox pedagogical methods and scholarly topics, as well as those whose politics might endanger their professional positions, if known). The picture is one of an academic world in which "academic freedom" is the privilege of the tenured few; it is thus not a "freedom" at all, but the special privilege of an increasingly small group of academic elites….
Read and ponder.
• Says Eric Berlin:
I'm no music critic. So I can't write 500 words on why Fiona Apple's song Extraordinary Machine is so wonderful. All I know is, it's unlike anything else I've ever heard—certainly unlike any pop song—and you should go find a way to listen to it right now. That is all.
I could probably write those 500 words, but I won’t. I’ll just say that I must have listened to “Extraordinary Machine” (the song, not the album) at least a couple of dozen times since Ms. in the wings first drew it to my attention, bless her. It’s that different—and that cool.
• Mr. American Scene is in a true-confession mode when it comes to important books he’s never read. (Henry IV? Yikes!)
• Are drama critics getting dumber? Is that even possible? Michael Coveney thinks so:
Instead, too many theatre reviews do little more than describe something as "great" or "awful." Even when the writing is stylish, reviews will often lack the knowledge that was taken for granted a generation ago. And increasingly, editors are sending in the critical clowns in the true joke spirit of contemporary journalism….
• Mr. Modern Kicks disagrees with me about Jed Perl’s New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century. I loved it, he didn’t. While he failed to change my mind, he made me think—without raising his voice. Smart, civilized disagreement…what a concept.
• Anna L. Conti waxes amusing on art gallery postcards:
The image on the postcard always sells. In my experience, this is not an absolute law but it happens more often than not. In the past, I've sometimes poked fun at the people who come in, give the entire show a 30-second glance and then say, "Where's the one on the card?" And boy, are they upset if it's sold already. At some of my shows, I've had people call as soon as they receive the card (before they've seen anything in person) and want to put a hold on the painting they saw on the card. Once, at an opening, I saw two people get into a fight over who was going buy a particular painting (naturally, it was the one on the card.)…
Which reminds me of one of my own corollary propositions to Murphy’s Law: Don’t even bother looking for a postcard of your favorite painting in a museum.
• The Museum of Modern Art is deaccessioning (i.e., selling off) an important late oil painting by Milton Avery. In case you’ve been wondering what MoMA doesn’t think worth hanging onto, much less hanging, this is what it looks like.
• You like Top Ten lists, big boy? Mr. Modern Art Notes obliges with an annotated list of his ten favorite American cities in which to see art.
• Incidentally, did you know that the FBI’s Art Theft Program has a Web site...
• ...or that you can take an online test to see whether you know enough about the United States to become a naturalized U.S. citizen?
• And have you ever wondered why The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation’s Greatest Magazine is so damn cumbersome to use, lovely and amazing though it is to have all of The New Yorker on DVD? Go here for the answer.
• Speaking of lawyers (which we were), allow me to remind you yet again bloggers get sued, for all sorts of reasons. Mr. BuzzMachine has a hair-raising list of recent anti-blog litigation. Read it and take cover.
• Finally, here’s the scoop on that $100 student laptop you’ve been reading about. (No, you can’t buy one. Sorry.)
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TT: Entries from an unkept diary
• I just added a new piece to the Teachout Museum, an 1892 etching by Edgar Degas called “Dancer Putting on Her Shoe.” Degas is one of my favorite artists, and I’ve long wanted to own a work of art that had something to do with dancing. This particular work isn’t rare—the copy I bought is a posthumous impression from the cancelled plate—but the cancellation marks are unobtrusive and the image extraordinarily beautiful, as you can see by going here.
It’s also extraordinarily simple, especially by comparison with the increasingly complex pastels
of dancers that Degas was producing around the same time. That’s one of the things I love about etching as a medium: it encourages the artist to concentrate on essentials. Color is still what I love best about painting, but looking at etchings taught me to understand and appreciate the importance of pure line—and, eventually, to love it as well. Whenever I look at “Dancer Putting on Her Shoe,” or my copy of Milton Avery’s March at a Table, it makes me want to write more simply, to strip away everything superfluous and be content with what remains.
• In case you were wondering, I very much enjoyed my Thanksgiving dinner at Good Enough to Eat. I’d never eaten out by myself for Thanksgiving, and I feared the prospect of being part of a salon des refusés, but the atmosphere turned out to be cheery and companionable, and the food was delicious. It was fascinating to see who else showed up. I counted more or less the same number of all-male parties and extended families with children, which tells you something about my neighborhood. (I only spotted one other singleton at the two o’clock sitting, though, and I’m not sure what that says.)
Incidentally, the background music consisted of tangos by Astor Piazzolla, which went surprisingly well with cornbread stuffing and roasted Brussels sprouts.
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TT: Rerun
November 2003:
In a perfect world, everybody would experience art without first having it explained: no program notes, no wall labels, no interviews with the author, and—above all—no reviews. You’d go simply because you were interested, because you made a habit of going to see new things. Then, after the immediate experience, you’d seek out further information to help you put that experience in perspective (or, as my correspondent remarks, simply for fun). I think it’s hugely important to make a serious and sustained effort to come to new works of art this way. But in order to do so, especially when you’re talking about Broadway shows, you’ve got to have (A) a lot of spare time and (B) a lot of spare money. Otherwise, it’s essential to call your shots, if only to avoid bankruptcy, and good reviewers can help….
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Number, please
• Advance paid to Flannery O'Connor by Harcourt, Brace in 1955 for The Violent Bear It Away: $1,250
• The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $8,588.02
(Source: Library of America, Flannery O'Connor: Collected Works)
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TT: Almanac
"The Gods are dead, poetry alone is left to us, the last star in the night of chaos."
Edgar Degas (quoted in Jeanne Fevre, Mon oncle Degas)
| Friday, December 3, 2004
TT: Words to the wise
“Giorgio Morandi: Late Paintings 1950-1964” closes Saturday at Lucas Schoormans Gallery. It’s the first Morandi exhibition in New York since 1981. God only knows when there’ll be another one. Please don’t miss it.
(To read what I wrote about this remarkable show last month in the Washington Post, go here.)
The gallery, which is at 508 W. 26th St., has just published an exquisite little catalogue. To order a copy, e-mail info@lucasschoormans.com, or call 212-243-3159. I suspect that supplies are limited, so don’t dally.
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TT: The West did it (but Japan helped)
Friday again, and I’ve reviewed two shows in today’s Wall Street Journal, the Roundabout Theatre Company's Pacific Overtures and Playwrights Horizons' Rodney’s Wife.
Pacific Overtures is a triumph:
This is one of the most entrancingly beautiful shows ever to come to Broadway. Even if you don’t like it, you won’t be sorry to have seen it.
Originally produced in 1976, “Pacific Overtures” tells the once-familiar story of the naval expedition led by Commodore Perry that opened Japan to the West in 1853—but tells it from the Japanese point of view. The characters are played by Asian-Americans (Perry is a giant monster in a mask). John Weidman’s book makes use of narrative techniques derived from Noh theater, while Mr. Sondheim’s iridescent score melds the spare, percussive textures of Japanese music with his own Ravel-perfumed harmonies.
What makes this production still more individual is that it has been staged and choreographed by a Japanese director, Amon Miyamoto. When I first saw it a few years ago at the Lincoln Center Festival, it was even sung in Japanese (with English supertitles). That deliciously distancing touch is gone from this English-language version, but Mr. Miyamoto and his designers have otherwise been careful to present “Pacific Overtures” in an idiomatically Japanese style, with simple décor that implies as much as it states. The staging is a synthesis of dance and naturalistic movement so thoroughgoing as to recall the similar approach of Jerome Robbins in “West Side Story.” It is masterly in every way….
Mr. Miyamoto was wise not to italicize any of the parts of “Pacific Overtures” that can be read as anti-American, especially since I’m sure there wasn’t a soul in Studio 54 who didn’t get the point. (The capacity of New York playgoers for liberal guilt is infinite.) In any case, the show mostly steers clear of cheap ugly-Americanism. It is, rather, a subtle meditation on the myriad ways in which two cultures can misunderstand one another—the Japanese themselves are portrayed no less frankly than their “barbarian” visitors—and its true subject is the inescapable tragedy of the coming of modernity, which takes as much as it gives….
The second isn’t, but you should think about seeing it anyway:
I didn’t like all of Richard Nelson’s “Rodney’s Wife,” which opened Wednesday at Playwrights Horizons, but it didn’t bore me for a second, either, and the good parts, of which there are many, are most impressive.
It’s hard to write about “Rodney’s Wife” because the plot turns on a showstopping surprise that I mustn’t give away (though I figured it out at least a half-hour before Mr. Nelson officially tipped his hand). Suffice it to say that the play is about an over-the-hill movie star (David Strathairn), his bitchy second wife (Haviland Morris), his recently widowed sister (Maryann Plunkett), his visibly upset daughter (Jessica Chastain) and the daughter’s fiancé (Jesse Pennington), all of whom are thrown together in Rome circa 1962 for a dinner party that soon degenerates into a near-orgy of passive-aggressive sniping. Two of the characters, we learn, are keeping an explosive secret from the others, and all hell breaks loose when it finally comes out (get the hint?).
The bad parts include a gratuitous prologue and epilogue and a pat, unconvincing denouement. The good parts include lots of sharp-eared dialogue, directed with a sure hand by Mr. Nelson himself and performed by a cast that never lets you down….
No link. Get yourself a Journal, or go here and do it the easy way.
| Thursday, December 2, 2004
OGIC: Grazing
A sampling from the recent cultural menu chez OGIC:
LISTENING: Erin McKeown, Distillation. I went on and on recently about her more recent album, Grand, and stand by my enthused prattling then. Distillation took me longer to warm up to, but its hold may be the stronger for that. If Grand charms your socks off, this album haunts you barefoot.
NETFLICKING: Richard Loncraine's 1995 Richard III, starring Ian McKellen and Jim Broadbent and set lavishly in 1930s England. This was okay. McKellen is hammy, which seems to be by directorial design. (And by the way, check out Sir Ian's home page, which—disturbingly or touchingly, I can't decide—really looks homemade.) Broadbent makes a great, quietly calculating Buckingham, blending in with the background like a less loyal, more lizardy Tom Hagen. I also liked Annette Bening and Robert Downey, Jr., as Queen Elizabeth and her brother the earl of Rivers. They're both wonderfully game at playing merry, mutually infatuated callowness in the carefree scenes before Richard really gets down to work. But I never could make out what was gained by the historical displacement of the story, other than the opportunities for visual sumptuousness offered by thirties style. Moving the action forward several centuries, though, should also work to highlight what's universal in the play's substance, enlarging its scope. This film somehow manages to shrink a giant—even if it does look great doing it.
ALSO NETFLICKING: The Secret Lives of Dentists. Thumbs way up. Sort of an American Beauty with recognizable human beings.
To be continued...
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, December 2, 2004 | Permanent
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OGIC: Fortune cookie
"As a food and travel writer, what I do for a living may seem trivial, but whenever I think of it as ephemeral to the great issues of the day, I am reminded of a scene in the play 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' Isolated for months in an attic but still believing they will soon escape, the family fantasizes about the first thing each member will do when they return to the world outside. Anne says she yearns to go to a dance. The teenage boy wants to go to a movie, a western movie! And the adults all start remembering and dreaming of a wonderful pastry shop, a good stew, a romantic restaurant with thick linen and fine wines. None, not one, declares that the first thing he wants to do is to change the political structure of Europe."
John Mariani, "Gluttony, Reconsidered" (with thanks to Felix Salmon for the Topic Magazine link)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, December 2, 2 | | |
