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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, January 26, 2007
TT: The very best we have
Today’s Wall Street Journal drama column starts out with a big bang—a hats-off celebration of Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Brian Friel’s Translations—followed by a review of Signature Theatre’s Into the Woods, the first of three reports on my recent expedition to the theaters of Washington, D.C., and its environs:
The only time I don’t think Brian Friel is the best living playwright is immediately after I’ve seen a play by Tom Stoppard. That both men should be represented on Broadway this season is a boon, and though Mr. Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia” trilogy, being both new and spectacular, will likely get most of the ink, the Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of “Translations,” directed by Garry Hynes, deserves equal time. This production of Mr. Friel’s 1980 play, among the greatest written in the 20th century, is so comprehensively masterful that no critic, however enthusiastic, can do more than suggest its manifold virtues. Instead of reviewing it, I wish I could simply send you a ticket….
“Into the Woods,” in which Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and Jack (the one who chopped down the beanstalk) meet in a forest and get into big trouble together, is one of Stephen Sondheim’s most frequently performed musicals, not because it’s the best but because it’s the most audience-friendly, right down to the reasonably happy ending. Perhaps Signature Theatre, a regional company whose imaginative Sondheim stagings have given it a national reputation, had that in mind when it picked Mr. Sondheim’s fractured fairy tale to open its new two-theater complex, located in an upscale suburban shopping mall not far from downtown Washington. Whatever the reason, this new production is as engaging and smartly designed as the handsome building that houses it….
No link. Buy a Journal—it’s cheap, easy to find, and full of goodies—or, better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, a wise decision that will give you immediate access to my column and all the rest of the Journal’s Friday arts package. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
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TT: Almanac
"The images on the screen are patterns of light, not living actors. They are not affected by applause or hissing. They will be the same in a packed house or an empty one. And they will be the same every time the movie is shown. This affects the audience. Occasionally, movie audiences applaud or hiss or walk out, but for the most part they are passive. No social bond between the audience and the actors can exist."
O.B. Hardison, Entering the Maze: Identity and Change in Modern Culture
| Thursday, January 25, 2007
TT: Old home week
I just got back from the Mark Morris Dance Center in Brooklyn, where the Mark Morris Dance Group has been dancing a mixed bill in its own 140-seat performance space. To see a dance company in so small a venue is an amazingly intimate experience, one not so far removed from watching a working rehearsal. It happens that tonight’s program included Sang-Froid, a dance I was lucky enough to see Morris choreograph eight years ago. I wrote about it in a New York Times essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader:
Mark Morris is making a dance—loudly. Dance studios, with their hardwood floors and mirrored walls, are noisy places even at the calmest of times, and Mr. Morris, who is working on a suite of nine dances to the music of Frederic Chopin, can raise a ruckus sufficient to drown out a medium-size riot. All afternoon he has been shouting, whistling, singing and emitting a steady stream of unprintable class-clown wisecracks in his shrill foghorn voice. It's as if John Belushi had decided to take up modern dance, or maybe Ernie Kovacs.
Visitors are often startled by Mr. Morris's antics, but his dancers are used to them. “Mark was loud before he was famous,” says Tina Fehlandt, a charter member of the Mark Morris Dance Group, not unaffectionately. Meanwhile, Ethan Iverson, the company's music director, clatters away at a finger-twistingly difficult etude on an ill-tuned baby grand in the corner of the studio, while a recording of “The Nutcracker”' pas de deux plays irrelevantly somewhere down the hall….
The tumultuous music has inspired Mr. Morris to transform Julie Worden, a handsome young woman who looks like a brainy cheerleader, into a suicidal princess who inexplicably finds herself swept up in some sort of mad Gothic torture fantasy. “Stop!” he screams as Ms. Worden sails despondently through the air for the third time in a row. He strikes a great-man pose and yells at no one in particular, “Isn’t it fun to be the cho-re-o-gra-pheur?”
Not only did Morris make all four of the dances I saw tonight, but he also appeared in one of them. The second movement of Italian Concerto is a male solo set to one of Bach’s most passionate instrumental arias. Morris is fifty, stocky, and gray-haired, and he rarely appears on stage anymore save to take curtain calls, but to see him execute the grandly sweeping arm movements of Italian Concerto is to be reminded that great dancing is far more than a mere matter of agility. He still fills his space to overflowing, and no sooner does he stride out of the wings than your eye goes straight to him and stays there.
Watching Italian Concerto and Sang-Froid at the Morris Center took me back to the days when I was seeing two or three ballet and modern-dance performances a week. I came late to dance, and it had so overwhelming an effect on me that I threw myself into it head first, in time becoming a dance critic and, eventually, the author of a book about George Balanchine.
I still love dance, but in recent years I’ve been spending so much time covering Broadway and regional theater that I rarely get to see Morris or Paul Taylor or New York City Ballet. Maybe that’s why tonight’s performance hit me so hard, to the point that my eyes actually filled with tears at the close of Love Song Waltzes, a moment about which Joan Acocella wrote beautifully and evocatively in her 1993 biography of Morris:
At the end of Love Song Waltzes one man waltzes each of the other eleven dancers off the stage, one by one, until finally he is alone. He pauses, and then, as the lights go out, he walks offstage by himself. For a dance that has taken the group as its subject, this is a stark ending, an admission that, the group notwithstanding, we are also alone, and we die alone. (The ending looks like a death.) But this does not undo the meaning of what has come before. Insofar as we transcend aloneness, we do so in the group. And what the group does is dance. It is significant that when the man is left alone on the stage, he stops dancing. He doesn’t waltz out; he walks out. When the others are gone, the dance is over, literally and figuratively. Dance and the group are the image of life as against death.
Balanchine choreographed the same set of Brahms waltzes in a totally different but no less moving way in Liebeslieder Walzer, my favorite of all his ballets. I regret to say that I haven’t seen it for years, and it’s been at least two years—far too long—since I last saw New York City Ballet. Fortunately, a blogger friend is taking me to an NYCB performance of Liebeslieder next Thursday. I don't like to wish time away, but after seeing Love Song Waltzes, I can hardly wait.
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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)
• Shipwreck (The Coast of Utopia, part 2)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, too intellectually complex to be suitable for children of any age, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• 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 May 12)
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)
• Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, very family-friendly, reviewed here, closes Feb. 18)
• Room Service (comedy, G, reasonably family-friendly but a bit complicated for youngsters, reviewed here, extended through Mar. 25)
• The Voysey Inheritance (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• The Germans in Paris (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
• Two Trains Running (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)
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TT: Almanac
"A work-room should be like an old shoe; no matter how shabby, it’s better than a new one."
Willa Cather, The Professor's House
| Wednesday, January 24, 2007
OGIC: My town, more than just an ursine cult
This week, I live in a city consumed. Only a game, you say? Tell it to the scamps who pitched themselves into Lake Michigan after dark on a day when the temperature did not exceed the freezing point. Aw, such an endearing waste of emergency resources! Every city loves a champion, but certain places embrace certain championship runs with special fervor and purpose. In Chicago, a championship run mounted by a defensive-minded Bears team is probably as heaven-sent as it gets, giving the real-life superfans a chance to flaunt their imperviousness to the elements and reaffirm solemn allegiance to smashmouth football.
My point is this: it may seem from the outside—as it certainly does from the inside—that this is a town given over completely to ursine cultism and Superbowl anticipation. Through it all, however, cultural life in Chicago does go on. One case in point is the Art Institute, which will bravely kick off its free February on a Saturday when many Chicagoans will probably be busy buying the supermarkets out of Polishes, MGD, and blue and orange face paint. But wouldn't February 3rd be better spent at the AIC's debut of Q & Art? That day, more than 100 art experts will be posted throughout the galleries that day to field all questions, from the sublime to the ridiculous. I love the idea of this event, especially as a way to kick off a month of free access to one of the greatest museums in the world. From the museum’s press release:
On hand to answer questions and offer information will be the chief curators and department heads from American art; Medieval to Modern European Painting and Sculpture; African and Amerindian Art; the Ryerson and Burnham libraries; conservation; and Ancient art. Curatorial staff from all departments—Photography to Contemporary, Decorative Arts to Architecture and Design—will also be available throughout the museum. In the museum’s Fullerton Hall, historic and contemporary programs about the Art Institute…will run continuously from 2:00 to 4:30 p.m.
“Q&Art” is a major initiative by the Art Institute to make the museum as accessible as possible to all. The Art Institute hopes that Chicagoans will take advantage of its “open house” for the first three weeks of February and specifically on Saturday, February 3.
Offering access plus accessibility through personal contact, the Art Institute appears to be looking for a way to reach out to new audiences that's an alternative to the heavily hyped blockbuster show. Here's hoping they find some success drawing in new museumgoers and that other museums take notice—even if the act of God involving the local gridiron team deflates attendance, which, unfortunately, it well may.
Also in the home of the bean, the bona fide Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley's Doubt, hailed by Terry here, has five days and six performances left in its Chicago run. I’ll be there Saturday night.
Finally, inspired by Terry’s euphoric report from the Erin McKeown show last night, I checked her tour schedule. The diva dynamo lands at Schuba’s on Southport, her traditional and ideal Chicago venue, on March 1. I will so be there, with so many bells on, they'll hear me coming a block away.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, January 24, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: New kid on the block
Commentary, for which I write a monthly art-related essay, has gotten into the blogging business with a bang, launching a group blog called Contentions. It’s mostly about politics, but I’m contributing a weekly feature called “Bookshelf” in which I comment on new, newish, and (occasionally) not-so-new books about the arts. My first posting was on Howard Pollack’s George Gershwin: His Life and Work and Amanda Vaill’s Somewhere: The Life of Jerome Robbins. This week I wrote about Lee Tanner’s The Jazz Image: Masters of Jazz Photography
and Michael Ainger’s Gilbert and Sullivan: A Dual Biography.
Contentions' contributors all have their own archive pages. To read my postings, past, present, and future, go here.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 24, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: Small package
I just got back from Joe’s Pub, where I saw the front end of a two-nighter by Erin McKeown. She’s touring in support of her new CD, Sing You Sinners, about which I recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal:
Ms. McKeown, one of the freshest singer-songwriters of her generation, has chosen this time around to cut an album of standards. What sets it apart from the superficially similar efforts of such aging rock stars as Linda Ronstadt and Rod Stewart is that Ms. McKeown isn’t recycling the smooth sounds of yesteryear. Instead, she sings “Something’s Gotta Give” and “Just One of Those Things” as if she’d written them herself, performing them in the casual, slightly rough-hewn style of her previous albums, We Will Become Like Birds and Grand. The effect is both arrestingly personal and utterly contemporary…
All true, and I can’t recommend Sing You Sinners strongly enough—yet now that I’ve seen McKeown perform, I understand why Our Girl swears that you haven’t really heard her until you hear her in person. She’s amazing on stage, focused and charismatic, and her backup musicians, who suggest by turns a rockabilly combo, a jump band, and a power trio, are no less impressive. She’s also a charmer, a five-foot-nothing cutie with a sunshiny smile who obviously loves nothing better than singing in front of a crowd. (It tickled me that she was wearing a pinstriped suit, which made her look like she was auditioning to play the Master of Ceremonies in a big-budget high-school production of Cabaret.)
One of the many things that impressed me about tonight’s gig was the unforced ease with which McKeown moved from familiar standards like “Get Happy” and “Rhode Island Is Famous for You” to her own songs, making everything she sang seem all of a piece. I brought one of my twentysomething friends along, and she was knocked out by McKeown’s originals. “She’s so literate,” my friend said, and I agreed wholeheartedly. I rank her right up there with Jonatha Brooke, than which there is no higher praise.
From New York McKeown and her band head down to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. (where she’ll be taping an All Things Considered segment). You’ll find the rest of their itinerary here. Go, and tell her OGIC and I sent you.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 24, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"Love and work are viewed and experienced as totally separate activities motivated by separate needs. Yet, when we think about it, our common sense tells us that our most inspired, creative acts are deeply tied to our need to love and that, when we lack love, we find it difficult to work creatively; that work without love is dead, mechanical, sheer competence without vitality, that love without work grows boring, monotonous, lacks depth and passion."
Marta Zahaykevich, “Critical Perspectives on Adult Women’s Development”
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 24, 2007 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 23, 2007
TT: Man's man
“God, I love this guy,” said the young man at the Barnes & Noble cash register from whom I purchased a couple of Elmore Leonard
paperbacks the other day. “There’s nothing better to read on a plane.” Three days earlier I’d been sitting in the restaurant of a hotel in Washington, D.C., reading Unknown Man #89 as I ate my breakfast, when a balding, middle-aged businessman stopped at my table and said, “You’re going to love that one.”
I mention these two encounters because they’re the only times in recent memory that a stranger has spoken to me about a book I was reading—and both of the strangers in question happened to be men.
I wrote an essay about Mickey Spillane a few years ago that contained the following observation:
Spillane was writing for a generation of fellow veterans who spent their off-duty hours thumbing through paperbacks—thrillers, westerns, even the odd classic. They were accustomed to taking pleasure in the printed word. Now their grandsons go to the movies, or watch TV. Novels, even mysteries, are overwhelmingly read by and written for women. This is not to say that nobody’s writing regular-guy books anymore: they’re just not being read by regular guys. A no-nonsense crime novelist like Elmore Leonard is far more likely to appeal to eggheads like me than the working stiffs about whom he writes—I’ve never seen anybody reading a Leonard novel on the subway—whereas Spillane’s books were actually read and enjoyed by men who weren’t all that different from Mike Hammer. He may well have been the last novelist of whom such a thing could be said.
Might I have spoken too soon? Probably not. Still, I have a feeling that if regular guys are reading any new novels at all, it’s Elmore Leonard’s novels that they’re reading, and that’s all right by me. To be sure, Leonard isn’t as good as his critical advocates like to claim—among other things, he’s more than a little bit repetitious—but his best books are wonderfully entertaining, and on those not-infrequent occasions when I find myself stuck in a hotel room and disinclined to grapple with literature, I’m always happy to find one on my nightstand.
Crime is Leonard's nominal subject matter, but it isn’t his main interest. I can’t think of a Leonard novel that doesn’t contain a prominent romantic subplot, usually involving an encounter between two divorced or separated people in their thirties or forties who got married too soon. These encounters are invariably portrayed in the wisecracking manner of Howard Hawks, but the relationships that arise from them are perfectly serious. Time and again Leonard’s characters admit to having foolishly fallen for partners who turned out to be boring, self-involved jerks, and time and again we see them meeting nicer partners who inspire them to take a second chance on love.
Could this be the reason why Leonard is so popular among male readers? I wonder. Men, after all, are often a good deal more idealistic than they care to admit, and Leonard gives them good old-fashioned romance hidden in a plain brown wrapper of violence. What’s not to like?
Needless to say, this is what sets Leonard apart from the first-generation noir stylists. They were romantics, too, but of a very different sort, disillusioned and cynical, and in their books the good guy never, ever got the nice girl. I readily admit to finding that kind of cynicism appealing, but there’s another part of me that warms to Leonard’s romantic optimism, even though I’m well aware that it’s as much of a pose as Philip Marlowe’s curdled nobility.
Here’s something I wrote a few years ago:
Most commercial films 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.
I like happy endings, too, but I don't always want them to be so easy as that, and given the inescapable fact that we all live under the twin aspects of modernity and eternity, I have a special liking for films that convey something of the complexity of modern life without losing sight of the pole star of truth. In particular, I like films about gravely flawed human beings who, faced with a set of similarly imperfect alternatives, suddenly find their moral imaginations regenerated by grace, make the best possible choice available to them and accept the consequences, good or bad.
All of which is well and good, but doesn’t necessarily serve the purpose of amusing tired, fussy aesthetes who feel the need to spin their mental wheels for an hour or two before drifting off to sleep. Great art, after all, portrays a world in which nobody meets cute, everybody ends up dead, and most people get a lot less out of life than they want—none of which is especially restful to contemplate at the end of a long day.
That’s why I watch old Hollywood movies on TV after hours, and why I read Elmore Leonard, a solid craftsman who tickles my fancies without insulting my intelligence. I can think of far less honorable ways to pass an evening.
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If you’ve never read any of Elmore Leonard’s books, I suggest starting with Maximum Bob or LaBrava.
You might also consider watching Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 film of Out of Sight, which is faithful to both the plot and the spirit of the novel on which it is based.
UPDATE: A friend wrote:
Great art also portrays beauty, laughter, and joy.
To which I replied:
Yes, but honestly. It doesn't pretend that the other things don't exist (though it doesn't necessarily emphasize them, either). That's why Schubert can make you so happy—because his happiness is set in front of a backdrop of reality.
To which he replied:
But you wrote the definition, and you wrote it entirely grim.
To which I replied:
Yeah, yeah, O.K., I give up! I was feeling grim.
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TT: Almanac
"But remember that words are signals, counters. They are not immortal. And it can happen—to use an image you'll understand—it can happen that a civilization can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of...fact."
Brian Friel, Translations
| Monday, January 22, 2007
TT: Words to the wise
I planned to post something long and thoughtful today, but it turns out that I’m severely overpressed with multiple deadlines, so instead I’ll stall for time by pointing you in the direction of a few things worth seeing and/or hearing:
• Turner Classic Movies is showing two rarely seen Fifties films that I strongly commend to your attention. Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, will air on Monday at four p.m. EST. Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (also known as The Big Carnival), starring Kirk Douglas, will air on Thursday at 2:30 a.m. EST. Both films take an extremely dark view of human nature, so brace yourself before tuning in.
• Erin McKeown, the singer-songwriter whom Our Girl and I praise as often as we think we can get away with it, is playing a two-nighter this Tuesday (at 7) and Wednesday (at 9:30) at Joe’s Pub. She’s touring in support of Sing You Sinners, her new album of pre-rock standards, though she’ll also be singing some of her own songs. For more information, go here.
• Amy Burton, one of my very favorite classical singers, is performing the voice-and-piano version of John Corigliano’s Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan this Thursday at 7:30 at Symphony Space. Here’s what Corigliano wrote about the song cycle when it was premiered in 2000:
I had always heard, by reputation, of the high regard accorded the folk-ballad singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. But I was so engaged in developing my orchestral technique during the years when Dylan was heard by the rest of the world that I had never heard his songs. So I bought a collection of his texts, and found many of them to be every bit as beautiful and as immediate as I had heard—and surprisingly well-suited to my own musical language. I then contacted Jeff Rosen, his manager, who approached Bob Dylan with the idea of re-setting his poetry to my music.
I do not know of an instance in which this has been done before (which was part of what appealed to me), so I needed to explain that these would be in no way arrangements, or variations, or in any way derivations of the music of the original songs, which I decided to not hear before the cycle was complete. Just as Schumann or Brahms or Wolf had re-interpreted in their own musical styles the same Goethe text, I intended to treat the Dylan lyrics as the poems I found them to be. Nor would their settings make any attempt at pop or rock writing. I wanted to take poetry I knew to be strongly associated with popular art and readdress it in terms of concert art—crossover in the opposite direction, one might say….
For more details about the performance, go here.
• The off-Broadway revival of Room Service that I praised lavishly in The Wall Street Journal three weeks ago has been extended through March 25. For more information, look immediately to your right at the first item in the Top Five module.
• Music & Arts has just released Artur Schnabel Plays Mozart, a budget-priced five-CD box set that contains all of Schnabel’s commercial Mozart recordings, made between 1934 and 1948, plus live performances of two additional concertos (K. 482 and 488) and sonatas (K. 333 and 533/494). To order, go here.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get back to work! See you tomorrow, maybe....
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TT: Almanac
"To remember everything is a form of madness."
Brian Friel, Translations
| Friday, January 27, 2006
TT: Rolling over
I just spent a pleasant hour doing some long-overdue maintenance on "Sites to See," our blogroll. Here's what I did:
• I added a number of interesting-looking new blogs and sites (new to us, anyway) on various subjects, all of which are marked with asterisks. We'll leave them on the roll for a month or so to see whether they're full-fledged keepers or mere flashes in the pan.
• I revisited and reconsidered the last batch of starred blogs and sites. Some made the cut, and are no longer starred. Some didn't, and are no longer there.
• I knocked off a half-dozen other blogs that had become inactive, insufficiently active, or irrelevant to the interests of our regular readers.
• I moved a couple of blogs to more suitable categories.
Take a look at the new starred blogs in the right-hand column and see what you think. As always, please let us know about any other high-quality art-related blogs that you'd like us to add to "Sites to See."
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TT: Two women on Mozart...
“We all drew on the comfort which is given out by the major works of Mozart, which is as real and material as the warmth given up by a glass of brandy."
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
“The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, and Balanchine ballets don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.”
Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will
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TT: ...and one more for good measure
"There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper."
Camille Paglia, interview, International Herald Tribune (April 26, 1991)
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TT: Birthday boy
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born 250 years ago today, and everybody’s writing about him. Arts & Letters Daily has a roundup of links at the top of today’s page (including a link to my own essay in last month’s issue of Commentary, which will be available for free on line through the end of January). I especially like Tim Page, who quotes the ever-quotable Ferruccio Busoni:
He disposes of light and shadow, but his light does not pain and his darkness still shows clear outlines. Even in the most tragic situations he still has a witticism ready; in the most cheerful, he is able to draw a thoughtful furrow in his brow. He is young as a boy and wise as an old man—never old-fashioned and never modern, carried to the grave and always alive.
If you’re in the mood to listen to something beautiful, my Commentary essay ends with a list of ten of my favorite recordings of works by Mozart in minor keys. This is the one to buy if you’re only buying one.
UPDATE: Thanks to Modern Kicks, I found this link to a wonderful W.H. Auden poem about The Magic Flute that (horrors!) I didn’t know. It’s on PostClassic, Kyle Gann’s artsjournal.com music blog. (In addition to the complete text, Gann's posting also contains a link to an audio file of Auden reading the poem.)
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TT: Minority report
Just to keep you on your toes amid all the Mozart-related hoopla, here's the first paragraph of an essay on Haydn I wrote for Commentary:
In 1945, Arturo Toscanini told the music critic B.H. Haggin that he preferred Haydn to Mozart. “I will tell you frankly: sometimes I find Mozart boring,” he said to his astonished interviewer. “Not G-minor [the G Minor Symphony, K. 550]: that is great tragedy; and not concerti; but other music. Is always beautiful—but is always the same.”
I don't agree, but I do know what he meant.
(If you’re curious, this CD contains Toscanini’s recordings of the Mozart G Minor and Haydn “Surprise” symphonies.)
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TT: Mixed doubles
In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent playgoing in New Haven, Connecticut, where I saw the Long Wharf Theatre’s production of Private Lives and the Yale Repertory Theatre’s production of The People Next Door:
Is there a more perfect comedy than “Private Lives”? It’s not my favorite Noël Coward play (I prefer “Present Laughter”), but for sheer elegance of craft it can’t be beat, and it’s madly funny to boot. Written in a mere four days, it contains more of Coward’s best-known lines than any other play, from “Very flat, Norfolk” to “Certain women should be struck regularly, like gongs,” and it never fails to make its effect, even when performed by amateurs. I have yet to see a hopelessly bad “Private Lives,” and Long Wharf Theatre’s new production is splendid….
Of the making of tendentious plays about 9/11 and its aftermath there is, apparently, no end. I have yet to see a watchable one, and Henry Adam’s “The People Next Door,” now playing at the Yale Repertory Theatre, is no exception. Mr. Adam is a Brit, and like virtually all British playwrights a Man of the Left, which tells you most of what you need to know about this ostensibly black comedy about Nigel (Manu Narayan, lately of “Bombay Dreams”), a wimpy, heroin-sniffing slacker of “mixed, indeterminate race” (so says the script) who falls afoul of Phil (Christopher Innvar), a fascist-type Scotland Yard detective in search of a likely-looking pigeon to spy on the neighborhood mosque. What ensues is utterly, agonizingly predictable…
No link, and that’s only a sample of this morning’s column. To read the rest, go to the nearest newsstand and plunk down a dollar for a copy of the Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the full text of my review, together with many other worthy art-related stories.
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TT: Words to the wise
This just in from the Duplex Cabaret Theatre:
We're continuing our CINEMA DUPLEX series this Monday, January 30th at 8 p.m. with a free screening of Broadway: The Golden Age. I'm thrilled to say that the film's director, Rick McKay, will drop by before we see the film to chat and answer questions.
If you haven't seen this acclaimed and enormously important documentary, or even if you have, I urge you to come. It's an essential recollection of the history of the Great White Way, told by the people who were there. There are dozens of interviews from the likes of Stephen Sondheim, Barbara Cook, Bea Arthur, Elaine Stritch, Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury and the list goes on and on...
So come—Monday, the 30th, 8 p.m. Free with a two-drink minimum. These intimate screenings in our 70-seat theatre have been such fun, and the 30th will be no exception, seeing this film with a room full of theatre fans. I can't wait to chat with Mr. McKay about putting this enormous undertaking together.
I couldn’t agree more. Not only have I raved
about the film, both here and in The Wall Street Journal, but I met Rick McKay
for the first time in December and can personally vouch for his capacities as a raconteur.
To make reservations, call 212-255-5438.
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TT: Almanac
“Contentment is the drug of fools. I prefer truth. And the truth is that we are animals scratching and rutting under an empty sky. Here in this theatre we can pretend that our lives have meaning. But the pretence only holds if we are given the truth. That is why I wish to see you shine on this stage, that is why, selfishly, I wish to train you. The theatre is my soothing drug, and my cynic's illness is so far advanced that my physic must be of the highest quality.”
Stephen Jeffreys, The Libertine (courtesy of twang twang twang)
| Thursday, January 26, 2006
TT: Call me Bartleby
Three weeks ago I resumed a more temperate version of my regular schedule. Since then I’ve seen plays in Washington, D.C., New Haven, and Chicago, from the last of which I returned two days ago. My trusty old iBook blew up and I bought a replacement. It wasn’t ready for me until yesterday afternoon, so I went downtown yesterday morning to write my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal on an unoccupied terminal, then picked up my new computer on the way back home and spent the afternoon breaking it in. Last night I went to a Broadway show, my first since the night before I went into the hospital. I had dinner with a friend after the show, then came home, answered my e-mail, and read a few pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop before falling asleep.
I woke up this morning at nine-thirty, an hour later than my normal get-up-and-go time. As I descended from the loft in which I spend my nights, it struck me that I had nothing whatsoever to do today: no deadlines, no shows to see, no meals with friends, no plans of any kind. For a moment I felt myself revving up, trying to think of culture-related activities with which to fill all those empty hours. Then a new, unfamiliar reflex kicked in. Why not do nothing? I asked myself, and a smile flickered across my face.
The New Me has one important thing in common with the Old Me, which is that we’re both having trouble getting used to the Concept of the Weekend. The problem is that while most people take Saturday and Sunday off, I don’t: I usually go to the theater, and for me that’s work, not pleasure (not necessarily pleasure, to be exact). I write my Journal columns every Tuesday and every other Wednesday, which means that my “weekends” fall some time between Tuesday afternoon and Friday evening. The habits of a lifetime tell me I ought to be working during that time, but the realities of my new life as a middle-aged drama critic with acute workaholic tendencies and a recent history of congestive heart failure demand a change of schedule. This morning—for the first time—I got the message, loud and clear.
So what am I going to do with myself today? Well, I think I’ll start by popping a Bocaburger
in the microwave and a whole-grain English muffin in the toaster and taking a Fuji apple out of the crisper. After lunch I’ll put my clothes on (yes, I'm writing these words in the unclothed state) and stroll over to the Central Park reservoir for a nice long walk. When I’m done with that, I might go to the Metropolitan Museum, which I haven’t visited since well before my illness. Or not: I might come straight home. Either way I’ll pick up my laundry on the way back to the apartment, then take a nap, followed by an early, solitary dinner at Good Enough to Eat. I might spend part of the evening pruning my CD collection or cleaning out the living-room closet. Or not: I might watch a movie on TV instead. Whatever I end up doing, though, I’ll definitely round out the evening by calling up my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., and finding out what she did all day. Then I’ll put on the new Chris Thile-Mike Marshall album,
post Friday’s blog entries, check my e-mail, spend a few minutes gazing happily at the Teachout Museum, and climb back into the loft to read a bit more of Scoop before falling asleep.
Not very exciting, is it? I mean, here I am, a compulsive aesthete in Manhattan, swimming in a sea of cultural possibilities. How dare I fritter away a whole day and night when I could be hitting the boulevards in search of illumination? But I prefer not to. Instead, I'm going to spend Thursday doing what I want to do when I want to do it, not including anything remotely resembling work. What’s more, I expect to have a perfectly lovely time. How about that?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for lunch. See you tomorrow.
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TT: So you want to see a show?
Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.
Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.
BROADWAY:
• Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)
• Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
• 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 July 2, 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:
• Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
• Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, extended through Mar. 11)
CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:
• In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Saturday)
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TT: Almanac
"The truth is that we mediocre men cannot even imagine what it is to be a great man like Mozart and Shakespeare and thus to be free from the domination of the contemporary prejudices, beliefs, morals, artistic rules, scruples (call them what you will) with which even the most enlightened of us are—often unconsciously—obsessed."
W.J. Turner, Mozart: The Man and His Works (courtesy of Bill Kristol)
| Wednesday, January 25, 2006
OGIC: Fortune cookie
"Ask him to make a film about happiness and he'd have gone fishing, or got drunk. But give him a story about more murders than anyone can keep up with, or explain, and somehow he made a paradise. Maybe he needed a cover, some way of seeming tough, cool and superior, if he was ever going to do happiness."
David Thomson on Howard Hawks, The Big Sleep
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, January 25, 2006 | Permanent
link |
TT: Almanac
"I am constitutionally a martyr to boredom, but never in Europe have I been so desperately and degradingly bored as I was during the next four days; they were as black and timeless as Damnation; a handful of fine ashes thrown into the eyes, a blanket over the face, a mass of soft clay knee deep. My diary reminds me of my suffering in those very words, but the emotion which prompted them seems remote. I know a woman who is always having babies; every time she resolves that that one shall be the last. But, every time, she forgets her resolution, and it is only when her labour begins that she cries to midwife and husband, 'Stop, stop; I've just remembered what it is like. I refuse to have another.' But it is then too late. So the human race goes on. Just in this way, it seems to me, the activity of our ant-hill is preserved by a merciful process of oblivion. 'Never again,' I say on the steps of the house, 'never again will I lunch with that woman.' 'Never again,' I say in the railway carriage, 'will I go and stay with those people.' And yet a week or two later the next invitation finds me eagerly accepting. 'Stop,' I cry inwardly, as I take my hostess's claw-like hand. 'Stop, stop,' I cry in my tepid bath; 'I have just remembered what it is like. I refuse to have another.' But it is too late."
Evelyn Waugh, Remote People
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, January 25, 2006 | Permanent
link |
OGIC: Man minus machine
Cheerio, cheerios! (This is a pretty considerable term of endearment in my book, but you'll know you're really in good when I call you my little rice chex.) Terry wanted me to tell you he's back in New York but without benefit of a working computer, which, logistically speaking, is making meeting his deadlines highly challenging and blogging highly improbable. He hopes to be back later this week, the less late the better.
A wonderful time was had by all during Terry's visit to Chicago. We spent Saturday and Sunday running around and taking things in before kicking back Monday and doing whatever we felt like. This amounted to very little. We ran some of my errands, watched a video, planted ourselves in the living room to read our books, went out to dinner, and read some more. This to me is the lap of luxury: sitting around with a friend reading books, making as much or as little conversation as you like because you've been friends long enough and well enough to enjoy shared silence as much as chatter. I once planned an entire vacation in Maine around this very activity, with another friend, and ended up discovering the glorious Dalziel and Pascoe in the process. This weekend was, of course, the first time I'd seen Terry since before he was sick, and it seemed especially right to spend some time simply sitting in a room together, laughing at the cat's delicate snoring and reading each other the occasional highlight from our books. Normally during these trips, we barely pause to tie our shoes.
But the high-gear part of the weekend was excellent too. It began with a blistering, Bach-graced double-mandolin concert at Chicago's comfy, intimate Old Town School of Folk Music—where I'd see damn near anything—and included as well two utterly absorbing plays at two favorite Chicago theaters. First it was Much Ado About Nothing at Chicago Shakespeare, airy and wry with an endearingly clownish Benedick and an imperturbable Beatrice. We then traveled south to the Court Theatre, in my own backyard, for a production of August Wilson's "Fences" that served as my introduction to the play. And an auspicious meeting it was—a meticulously crafted yet rawly powerful production that's especially distinguished by electrifying performances from each and every cast member. I can't speak for Terry (he'll say his piece on both plays in an upcoming WSJ column), but here's a great American play I took my sweet time getting around to seeing, and this was a production to make me glad I waited.
Thanks for being patient with us earlier this week. One or both of us will be back soon with more blogging. And I still owe a bunch of you email, which I promise soon.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, January 25, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 24, 2006
TT: Almanac
"I don't really like Shakespeare on the screen at all—the shot is too big for the cannon. The later plays, like Lear, are too big even for the theatre."
Laurence Olivier, interview, London Observer (1937)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, January 24, 2006 | Permanent
link | Monday, January 23, 2006
TT: Almanac
"'I know most men go in for love affairs,' he said. 'Some of them can't help it. They can't get on at all without women, but there are plenty of others—I daresay you haven't come across them much—who don't really care about that sort of thing, but they don't know any reason why they shouldn't, so they spend half their lives going after women they don't really want. I can tell you something you probably don't know. There are men who have been great womanizers in their time and when they get to my age and don't want it any more and in fact can't do it, instead of being glad of a rest, what do they do but take all kinds of medicines to make them want to go on? I've heard fellows in my club talking about it.'"
Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Monday, January 23, 2006 | Permanent
link | Friday, January 21, 2005
TT: Youth will be (dis)served
It’s Friday, and I’m in The Wall Street Journal with a review of Harold and Maude: The Musical, plus a report on Harvey Fierstein’s debut as Tevye in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof.
The former was, eh, not so hot:
For years now, Tom Jones, whose list of credits includes the book and lyrics for “The Fantasticks,” has had his eye on “Harold and Maude,” the 1971 cult movie about a 20-year-old suicidal misfit who falls hard for a fey 80-year-old widow. When Harvey Schmidt, his longtime collaborator, declined the challenge of writing music for so quirky a project, the undaunted Mr. Jones teamed up with a younger composer, Joseph Thalken. They brought the finished product to New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse, where “Harold and Maude: The Musical” is running through Feb. 6, with Estelle Parsons playing the part created in the film by Ruth Gordon.
Would that the fruits of Mr. Jones’ protracted labors were more satisfying. Alas, “Harold and Maude” doesn’t fly, in part because the redeeming peculiarities of the film, an all-you-need-is-love-love-love period piece, have been carefully watered down by Mr. Jones to accommodate easily ruffled suburban sensibilities. What’s left is a decorously brief fling between Harold and Maude that still fails to pass the eeuuww test, portrayed with a starry-eyed tweeness that made my teeth itch….
The latter was, somewhat to my surprise, really fine, if a bit odd in spots:
Mr. Fierstein, last seen on Broadway in “Hairspray,” isn’t an obvious candidate for the part of Tevye. Aside from not getting to wear a dress, he has to sing several demanding songs, and his voice, which sounds like a bullfrog stuck in a double bass, makes a decidedly odd impression in “Sunrise, Sunset” and “Sabbath Prayer.” (Believe it or not, he croaks some of his numbers in keys so low that the orchestra has to transpose them up to meet him in the middle.) Still, he more than makes up in comic prowess for what he lacks in vocal luster, and though he hasn’t combed all the “Hairspray” out of his intermittently flouncy mugging, Mr. Fierstein rises effortlessly—as well as believably—to “Fiddler”’s not-infrequent moments of high drama….
No link, and there’s much, much more, including a review of a third show, Washington’s Arena Stage revival of Hallelujah, Baby! To see what you’re missing, buy a copy of today’s Journal (duh), or click here and get with the program.
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TT: Almanac
"Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian's life can be that moment when he manages to sin like a proper human (Look at us, Binx—my vagabond friends as good as cried out to me—we're sinning! We're succeeding! We're human after all!)."
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
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TT: AWOL
Pardon me for not having done the usual this morning. I was prepping last night in order to conduct the very first interview for my Louis Armstrong biography, and today I spent six amazingly absorbing hours talking to George Avakian, who knew Armstrong from 1940 on and was his record producer in the mid-Fifties. Avakian, who was born in 1919, appears to remember everything that ever happened to him, and revels in sharing his memories with serious-minded interviewers who've done their homework. I had, and I filled up four cassettes with his detailed recollections of Armstrong, on and off the job. We're not quite done yet, but I covered a lot of ground, and I expect to start writing the first draft of the prologue some time next week.
It isn't easy to write a biography of a man you never met, even someone like Armstrong who left behind a substantial body of correspondence and reminiscence. By the time I started writing about H.L. Mencken, who died in 1956, everyone who had known him at all well was long gone, and I had to work from written source material alone. Though Armstrong died in 1971, there aren't many people left who knew him well enough to speak with confidence about his character and personality, much less who collaborated with him closely enough to describe his working methods. Oral-history transcripts are precious, sometimes priceless, but the one thing you can't do with them is ask the interviewees your own questions. When I turned on my tape recorder this morning, I felt as if magic casements were about to open, and when I turned it off late in the afternoon, I knew they had.
Anyway, my apologies for not posting my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, which will go up shortly, along with today's almanac entry. Now you know why, and I bet you don't blame me one bit....
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OGIC: Thingamajigs we love
Last night the ipod played Lucinda Williams's "Jackson" and the Breeders' "Drivin' on 9" practically back-to-back, which I thought was awfully clever of it. These are my two favorite songs about driving—songs while driving, really—dating back to well before I was a driver myself. Driving can be an opiate, and the narrators of both songs seem under its influence. They treat the names of their destinations like talismans, hopefully investing them with emotional significance the places haven't actually yet taken on. Musically, both songs have simple, even naïve structures, though I hasten to add that I don't really know what I'm talking about.
But speaking of ipods, mine slips smoothly into the dock of this sleek little donut, otherwise known as the Harman JBL On Stage speaker system. It's fabulous. I found mine under a tree but you can locate one at Amazon or here, where I imagine they will let you listen to or fondle it before you plunk down your hard-earned cash. The speaker is highly portable, holds its own against the pod in terms of style, and sounds great, both to mine and more exacting ears. Doing dishes? Newly tolerable this year.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, January 21, 2005 | Permanent
link | Thursday, January 20, 2005
OGIC: In which WebCrimson defeats me
I accidentally (or, more accurately, in wretched impatience) posted my last item twice. As soon as I saw that this had happened, our blog service provider slowed down to more or less a full stop (please note that I am the last known blogger still using a dial-up connection, although these medieval days are numbered).
Fifteen minutes of tearing my hair out ensued, but I was at last able to delete one of the doubles. An hour later, they were both still appearing here. Now I've gone in and deleted the second copy, with no apparent effect on the appearance of this page. Presumably at some point they will both vanish; as soon as possible after that, I'll marshal as much forbearance as I can and post the errant post—precisely once.
Long story short: I do know I appear to be repeating myself, thanks. Thanks.
UPDATE: All fixed!
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, January 20, 2005 | Permanent
link |
OGIC: In which WebCrimson defeats me
I accidentally (or, more accurately, in wretched impatience) posted my last item twice. As soon as I saw that this had happened, our blog service provider slowed down to more or less a full stop (please note that I am the last known blogger still using a dial-up connection, although these medieval days are numbered).
Fifteen minutes of tearing my hair out ensued, but I was at last able to delete one of the doubles. An hour later, they were both still appearing here. Now I've gone in and deleted the second copy, with no apparent effect on the appearance of this page. Presumably at some point they will both vanish; as soon as possible after that, I'll marshal as much forbearance as I can and post the errant post—precisely once.
Long story short: I do know I appear to be repeating myself, thanks. Thanks.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, January 20, 2005 | Permanent
link |
OGIC: Fortune cookie
"One needs only to be old enough in order to be as young as one will."
Henry Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, January 20, 2005 | Permanent
link |
OGIC: Reading around
• Erin O'Connor has discovered the wonder that is Shirley Hazzard's Transit of Venus. She gets further than I ever did in explaining what makes the novel so palpably different from other books one reads, what gives it its unmistakable aura:
The novel cannot be read quickly and still be read well. Its nuance demands a dipping method of reading, in which the reader stops reading frequently to consider what she has just read, and in which the reader routinely disrupts her forward progress to reread a passage whose precision cannot fully be grasped at once. It's a rare and exquisite pleasure to read this way and to be rewarded for it, a reminder that nothing is ever bland, and that the closer one attends to the details of life, the more there is to see, to know, and to feel.
I received for Christmas the Hazzard novel you never hear about, The Bay of Noon. I've read just a few pages and won't be able to return to it anytime very soon. My brief initial foray revealed the fine writing and keen eye I would have expected—but not that, you know, that thing (snaps fingers). That thing is a rare thing. Truth be told, it would be a little disappointing to find out it's replicable.
• Mr. Elegant Variation is multi-talented. I very much enjoyed his super-short story at Pindeldyboz. "The Everhappy Eterna Comfort Band™" may be a diminutive thing, but it has some teeth on it.
• Finally, Colby Cosh writes fascinatingly here on the relative homogeneity of journalists' class backgrounds and the difference of his own from the norm. Here's a swatch:
If you compared the average working physicist to the average working journalist, I believe you'd find that the latter had parents whose income was much higher. And I believe this is so even though it's the physicist who is ostensibly in greater need of early-life educational advantages, an encouraging household milieu, and (to stick one toe into Larry Summers territory) inheritable cognitive endowments. This happens not because journalism is a cliquish, incestuous business, or just because it is; it's also because a child of intellectuals or businessmen just has a much easier time imagining getting paid for doing mental work and nothing else.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, January 20, 2005 | Permanent
link |
OGIC: It came from Outer space
After careful consideration, and having duly consulted with my co-blogger, I've come to the conclusion that the mysterious proprietor of Outer Life is the Charles Lamb of our time, or the Charles Lamb of our medium—I'm not sure which, but he's the Charles Lamb of something. His recent posting "Birthday at Buddy's"—as observant, dry, and economical as his usual fare but somehow even more hilarious—is what pushed me over the fence from simply enjoying his essays to reaching for superlatives. If you aren't already reading him, what are you doing with your life?
"Brithday at Buddy's" begins:
The invitation arrived on Tuesday for a birthday party on Sunday. At 10:00 am. Bowling at Buddy's Bowl-O-Rama. For a four year old. Bouncy and lunch to follow at the house.
Late invitation -- strike one. Bowling for four year olds -- strike two. 10:00 am on a Sunday morning -- strike three. So I threw the invitation out.
You'll want to read the rest.
Outer Life appears to have been around for about ten months. I've been reading it regularly for about two, which means there's a nice plump archive for me to plunder greedily over the next little while. Some posts I've especially liked so far (both culled from a greatest hits list in OL's right-hand column called "Some Old Posts"—what, did he pick them by throwing darts?): "Mr. Tiki and the Boogie Boys" and "A Farewell to Golf," which will no doubt strike some as an inconceivable sentiment (hi Dad!).
Good deed for the day: check.
UPDATE: Outer Life promises he'll "keep a sharp eye on my sister."
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, January 20, 2005 | Permanent
link |
TT: Absence makes the heart grow fonder
I'm staying out of sight until Friday: deadlines, appointments, interviews, paperwork, performances. Our Girl will keep you fed until I return.
Have fun, and don't make a mess while I'm gone.
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TT: Almanac
The sleepless nights,
The daily fights,
The quick toboggan when you reach the heights—
I miss the kisses and I miss the bites.
I wish I were in love again!
The broken dates,
The endless waits,
The lovely loving and the hateful hates.
The conversation with the flying plates—
I wish I were in love again!
Lorenz Hart, “I Wish I Were in Love Again” (music by Richard Rodgers)
| Wednesday, January 19, 2005
OGIC: Truer confessions
Responses to last week's post on demonstrative reading have been all over the map. Most people I heard from seemed to take for granted the attention-seeking dimension of reading in public and wondered what all my fuss was about. I suppose it's become a banal observation what with the boom in Starbuck's-sitting and, of course, the invasion of the bookstore-cafes. More to the point, though, I shied away in my post from admitting just how painfully self-conscious this variety of reading could be when I was younger. Sometimes there was very little turning of pages at all but very much furtive looking up to see whether I'd been noticed. I must have looked ridiculous. Also, on rare occasions I managed to stick myself with a book I really, really didn't want to read. I drew the line at books in other languages, but New Directions translations could be irresistible. These days I'm unlikely to be seen reading anything very impressive at all, since it's the Westlakes (but not the Starks, mind you, which are trade paperbacks), John D. MacDonalds, and Reginald Hills that fit best in my purse.
Over at Tingle Alley, Carrie has come up with a few delicious anecdotes about demonstrative reading gone wrong. Herein you'll find the memorable lament "Oh no, you’re one of those girls who walk around reading Cortázar."
Meanwhile, one correspondent prefers to keep his reading choices to himself, thank you very much:
I've never been comfortable reading in public. This is probably a relic of growing up around kids who'd beat up any poindexter seen with a book. It probably also has something to do with my insecurity, worrying that some hoity-toity type will spy my reading material and reveal my inferior taste for everyone to see.
Another reader brings up a point that never occurred to me: perhaps that weathered Celine edition I thought so becoming at 17 was actually screaming "Unapproachable!" and even looked, to some blinkered eyes, downright unfeminine:
I used to engage in much demonstrative reading in Ann Arbor coffee shops, though often because I was actually reading what I wanted (not because I picked up The American Scholar or Far Eastern Economic Review just to seem cool). Finally (though this didn't stop me) a female classmate told me that I'd never get a date because I looked too smart and scared guys away. Well, I didn't get many dates then with or without the books so I just kept on reading and married an equally nerdy reader.
This all sounds so healthy and reasonable, I'm starting to think the category of demonstrative reading needs to be subdivided into the innocent and the guilty. A friend here in Chicago is sharp and shameless in dissecting the latter:
I'm a total repeat offender. I think it's one of those fantasies that is kind of irresistible to the bookish— so seductive because we can fool ourselves into thinking that our act of preening is instead the result of a kind of self-absorption that we (and, I think we imagine, the person who discovers or recognizes or understands us) would see as noble, as opposed to all the vulgar acts of self-absorptive display that the intellectually unwashed engage in at the gym, the lake front, or some wretched nightclub. I remember during my second year of grad school looking for a book at Barnes & Noble, and they had set up this mini Starbuxian coffee-shop next to the philosophy section, and I remember being genuinely offended (!) when seeing this yuppie guy sitting at a table in horn-rims and a black turtleneck (heh—this was still the early 90s) thumbing through some Barthes while sipping his latte-cappuccino. The nerve! Co-opting the pose I was suffering through graduate school to earn. Of course I was feeling these things totally unironically and with an embarrassing lack of self awareness.
Read three John Grishams and a Da Vinci Code on the steps of the AIC and your sins will be forgiven, darling.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, January 19, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Unseparated at birth
When you have an unusual last name—in my case, extremely unusual—it's always startling to stumble across it in print and realize that the party in question isn't you. This has been happening quite a bit in recent days, so I thought perhaps I should explain that I am not Zephyr Teachout, nor have I had anything to say, in print or out, regarding Daily Kos’ relationship with the Howard Dean campaign, in which Zephyr played a prominent and widely reported role. Nor will I. Ever. You can count on it. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, visit Zephyr’s blog for details.)
To be sure, I’ve always wanted to meet Zephyr, with whom I exchanged friendly e-mails around the time that her name first started popping up in news reports about the Dean campaign. She's obviously very smart and very nice, and we concluded that we must be related—I mean, how could two Teachouts not be related? I hope our paths cross someday.
Nevertheless, she’s not me, nor am I her.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 19, 2005 | Permanent
link |
TT: Almanac
"Magic is directed almost entirely to men, you know. And it's a return for them to boyhood, childhood. It has nothing to do with women, who hate it—it irritates them. They don't like to be fooled. And men do."
Orson Welles (quoted in David Thomson, Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 19, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 18, 2005
TT: New face of 2005
I just got back from the Algonquin Hotel, where Jessica Molaskey
made her Oak Room debut earlier this evening. She tore the joint up. It was the best debut I’ve seen there since Diana Krall first played the Algonquin eight years ago, and one of the strongest and most polished cabaret sets I’ve ever seen.
Molaskey is a Broadway baby (Crazy for You, Dream) who read the writing on the wall when good parts for old-fashioned musical-comedy actors started drying up in the late Nineties. Instead of cursing the looming darkness, she retrofitted herself as a cabaret singer with the help of her husband, the jazz singer-guitarist John Pizzarelli. She started off by making guest appearances on his New York gigs, and they began to collaborate in the recording studio (they were already writing excellent songs together—she has an enviable knack for witty wordplay). At first she had trouble accustoming herself to the intimate scale of cabaret, a problem she shared with most Broadway performers who’ve tried to make the switch. My guess is that she found it intimidating. But somewhere along the line she figured out how to play to a small, attentive crowd, and the payoff came tonight.
Molaskey's soft-edged bass-flute voice would be easy on the ears even if she didn’t have such a deft way with words. In fact, she sings like the smart actor she is, making the most of a lyric without ever succumbing to the temptation to make a meal of it. Instead, all is subtlety: a wry smile here, an arched eyebrow there, just enough between-song patter to grease the audience’s wheels, and everywhere an enveloping, inviting warmth that lights up her fetching jolie-laide features and makes them shimmer. As of now, I’d say she’s got the sexy-girl-next-door market sewed up tight. Being the fine songwriter she is, it stands to reason that she really knows how to pick songs, and tonight’s set was a savvy blend of the time-tested (“Make Believe”) and the unexpected (“Stepsisters’ Lament”). Not surprisingly, she likes a good medley: I loved the way she dropped a pinch of “Big Spender” into “Hey, Look Me Over." As for the duet version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Getting Married Today” and Jon Hendricks’ “Cloudburst” that she sang with husband John, all I can say is…wow. Octuple wow.
For the most part, Pizzarelli stuck to the role of loyal sideman, teaming up with his brother Martin on bass and the superlative Larry Goldings on piano to provide the kind of smooth, swinging, utterly assured support of which most cabaret singers can only dream in vain. A show-stopping entertainer in his own right, he scrupulously refrained from scene-stealing, and it was wonderful to see the pride on his face as he watched his wife sashay through the show without dropping a stitch.
If I sound excited, it’s because the buzz of Molaskey’s debut hasn’t yet worn off. I'm still flying. The good news is that you don’t have to take my word for it, since most of the songs she sang are on her latest CD, Make Believe. Give it a spin. If listening to Make Believe doesn’t make you want to come down to the Oak Room and behold the birth of a new cabaret star, maybe you need to get your batteries charged. Or changed.
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Jessica Molaskey is at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel through Saturday, Jan. 29. The music starts at nine o’clock, with an 11:30 show added on Fridays and Saturdays.
For more information, go here.
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TT: Inquiring minds
I recently noticed in our referral log that somebody had been sent to “About Last Night” as a result of searching Google for “terry + teachout + gay.” Curious as to what else this anonymous investigator succeeded in turning up, I clicked through to the search results and saw…well, not much. Outside of my review of Mystic River (in which I mentioned Marcia Gay Harden) and a passing reference to Cole Porter’s The Gay Divorce, I found only coincidental juxtapositions of those three words that happened to pop up on the same URL. If someone out there in cyberspace was longing for the lowdown on my private life, I fear the party in question came up empty-handed.
I can’t help but wonder what prompted this mysterious electronic inquiry. Might it have been an uncomfortable reader who, puzzled by my consistent failure to conform to his firmly settled politico-aesthetic preconceptions, longed to stuff me into a more reassuring pigeonhole? Or was he merely looking to add an item or two to a file somewhere or other? In either case, my suggestion is simple: ask Our Girl. She knows all my secrets. (So do the FBI and the White House, but they're not telling.)
Alas, anyone who knows me more than casually would be likely to dissolve into helpless giggles if asked such a question. My sexual preferences are laughably self-evident, not to mention single-minded, though I doubt you could figure them out by administering a cultural questionnaire via e-mail. I mean, what kind of weirdo likes Rio Bravo and Pacific Overtures? Or Mark Morris and the Louvin Brothers? (Well, Mark does, but then he's really weird.)
The point being, of course, that it simply doesn’t matter, nor should it (unless you’re going out on a date with me, in which case it’s highly relevant). I don’t put all of myself on this blog, or into my published writings, but the part I exhibit in public is absolutely, unequivocally the real right thing. I am, in short, what I seem to be, and if you don’t think it adds up, let that be a lesson to you: the only way to stuff a human being into a pigeonhole is to cut off pieces until he fits.
UPDATE: I came back from lunch to find a new search in the referral log: "terry + teachout + claims + he + isn't + gay." Oh, puh-leeze.
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TT: Snapshot
Overheard:
HE: I want somebody to love me.
SHE: I want somebody to pay me.
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TT: Did you ever have one of these days?
On Saturday morning I sat down at my desk and started writing my Louis Armstrong biography. By mid-afternoon I'd finished drafting the 850-word preface. I think it’s good, and so did several friends to whom I sent the paragraph I liked best. Then I broke down the main events and transition points of Armstrong’s life story into an eight-chapter outline, using fragments from Armstrong’s own writings for chapter titles (just as I did with The Skeptic).
Feeling that I’d done enough for one day, I shut up my iBook and took a cab to the opening of the Jane Freilicher retrospective currently on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. I was joined by a friend who knows his way around the art world, and when we arrived he said to me, “Would you like to meet Jane?” She's one of my favorite painters—one of her prints is in the Teachout Museum—so naturally I said yes. My friend took me up to Freilicher and made the introduction, and she shook my hand and said, “Oh, yes, I know who you are—I really liked your Balanchine book.” Had there been an open window handy, I would have jumped out of it and floated all the way down to Park Avenue.
Instead, I descended to the street via conventional means, had fondue with friends at La Bonne Soupe, then strolled over to Zankel Hall, the small auditorium beneath Carnegie Hall, where Chris Thile, the stupefyingly virtuosic mandolin player of Nickel Creek, was giving a duet recital in the company of Edgar Meyer, the best bass player of any kind in the known universe. The music
they played together was by turns complex, direct, funky, pensive, and ecstatic, and the two of them were in such touchingly high spirits that I was forcibly reminded of why it is that we speak of playing music.
After the second number, Chris looked at the audience, his mouth a perfect O of bliss, and shouted, “Carnegie…freaking…Hall!” The crowd exploded in laughter and cheers.
I went straight home from there but couldn’t sleep for sheer happiness, so I stayed up and wrote until two in the morning. It was an amazing day, but in a way the most amazing thing about it was that it wasn’t an especially unusual day. I have days like that all the time—maybe not quite that showstoppingly fine, but often pretty damn close.
How lucky am I? You don’t have to tell me. I soooo know.
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TT: Elsewhere
• Mr. Alicublog goes to the movies:
Also revisited Kubrick's Lolita. Like Wilder in Kiss Me, Stupid, Kubrick was doggedly exploring the terrain of 60s sex comedy; unlike Wilder, he has no skill at sex comedy of any sort -- the best male sex-comedians dance at the edge of misogyny, whereas Kubrick had long since progressed from misogyny to misanthropy. I can see why he was attracted to Humbert's obsession, but having to deal with the female half of the equation appears to have baffled him: The moments of sympathy for Charlotte Haze seem tacked on like guilty afterthoughts and Sue Lyon is practically exterminated as Lolita -- only her body and brash tone survive….
Yes, totally. (I don’t like Stanley Kubrick at all, by the way. I, too, watched Lolita on cable the other night, but only to wallow in James Mason's dark-brown, Yorkshire-tinged accent. I can't think of a Hollywood voice I like better, male or female.)
• The ever-satisfying Ms. Household Opera goes to the annual Modern Language Association convention and breathes a sigh of relief at having resumed her civilian status:
But well before the end of it, I was thanking multiple deities that I will never again have to write in the machete mode of criticism. By this I mean the kind of literature scholarship that frames all its main points as a demolition of everyone else's main points, like mowing down those around you by swinging a machete around. In graduate school it didn't take me long to tire of academic writing in which the argument was preceded by hatchet-jobs on the prior work of Professors X, Y, and Z; I hated writing like that even more. Hearing it again from the lips of senior scholars, some of whom posed their entire talks as point-by-point refutations of someone else's article, reminded me of everything that put me off the idea of writing the sorts of things one gets tenure for. At one point, I had the odd feeling that I was watching a large group of people standing on a tiny patch of ground, elbowing and jostling each other for more space, all trying to outshout each other.
No wonder I so often used to feel like no matter how hard I worked, I could never be good enough. Blargh. I don't miss it one little bit….
Blargh. Is that better or worse than arrgh?
• Comes now The Little Professor, that mysterious but nonetheless self-evidently cool non-civilian Victorianist, with a link to an almanac-worthy remark by Colin Burrow, followed by reflections thereon. The quote:
“Shakespeare may or may not have been Catholic, but generally if a document that sounds too good to be true is found exactly where you’d hope to find it and then goes missing in mysterious circumstances it is indeed too good to be true.”
Sad but true, as any halfway decent biographer (or journalist! or journalist!) can tell you.
• An unknown visitor to the new MoMA recently damaged Anne Truitt’s “Catawba,” which is no longer on display. Tyler has the scoop, plus links. (Scroll up and down for more.)
• Mr. Decline and Fall, an American living in Iraq, keeps his ears open:
What do they listen to? Let's just say that there's very little sense of "cool" or "trendy" in their listening habits. One can't expect people who have spent their lives living under Saddam's thumb to have any real sense of hipster do's and don't's, but even those who have lived in America for a while and have come back here to work as linguists can almost be relied upon to be fans of Celine Dion. It's actually gotten to the point where as soon as a discussion of music begins, I say to the nearest Arab, "You like Celine Dion, don't you?" They always reply in the affirmative.
On some level this completely un-self-conscious appreciation of melody and the human voice is refreshing in a world where you are sometimes identified by your music preference. When someone says they like Billy Ray Cyrus or DMX or Franz Ferdinand or Marilyn Manson, we assume that tells us something about them. Unaware of the pitfalls of music-as-identity, these folks just listen to what they enjoy. On the other hand, I can't shake the thought that Western Music consists in their eyes of nothing but insipid crap….
Yesterday I was getting an Arabic lesson from a local national friend when he looked across my desk and saw the new Nirvana box set. I explained, through words and gestures, about Nirvana's music and Kurt Cobain's untimely demise and concluded very quickly that he would not be able to appreciate what an earth-shattering event "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was, so I showed him my iPod. I dialed up Ella Fitgerald singing "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," but he didn't like the fact that he couldn't understand the words. So I let him listed to Edith Piaf singing "La Vie en Rose" with the thought that if neither of us knew what was going on lyrically we'd be on the same page. No dice: "Too old," he said.
Then I decided to try an instrumental selection: one of J.S. Bach's Violin Concertos, played by Hilary Hahn. He had never heard anything like it before. For a moment I pondered the stark implications of a culture that had heard Yanni but not Mozart, Celine Dion but not Ella Fitgerald, Country but not Blues. "This is a much bigger clash of cultures than I had ever imagined," I heard myself say. But the look on his face as he struggled to turn the volume up on that exquisite music made it all better….
I sure hope somebody out there tells Hilary Hahn about this posting. (You may need to scroll down a bit to find it, by the way.)
• Speaking of great moments in Western culture, Mr. From the Floor recently paid a visit to the “Mona Lisa”:
The point of seeing the piece, for almost all visitors, is to say that they have seen it. Tourists don’t really go to the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa. They go so that when they return home they can tell friends that they saw the painting.
Those of us who spend time looking at and writing about art tend to be condescending toward the masses that gather in front of da Vinci’s painting—looking, as they do, to the work to provide validation for their trip to Paris.
Unfortunately, though, many of us do the same. Reading through top ten list after top ten list this month in both the print media and around the blogosphere has made me realize that too many art writers neglect seeing exhibitions in their haste to prepare for saying that they have seen them….
Oh, yes. Yes-and-a-half.
• Lastly, Lileks reflects on some non-political aspects of the great red-blue divide:
I love some bustle. I prefer to commute to the bustle, however, not be embustled 24-7. Myriad options are nice, but I suspect that 84% of these options consist of “ethnic food, readily available,” and the other 12% are made up of museums and concerts most urban dwellers rarely have time to attend.
But at least they’re there if you want them! In any case, it’s somehow flattering to know you live in a place where someone, right now, is setting up an art installation that forces us to rethink the way we think about something. Anything. Except the historical failure of art installations to make anyone rethink about anything, ever….
Or you get exhilarated, depending on your mood and temperament, or depending on something as simple and unique as turning a corner in Manhattan during the blue hour, looking through a store window into a salon, heading up the sidewalk with the traffic streaming the other way, forty stories of lights rising up on either side, and thinking: nowhere else but here, and here I am. Having lived on the East Coast, I can see why some people love it. And I understand why I didn’t, in the end. At some point in your life you may think I'd prefer a little less public urination, if I might. The fact that some prefer the Big City strikes me as utterly unremarkable, and I’d bet that most people in Red stat
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