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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, February 2, 2007
TT: On the air
I appeared on WNYC-FM’s Soundcheck today to chat with John Schaefer, the program’s host, about the music of Ennio Morricone, whom I interviewed earlier this week. If you missed it, you can listen via streaming audio by going here.
In addition, The Wall Street Journal has posted a free link to my profile of Morricone. To read it, go here.
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TT: Famous father, furious family
It’s Friday! Yes! Today I wrap up a more than usually hectic week on the job (about which more below) with a Wall Street Journal drama column in which I review the New York premiere of Frank’s Home and file the last of three reports about my recent trip to Washington, D.C., this time discussing the Classical Theatre of Harlem’s King Lear:
Frank Lloyd Wright, like so many great artists, was a lousy family man. This amply documented fact inspired Richard Nelson’s “Frank’s Home,” a play about the master architect who designed the Guggenheim Museum, invented the carport and conducted a love life complicated enough to fuel a miniseries or two.
Mr. Nelson’s play, first seen earlier this season at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in a production now being presented in New York by Playwrights Horizons, is partly a domestic drama and partly a meditation on the meaning and significance of art. The second part is better than the first. I see more than my share of plays about uncaring parents and their resentful children, and while “Frank’s Home” covers that oft-trod ground plausibly enough, I didn’t find Mr. Nelson’s rendering of the old, old story to be especially original or memorable. Far more interesting are the scenes in which Wright (Peter Weller) talks about his work, seeking to persuade his angry son (Jay Whittaker) that its quality redeems his failings as a father and husband…
The nation’s capital is playing host to a city-wide, season-long Shakespeare orgy. “Shakespeare in Washington,” which runs through June, consists of 100-plus presentations by 60 arts organizations—drama companies, dance troupes, opera houses, symphony orchestras, museums—celebrating the life and work of the greatest of all English-speaking playwrights. I dipped my toe into the stream by paying a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library, where the Classical Theatre of Harlem, about which I’ve been hearing terrific buzz, is midway through a six-week run of “King Lear.” The company proved to be every bit as good as its reputation, and its “Lear,” previously seen in New York and Miami, is a highly impressive piece of work.
Alfred Preisser’s production is set in ancient Mesopotamia, and the program contains some fancy talk about how he conceives of the play as “a fairy tale in which Lear’s family is analogous to the universe.” Ignore it, please: Mr. Preisser’s “Lear” is a straightforward, colorfully costumed staging full of high-flying rhetoric and flamboyant physicality…
No free link, so do do that voodoo that you do so well, or get smart and go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, a sound decision that will give you instant access to my column and the rest of the Journal’s Friday arts package. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
P.S. I ran into Mr. My Stupid Dog at the production of Into the Woods that I reviewed in last Friday's Journal. To read his thoughts on the same show, go here.
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TT: Old (toe) shoe
Yesterday was…well, a bit much.
I arose at seven to meet a composer friend with whom I may be collaborating on an opera. (More as it happens.)
I returned to my apartment an hour later, then spent the next four hours writing today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, finishing at noon.
A few minutes later I received an e-mail informing me that Whitney Balliett had died, so I wrote a tribute and posted it while waiting for the drama column to be edited. I signed off on the column at one p.m.
At two-thirty I received an e-mail from the Journal advising me that Gian Carlo Menotti had died and asking whether I wanted to write a “Sightings” column about his life and work for Saturday’s paper. I thought about it for thirty seconds, then replied, “O.K. By what time do you need it?” The answer: six p.m. I took a deep breath, cleared off my desk, put on the 1947 original-cast recording of Menotti’s The Medium, and started writing. At 5:59 I finished editing the piece, and by 6:03 it was on its way to the Journal via e-mail.
Half an hour later I went out to grab a quick bite to eat, and by 7:45 I was sitting next to a blogger friend in row K of the New York State Theater, where New York City Ballet was about to dance George Balanchine’s Square Dance, Liebeslieder Walzer, and Stars and Stripes. It was the first time I’d seen NYCB in two years, and the first time I’d seen Liebeslieder Walzer in at least five.
I wrote about Liebeslieder Walzer in All in the Dances, my brief life of Balanchine:
The dancers drift outdoors into a moonlit garden and the curtain falls for a breathless moment. When it rises again, the ballroom itself is flooded with moonlight, the women are wearing tutus and toe shoes, and the decorous ballroom dancing of the first act is replaced by the heightened gestures of ballet. At the end, the women reappear in their party gowns, and the couples listen in stillness to the last waltz, whose words, sung in German, are by Goethe: Now, Muses, enough!/You strive in vain to show/How joy and sorrow alternate in loving hearts./You cannot heal the wounds inflicted by love;/But assuagement comes from you alone. “The words ought to be listened to in silence,” Balanchine wrote, surely thinking of the joys and sorrows of his own complicated life.
The costume change midway through Liebeslieder Walzer is a stroke of fantasy as stunning in its quieter way as the climactic flying lifts of The Four Temperaments. Balanchine revealed its meaning to Bernard Taper: “In the first act, it’s the real people that are dancing. In the second act, it’s their souls.” But more than a few members of the ballet’s earliest audiences, bored by its unending succession of “love-song waltzes,” would slip out of the theater during the pause between acts. In an oft-told anecdote that may or may not be true, Balanchine and [Lincoln] Kirstein were watching a performance together. “Look how many people are leaving, George,” Kirstein moaned, to which Balanchine replied, “Ah, but look how many are staying!” Today, though New York City Ballet now performs Liebeslieder Walzer only infrequently, it is loved by connoisseurs for what Arlene Croce has called its “persistent note of melancholy and tragic remorse,” and there are those, myself included, who regard it as their favorite Balanchine ballet of all.
I wondered as I waited for the curtain to go up whether I would still feel the same way about Liebeslieder Walzer as I had when I wrote those words. Fifteen minutes later my face was wet with tears, and in the brief pause between the two halves of the ballet a stranger sitting next to me touched me on the arm and whispered, “You really love that ballet, don’t you?”
“I sure do,” I said.
* * *
To read what I wrote about Menotti, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.
Go here to read Alex Ross’ brief but thoughtful tribute.
Bernard Holland’s New York Times obituary is here.
Tim Page’s Washington Post appreciation is here.
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TT: Almanac
"I don't see dancing. I start with the music. I listen to a lot of music, a lot of the time. Loads of Bach. But for me to want to choreograph a piece, there's got to be some twist to it, something odd. A certain weirdness. It could be rhythmic, or something about the orchestration, or some wrong chord nobody ever notices that makes me crazy. And the concept of 'danceable' music doesn't mean much to me. A lot of music I choose is the opposite of what people would choose to dance to."
Mark Morris (quoted in A Terry Teachout Reader)
| Thursday, February 1, 2007
TT: Whitney Balliett, R.I.P.
“My bookshelves, like my writings, are haunted by ghosts of influences past, all remembered with great tenderness, much as one recalls an old flame from college days,” I wrote in a 1999 essay collected in A Terry Teachout Reader. One of those influences died this morning.
I didn’t read The New Yorker as a boy—I wasn’t quite that precocious—and so my first encounter with Whitney Balliett, whose jazz criticism appeared regularly in that magazine for the better part of a half-century, came when I ran across a remaindered copy of Such Sweet Thunder in a department store. It was the first book about jazz that I read more than casually, and it made a lasting impression on me, not merely because of the music it discussed but because of the miraculously vivid way in which it was written.
Time and again, as in his celebrated profile of Pee Wee Russell, Balliett drew verbal pictures whose evocative power was infallible and inimitable:
Russell spoke in a low, nasal voice. Sometimes he stuttered, and sometimes whole sentences came out in a sluice-like manner, and trailed off into mumbles and down-the-nose laughs. His face was never still. When he was surprised, he opened his mouth slightly and popped his eyes, rolling them up to the right. When he was thoughtful, he glanced quickly about, tugged his nose, and cocked his head. When he was amused, everything turned down instead of up—the edges of his eyes, his eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth.
Balliett wrote the same way about the sound of jazz as he did about the men and women who played and sang it. “Guided by Edmund Wilson’s precept that a critic must first describe what he is going to criticize,” he explained, “I began trying to describe what jazz sounded like. Music is transparent and bodiless and evanescent, so I was forced to use metaphor and simile and other such circumambulatory devices.”
Some of his purpler passages did indeed have a roundabout quality, and readers conversant with the technical language of music occasionally found his inability to use that language frustrating. On the other hand, his musical illiteracy forced him to coin some of the most memorable images ever to have found their way into the literature of jazz. Here’s one of the best of them, a pen portrait of Buddy Rich in full flow:
He could move between his tom-toms and his snare drum and his cymbals with such speed that he gave the impression he was playing simultaneously on three different parts of his set. His long solos were not rhythmic investigations as much as avalanches—he wanted to bury his listeners with his brilliance, with crushing rolls and rimshots, with round-the-set rocketry and bass-drum thunder.
A few years ago I wrote an essay for Commentary about what I called “the amateur tradition in jazz writing,” in which I cited Balliett as an example of the very best that tradition had to offer. I still feel that way. To be sure, he didn’t know enough about music to be a great critic, but he was a great appreciator, which is at least as good and very often better. It was from his New Yorker articles that I first learned of the music of Russell, Gene Bertoncini, Sid Catlett, the Classic Jazz Quartet, Blossom Dearie, Bobby Hackett, Jim Hall, Ellis Larkins, Dave McKenna, Charlie Mingus, Red Norvo, Jimmy Rowles, Dick Wellstood, Alec Wilder, and countless other artists whose work would brighten my life ever after. He was also a superlative journalist with a well-tuned ear for the telling quote, and every profile I have published in my thirty years as a professional writer bears the stamp of his style.
I met Balliett a number of years ago, and made a point of telling him how much his writing had meant to me. By then, alas, he was on the outs with the magazine he had served so loyally for so long. He was treated cruelly and shabbily by William Shawn’s successors, who had no understanding of the significance of his work. His last years were by all accounts disappointed ones, though he did manage to collect his best pieces into a hefty pair of volumes, American Musicians II: Seventy-one Portraits in Jazz and Collected Works: A Journal of Jazz 1954-2001, which will serve as permanent monuments to his unique gifts.
My heart sank when the word went out yesterday that Balliett was close to death. Though we were never more than distant acquaintances, his writing was so expressive that I felt as though I knew him better than I did. Today I feel as though I had lost a friend.
UPDATE: Doug Ramsey's tribute to Balliett is here.
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TT: Composer with a harmonica
As promised, my profile of Ennio Morricone is in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:
If film music is the invisible art form, then Ennio Morricone is one of its least visible giants. To be sure, no one familiar with Mr. Morricone's work is in the slightest doubt of his immense stature. He has scored more than 400 movies since 1959, many of which, like "The Untouchables" and "In the Line of Fire," were box-office smashes. The long list of his famous fans ranges from Yo-Yo Ma and Renée Fleming to Pat Metheny and Bruce Springsteen. Mention his name to Mark Morris, the iconoclastic choreographer whose eclectic musical interests are a byword in the world of modern dance, and the response is both prompt and fervent: "Oh, God, don't you just love him? I love him."
But Mr. Morricone, like most film composers, is not nearly so well known in America as is his music. The wailing harmonicas and twangy electric guitars with which he accompanied the "spaghetti Westerns" of Sergio Leone remain instantly recognizable four decades after those still-controversial films were made—yet you will not find his name anywhere on the cover of the DVD version of Mr. Leone's "Once Upon a Time in the West," the 1972 film for which he wrote one of his most innovative scores….
No free link. If you want to read more, pick up a copy of today’s Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you immediate access to my piece. (If you’re already a subscriber, you’ll find it here.)
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TT: For ailurophiles only
A friend writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting about my late, lamented cat Blossom:
“Exasperated affection” is a great way to describe the way most people feel about their cats, dead or remembered, but my feelings tend more toward the unconditional. Somewhere along the line (he's 14 now) my own cat traded in his cat diffidence for a desperate affection. He used to be desperate and disappointed and diffident all at once. But in his tottery old age, he decided to love me. So he follows me into the bathroom and follows me out, and if I spend too many hours out of the apartment , he shows up at the door with a look of such despair—you know, the way humans look after they've been crying all day—that I never want to leave again.
I used to feel embarrased about how much I adored him back—he's only a cat, I'd kept thinking, but it wasn't what I felt. I felt that I was was reaping the pain and benefit of his having traded in a chunk of his catness—why he did or how, I don't know; that it was possible to love him without exasperation, and so finally I let myself.
That’s more or less how I felt about Blossom.
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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, reviewed here, closes May 12)
• Translation (drama, G, too complicated for children, 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 complicated for children, 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)
• Room Service (comedy, G, reasonably family-friendly but a bit complicated for youngsters, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)
• The Voysey Inheritance (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)
CLOSING SOON:
• Meet Me in St. Louis (musical, G, very family-friendly, reviewed here, closes Feb. 18)
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TT: Almanac
“Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman; it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the human.”
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
| Wednesday, January 31, 2007
TT: Another old friend
A reader wrote, apropos of this posting about an alleged quote of mine, to reassure me that I really did say what the Web says I said. The quote, he gleefully informed me, came from a review of The Cat Who Went to Paris and Particularly Cats...and Rufus published in the
Washington Post in 1991. It appeared in the first paragraph:
"This broadcast," Harry Reasoner once said at the beginning of a television show called "Essay on Women," "was prepared by men, and makes no claim to being fair. Prejudice has saved us a great deal of time in preparation." Perhaps I should start with a similar disclaimer: This review was written by the owner of an 11-year-old cat
named Blossom. Not surprisingly, I have strong opinions about cats. Some are favorable, others merely resigned. I love Blossom, but I also know the limits of our relationship. He does what he wants, and I do what he wants. Most cat owners are like that. They understand that
life with a cat is in certain ways a one-sided proposition. Cats are not educable; humans are. Moreover, cats know this. If you're not willing to humor them, you might as well stick to dogs.
Blossom died in my arms several years ago, but I still remember him (yes, he was a him) with slightly exasperated affection. A framed picture of him shares one of my bookshelves with the selected works of Willa Cather, Raymond Chandler, John P. Marquand, and Tom Wolfe—a place of honor, in other words. He was a good cat except when he wasn't, I loved him very much, and I'm glad to have occasion to mention him in this space.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 31, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: As good as a mile
Experience isn’t nearly as good a teacher as it ought to be, but it has taught me a few things, one of which is to always check my tape recorder prior to conducting an interview. An hour before I planned to leave my apartment on Tuesday to meet Ennio Morricone at the Italian Cultural Institute, I changed the batteries in my trusty old miniature cassette recorder and discovered that it had breathed its last. I dropped it in the wastebasket and walked briskly to the nearest Radio Shack to buy a replacement.
I was surprised—though not too much so—to discover that such old-fashioned devices had all but been replaced by digital recorders. Needless to say, I would have been more than happy to purchase one of those instead, but I didn’t have time to fumble with an unfamiliar technology and I still had a stack of Louis Armstrong-related interview tapes to transcribe, so I bought the last cassette recorder in the store, tried it out on the spot to make sure that it worked, paid the clerk, ran out the door, and flagged a cab.
Halfway through Central Park, I tried to remember how long I'd been using my old tape recorder. Suddenly it hit me: I'd bought it one afternoon in 1994 to interview a cabaret singer for the New York Daily News. I met her early that evening at a restaurant in the theater district, sat down at her table, and switched on my brand-new machine. Nothing happened. After a few minutes of futile fumbling, I put it back in my bag, mortified by my inadvertent display of professional incompetence.
What happened next is described in A Terry Teachout Reader:
I pulled out a notebook and started asking her about her early days. She came from a medium-sized town in Michigan. Her father had been a part-time trumpeter, and she had gotten her start with his band. “My family visited New York when I was twelve,” she said, “and I was already the kind of kid who read Earl Wilson’s column and wanted to go to Sardi’s and a Broadway show.” Laughing, I confessed that I, too, had read Wilson’s Broadway column as a child in Missouri. Indeed, the longer we talked, the more we found we had in common. Both of us had cut our teeth on jazz, longed to see the lights of Broadway, and traveled to New york to seek our fortunes.
What started off as an interview imperceptibly became a conversation. She spoke frankly of her struggle with Crohn’s disease, of the ileostomy she had undergone the year before in order to relieve the condition, of the hard times she had known and the hopes she had. After dinner, I walked her to the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, where she was singing anonymously in the pit of an ill-fated musical called The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, a thankless chore she had taken on in order to pay her medical bills. She was so tiny that I had to stoop to hear her over the roar of traffic in Times Square.
As soon I got back home, I took a closer look at the recorder and saw that the pause switch was on. I laughed myself silly. It never again malfunctioned, and in the thirteen years that followed I used it to tape interviews with Karrin Allyson, George Avakian, Maria Bachmann, Patricia Barber, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Tony Bennett, Bob Brookmeyer, Bill Charlap, Mary Foster Conklin, Norman Corwin, Eliot Feld, Renée Fleming, Jim Hall, Fred Hersch, Stephen Hough, David Ives, Keith Jarrett, Diana Krall, Lowell Liebermann, Audra McDonald, Marian McPartland, Pat Metheny, Dan Morgenstern, Mark Morris, Mark O’Connor, Madeleine Peyroux, Bucky and John Pizzarelli, Maria Schneider, George Shearing, Luciana Souza, Frederica von Stade, Ethan Stiefel, Whit Stillman, Paul Taylor (twice), Twyla Tharp, Edward Villella, Wendy Wasserstein, Robert Weiss, Christopher Wheeldon, Weslia Whitfield, and the members of the Emerson String Quartet, Nickel Creek, and Pilobolus.
All of those conversations were memorable and a few led to treasured friendships, but none would affect me so deeply as the interview with Nancy LaMott that my now-defunct cassette recorder failed to record. May it rest in peace.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 31, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"I am drawn to stories about people who really, really want something. That helps you to sing in ways that really matter to an audience. If your desire is big enough, then singing seems natural."
Adam Guettel, interview, St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Jan. 28, 2006)
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, January 31, 2007 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 30, 2007
TT: Lost in the ozone
A friend writes:
I bought a cat calendar that featured a quote from you, so I had to write. You said: "Life with a cat is in certain ways a one-sided proposition. Cats are not educable; humans are. Moreover, cats know this."
This e-mail amazed me. It sounds very much like something I might have said—I lived with cats for two decades, after all—but I have no memory whatsoever of writing any such thing.
I Googled my alleged quote and found it in several places on the Web, unsourced in all cases, though one person tacked on an additional, equally plausible-sounding sentence: “If you're not willing to humor them, you might as well stick to dogs.” That one doesn’t ring any bells, either. Is it the fate of overly prolific authors to forget their past utterances as they lurch into middle age? Have I said other, comparably pithy things that have vanished no less irretrievably into the ether?
Would that I had time to get to the bottom of this puzzle, but I don’t, for I've got to spend the next couple of hours prepping for today's interview with Ennio Morricone. If anyone out there can tell me where and when I paid this backhanded tribute to the ineducability of Felis domesticus, I'd appreciate hearing from you....
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TT: Almanac
"A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 am and finds a molehill on his desk. He has until 5 pm to make this molehill into a mountain. An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch."
Fred Allen, Treadmill to Oblivion
| Monday, January 29, 2007
TT: Not blogging but working
Last week was a good week for this blog. Our Girl and I had more visitors than usual, partly because we put up a lot of stuff and partly because we popped up on the Guardian’s litblog.
This week is likely to be somewhat dicier, for it seems that my life is in the process of getting more than a little bit hectic. I withdrew to Connecticut over the weekend to write a long Commentary essay on Alyn Shipton's A New History of Jazz and watch three old movies, Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, William Wyler's Detective Story, and Fritz Lang's Human Desire. Today I'm returning to New York to interview Ennio Morricone for a Wall Street Journal profile, see four new plays by Alan Ball, Richard Nelson, Yasmina Reza, and Oren Safdie, and catch a New York City Ballet performance of George Balanchine's Liebeslieder Walzer, hitting all my regular deadlines in between these varied events.
I'll try to blog, too, and Our Girl will pay her usual Wednesday visit to this space, but outside of the daily almanac entry and my weekly theater-related postings, I make no promises whatsoever. For the moment I'm simply going to have to keep my head down and pedal hard.
In the immortal words of the Anonymous Bluesman, If you see me comin', raise your window high/If you see me passin', baby, hang your head and cry. Or something like that.
Later, maybe.
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TT: Almanac
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning"
| Saturday, February 4, 2006
TT and OGIC: Just wondering
Do you find "Sites to See," our blogroll, too long to be manageable? Or is it useful to you at its present length? We've been contemplating a drastic pruning, but before we do anything so dire, we'd like to know what you think.
Write to either one of us at the mailboxes in the top module of the right-hand column. Thanks in advance.
| Friday, February 3, 2006
OGIC: I sing myself...if I must
So somebody cooked me dinner. That was nice.
I drank a couple of tankards' worth of red wine. Nice at the time, but now I'm good for nothing. So that was mixed.
But the cook also showed me a little book nicked from his parents called Poet's Choice and, when I became wholly absorbed in the book and not quite so fascinating or, um, at all responsive a guest, urged me to bring it home with me. For the sole purpose of regaling you with its contents. And politely correcting my manners. Again: very and entirely nice.
Poet's Choice was published in 1962 by Time-Life Books. Its editors asked more than 100 well-known poets to select one of their own works for the volume and to say something about their selection—a condition that many of them meet with reluctance, reserve, or outright obfuscation. In at least one instance, the poet compares his poems to his children, whom it would of course be unseemly to choose among. There's a surprising amount of creative evasion in play. Some of our bards you can just envision shifting from leg to leg uncomfortably and eying the exits.
Held to the task, some disdain explication: of "In the Night Fields" W. S. Merwin says, in toto, "If I had to use one as an amulet I hope this one would serve." Conrad Aiken answers with a fragment of a different poem.
Kingsley Amis, who chose "After Goliath," throws cold water on our expectations and then can't stop from hedging his bet anyway: "I wrote this poem three years ago and I can still read it without irritation (except perhaps at lines 4, 13, and 34)...."
Reed Whittemore, author of "Reflections upon a Recurrent Suggestion by Civil Defense Authorities that I Build a Bombshelter in My Backyard," seems to have been lying in wait for just such an occasion to say: "I like this one partly out of malice toward the editors of The New Yorker, who rejected it six or seven years ago...."
George Barker's articulate bark makes me continue to want to go back in time and somehow release Elizabeth Smart from the irresistible but corrosive spell he casts with his swaggering brain:
I don't have any favourite poems, not even anyone else's, let alone my own. (And I rather suspect this goes for a lot of poets—if there are a lot of poets. It's as frivolous to have a favourite person—imagine a menagerie full of those monsters.) So that in the circumstances I would like to offer a little verse which I like for its simple sexual irony. I also favour it because it is, I hope, opposite to much of the pretentious pseudo-poetastery parading about public places now.
Glad you asked, punk?
There are more riches where these came from. But it's late and, you know, the wine, so just one more: Philip Larkin on "Absences," which I can't immediately find on the information superhighway, so here's that, too.
Absences
Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.
Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.
Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!
And on why this poem rose to the top:
I suppose I like "Absences" (a) because of its subject matter—I am always thrilled by the thought of what places look like when I am not there; (b) because I fancy it sounds like a different, better poet rather than myself. The last line, for instance, sounds like a slightly unconvincing translation of a French symbolist. I wish I could write like this more often.
Incidentally, an oceanographer wrote to me pointing out that I was confusing two kinds of wave, plunging waves and spilling waves, which seriously damaged the poem from a technical viewpoint. I am sorry about this, but do not see how to amend it now.
That one I find wholly excellent, and a fine note on which to retire. Goodnight 'til next week.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, February 3, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: That sinking feeling
It’s Friday, and I’m in The Wall Street Journal. (What else is new?) This week I report on a new Broadway play, Rabbit Hole, and one of the plays I saw two weekends ago in Chicago, the Court Theatre’s revival of August Wilson’s Fences:
What makes a play great? Sometimes the difference between high art and earnest mediocrity is less than obvious at first glance. Consider David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Rabbit Hole,” which opened last night on Broadway at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Biltmore Theatre, and August Wilson’s “Fences,” now playing at the University of Chicago’s Court Theatre. Both plays are homely kitchen-sink dramas about families in crisis. Both pivot on the death of an offstage character. Both productions are well cast and well designed—yet “Rabbit Hole” is dullish and “Fences” a masterpiece.
On closer consideration, though, it isn’t so hard to see why “Rabbit Hole” fails to measure up: It’s a family drama with punch lines, a genre that at best runs to glibness, and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire sweetens the loaf of his characters’ suffering with a double spoonful of sugar...
The Court Theatre’s revival of “Fences” is a theatrical experience of a wholly different order. Yes, August Wilson tucked a lot of laughs into his Pulitzer-winning 1985 play about the splendors and miseries of a working-class Pittsburgh family, but he didn’t pull any punches in portraying the kind of inter-generational agony Philip Larkin had in mind when he wrote his most famous poem: “Man hands on misery to man/It deepens like a coastal shelf.”...
As usual, no link. To read the full review (which contains much more about Rabbit Hole and Fences, plus a brief but laudatory mention of Sarah Jones’ Bridge & Tunnel), pick up a copy of this morning’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review, along with lots of other worthy art-related coverage.
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TT: Visit to an empty museum
Here's a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:
"Welcome to the best-kept secret in Newark!” So said the smiling woman who took my $7 and admitted me last Saturday to the Newark Museum, whose superlative collection includes such marvels as a flawlessly installed Alexander Calder mobile, one of Arthur Dove’s pioneering abstract paintings of 1919, and "Laburnum II," a small Hans Hofmann canvas so outrageously vital that I longed to tuck it under my arm and cart it back to my Manhattan apartment. What’s more, you can admire these masterpieces in blessed silence when you go there—because there’s a good chance you’ll be all alone. I spent an hour touring the two floors of "Picturing America," the museum’s installation of its permanent collection of American art. During that time the only other people I saw were seven kids who breezed through the second-floor gallery....
As always, there's lots more where that came from. See for yourself—buy a copy of tomorrow's Journal and look me up.
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TT: Strummer
I’ve been listening to Erroll Garner
for some inexplicable reason (not that the desire to listen to him needs explaining!). Younger readers may not recognize Garner's name, or know him solely as the composer of “Misty,” but people of a certain age (i.e., mine) will at the very least remember his many TV appearances, if only because he was so short that he had to sit on a Manhattan phone book placed atop his piano bench in order to bear down on the keyboard with sufficient comfort.
Garner was hugely popular in the second half of his life, and because of that, many critics failed to take him seriously. I once wrote a piece for the New York Times that was intended to squelch this foolish notion:
In jazz as in the other arts, worldly success can be a decidedly mixed blessing. As the critic Max Harrison has pointed out, "People do not object to artists deserving success—only to their getting it." The bigger the triumph, the snarkier the reaction, at least among those who mistakenly believe there is an inverse relationship between accessibility and quality. From Louis Armstrong to Diana Krall, talented musicians lucky enough to crack the code of popular taste without compromising their art in the process have invariably found themselves fending off flying brickbats. Some are flung by prissy colleagues who think jazz should be packaged in plain brown wrappers, others by critics who review reputations instead of music….
Garner was a self-taught musician who could not read music. (Asked why he never bothered to learn, he famously retorted, "Hell, man, nobody can hear you read.") Though he worked almost exclusively with trios, his irresistibly buoyant playing had a near-orchestral feel. At medium and fast tempos, he brusquely "strummed" close-clipped chords with his left hand—four to a bar, just like the rhythm guitarist in a swing band—while his right hand, which often lagged tantalizingly behind the beat, alternated between bustling single-note lines and delectably squashy chordal riffs….
One of Garner’s albums was called The Most Happy Piano, and that sums him up very nicely. As Joseph Epstein wrote of H.L. Mencken, "He achieves his effect through the magical transfer of joie de vivre." You simply cannot listen to his best recordings without breaking out in an ear-to-ear grin. What's more, Garner was by all accounts as likable as the music he made. As George Avakian, his producer at Columbia, recalled, “He was really like a pixie or an elf. When you split with Erroll at the end of an evening you left with a happy smile and a good feeling. No worries at all. Off to bed feeling great. That's what Erroll did for people."
The trouble is that Garner recorded extensively and indiscriminately throughout much of his long career (he died in 1977). Many of his early records, which are now out of copyright and are constantly being reissued on fly-by-night European labels, fail to do him justice, and at least as many of the later ones are of lesser interest than the performances he recorded between 1950, when he signed with Columbia Records, and the mid-Sixties, when his distinctive style started to harden into mannerism. Alas, a comprehensive Garner-on-CD series on Columbia (now Sony) was aborted fifteen years ago after just two volumes, and the bulk of his recorded legacy has yet to be reissued systematically.
Someday—I hope—Sony will put out a carefully chosen two- or three-disc collection of Garner’s best Columbia recordings. (It damn well better include his stupendous eight-minute-long 1956 version of “The Man I Love,” which at present is available only as part of an obscure multiple-artist anthology called Gershwin Jazz that I only found out about last week.) Until then, I suggest you give a listen to Erroll Garner’s Finest Hour, a single-disc greatest-hits compilation from Verve (it contains "Misty"), and This Is Jazz: Erroll Garner, a fifteen-track Columbia sampler.
On second thought, just start with This Is Jazz, which contains the first two Garner recordings I ever heard, “It’s the Talk of the Town” and the 1951 remake of “Laura,” his first hit single. If it doesn’t ring your bell, I suggest you enter psychotherapy at once—you’re seriously depressed.
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TT: Almanac
"Artists are by nature versatile and precise; they only repine when involved with the monotonous and the makeshift."
Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One
| Thursday, February 2, 2006
TT: Holding forth
I’m the featured blogger on today’s Hotline Blogometer, which normally devotes its space to political blogs.
Here’s a sample:
What is your favorite television news program, either network or cable?
In the absence of hurricanes, terrorist attacks, or lawyer-led coups, I don't watch any TV news programs, and haven't for years. The last TV-news personalities I really liked were Harry Reasoner and Charles Kuralt.
To read the whole interview, go here (you may have to scroll down).
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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)
• Bridge & Tunnel (solo show, PG, some adult subject matter and strong language, reviewed here, closes Mar. 12)
• 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)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)
CLOSING SOON:
• Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here).
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TT: Words to the wise
DC Moore Gallery, one of my favorite midtown art galleries, is about to open a pair of shows that I mean to see as soon as possible, “Milton Avery” and “Jacob Lawrence: Mural Studies.” Both go up next Wednesday and run through March 11.
For more information, go here.
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TT: Almanac
"Artists are not, on the whole, intellectuals; they do not try to be particularly articulate and, when they do speak of their art, they do not do so in the terms of the critic or connoisseur. But that is not their job. They simply do it."
Peter Ackroyd, J.M.W. Turner
| Wednesday, February 1, 2006
TT: New kid on Broadway
I wrote yesterday about how much I was looking forward to Lincoln Center Theatre’s upcoming revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing! Well, guess what? I’m looking forward to it even more today. Says Playbill:
Mark Ruffalo will star in Lincoln Center Theater's spring 2006 revival of Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!, it was announced.
As previously reported, the show will also star Lauren Ambrose, Ned Eisenberg, Ben Gazzara, Jonathan Hadary, Peter Kybart, Pablo Schreiber, Richard Topol and Zoe Wanamaker.
Ruffalo, who will play Moe Axelrod, first garnered notice in the original Off-Broadway production of Kenneth Lonergan's This Is Our Youth Soon after, he was discovered by Hollywood, and has appeared in such films as "You Can Count on Me," "In the Cut," "Just Like Heaven," "Rumor Has It" and "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." This will be his Broadway debut.
Those of you who read my last film column for Crisis may recall that of all the films I wrote about between 1998 and 2005, Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me was my favorite:
Lonergan’s directorial debut [has] a novelistic richness that defies the simplifying art of the pitchman. To say that it is about Terry, an immature drifter (Mark Ruffalo), and Sammy, his stay-at-home older sister (Laura Linney), orphaned in childhood and desperately lonely as young adults, is to convey nothing of the moral complexity of Lonergan’s script, which pays the viewer the compliment of not making his mind up for him. Terry is never romanticized and Sammy is never treated with condescension: they are both treated as human beings, deeply flawed but not without virtue....
That was my introduction to Mark Ruffalo, who may not be a Hollywood star—yet—but whose on-screen presence has briefly brightened any number of movies (he also had a nice little bit in Collateral). I’ve never seen him on stage, alas, and for a time I feared I never would: he survived an operation for a benign brain tumor in 2001. So that’s all the more reason for me to look forward to Awake and Sing!, which goes into previews at the Belasco Theatre on March 24.
For more information, go here.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 1, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Time capsules
I once knew a man who saw Nijinsky dance, heard George Gershwin play, and was present at a recording session by Billie Holiday and Teddy Wilson. The party in question was B.H. Haggin, the famously curmudgeonly
music critic. He was in his eighties and I was in my thirties when we met, and the vast difference in our ages gave additional force to his memories: Gershwin, after all, died in 1937, while Nijinsky’s only visit to the United States was in 1916. Even more powerful, though, was the fact that Haggin’s memories were unique, since Nijinsky was never filmed and the only surviving sound film of Gershwin at the piano is a mere snippet.
Now that I’m on the verge of turning fifty, I find myself wondering what memories I’ll trot out to stun the youngsters of 2036. (Note the planted axiom in that sentence!) My last “Second City” column for the Washington Post was a list
of the ten most memorable events I covered for the column, which ran from 1999 to 2005. They were all extraordinary in their various ways, but this is the one I expect to still be talking about thirty years from now. It happened in 2001, three months after 9/11:
Of all the things I did in December, the one that best summed up the spirit of this wounded city was a midweek visit I paid to the Village Vanguard, New York's oldest jazz club, down whose narrow stairs I stepped gingerly one night to hear the Bill Charlap Trio. Imagine my astonishment when my eyes adjusted to the dimness and I spotted Tony Bennett sitting in the corner—and imagine my delight when he sauntered up to the tiny bandstand and sang "Time After Time" and "The Lady Is a Tramp." Yes, we're battered and bruised and living with the worst kind of uncertainty, yet there we were, drinking up our minimums and goggling at a living legend, after which we all rushed home to call up our envious friends and tell them what they'd missed.
The age of mechanical reproduction, alas, has sharply diminished the value of the eyewitness account: I saw Count Basie in concert a half-dozen times when I lived in Kansas City, for instance, but I also saw him on film and TV so many times that it’s hard for me to distinguish between my first- and second-hand memories. Still, I’ve seen plenty of amazing things at which no cameramen were present. What else measures up in sheer uniqueness to that unforgettable night at the Village Vanguard? Here’s my top-ten you-had-to-be-there list, arranged in rough chronological order and subject to revision without warning:
• I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance Spectre of the Rose—and I was sitting directly behind Lauren Bacall when I saw him.
• I saw Van Cliburn give a solo recital in 1978, the year he retired from the concert stage.
• I saw Carlos Kleiber conduct Der Rosenkavalier at the Met.
• I saw Jerome Robbins’ Broadway four times—once from the front row.
• I saw Suzanne Farrell’s last public performance.
• I saw the 1992 Matisse retrospective
at the Museum of Modern Art.
• I was in the studio when Diana Krall recorded All for You: A Dedication to the Nat King Cole Trio (and wrote the liner notes for the album a few weeks later).
• I’ve interviewed Paul Taylor
twice, once at his Manhattan home and once at his Long Island beach house (and was present at the performance of Taylor’s Piazzolla Caldera seen at the end of this documentary).
• I saw Bill Monroe play at the Grand Ole Opry, then met him backstage after the show. This is what I wrote about the latter experience in the Teachout Reader: “He stood six feet tall and looked at least seven, and his expressionless face might have been carved from a stump of petrified wood. He wore a white Stetson hat and a sky-blue suit with a pin in each lapel—one was an enamel American flag, the other an evangelical Christian emblem—and everyone in earshot called him ‘Mister Monroe.’ Never were italics more audible.”
• I saw the original off-Broadway production of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt.
Does anyone else feel a meme coming on?
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 1, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"There is no reason why an artist of genius should not also be an astute businessman."
Peter Ackroyd, J.M.W. Turner
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 1, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, January 31, 2006
OGIC: This morning's assignment
Just read Maud.
UPDATE: Also Outer Life. Then you can have a snack.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, January 31, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: In lieu of an obit
Wendy Wasserstein died yesterday morning. I met her several years ago when I interviewed her for a story in Time about Central Park, a trilogy of one-act operas to which she had contributed a libretto. I liked her enormously—everybody did—and I was always pleased to run into her at New York City Ballet, which she frequented once upon a time. Then she dropped out of sight, had a baby, and more or less vanished from the theater world. Her plays were no longer being performed in New York by the time I became a drama critic, and it wasn’t until last October that I had occasion to write about her in The Wall Street Journal.
Alas, her last play wasn’t any good, and I said so. I hated to give Third a bad review, not least because I knew Wasserstein was sick, though I didn’t know she was dying. (One of the characters in the play had cancer.) In fact, I didn’t think much of any of Wasserstein’s plays, and I dreaded having to say so in print, since she was an exceedingly nice lady. I fudged the point in my review, calling her “one of our best theatrical journalists, a keen-eared social observer with a knack for summing up cultural watershed moments like the coming of age of the baby boomers and putting them on stage to memorable effect.” All true, and none of it incompatible with the fact that I considered her to be a glib, punch-pulling lightweight, a kind of feminist Neil Simon who never cut too close to the knuckle.
Needless to say, you won’t find such heretical sentiments in any of today’s obituaries. Even John Simon wrote affectionately about Wasserstein, making it clear that he liked her both as a writer and as a person. Might my own feelings about her work have been softened had I gotten to know her more than casually? It’s quite possible. George Orwell once wrote a letter to Stephen Spender in 1938 in which he made this wholly characteristic confession:
You ask how it is that I attacked you not having met you, & on the other hand changed my mind after meeting you….Even if when I met you I had not happened to like you, I should still have been bound to change my attitude, because when you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being & not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don’t mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met & spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to show any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel that I ought to, like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes & are lost forever more.
It is partly for similar reasons that I don’t mix much in theatrical circles. In addition, The Wall Street Journal is extremely fussy about conflicts of interest (as it has to be, seeing as how it devotes so much of its space to financial affairs), so I mostly keep theater people at arm’s length. If I did otherwise, I’d be a different kind of critic—not better or worse, just different. There are many ways to be a critic. I write about theater as an interested spectator. I write about the visual arts as a connoisseur and collector. I write about music as an ex-practitioner. I write about writing as a working professional. It’s always me—everywhere you go, there you are—but it isn’t hard to tell which me has the floor at any given moment.
In case you hadn’t guessed, I’m feeling a little guilty about my review of Third, which is one of the risks an honest critic runs. It isn’t the first time I’ve felt that way, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Criticism is a morally dangerous profession, and those who practice it without ever feeling guilty are…well, not very nice. As I wrote early in the life of this blog:
You don't review a college opera production the same way you review the Met. That's another reason why critics should ideally have hands-on experience in the areas about which they write: It teaches them proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls "the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night." It's hard to sing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, or to dance in Concerto Barocco. It's scary to go out in front of a thousand people in a dumb-looking costume and put your heart and soul on the line. Unless you have some personal experience of what that feels like—of the problems, both psychological and practical, that stand in the way of getting the curtain up—then you may err on the side of an unrealistic perfectionism, and your reviews will be sterile and uncomprehending as a result.
None of this is to say that criticism should be bland and toothless. Sometimes it’s your duty—your responsibility—to drop the big one. But you shouldn’t enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can’t, even when you don’t think they do it very well.
That’s the hard part.
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OGIC: Hello Teatro!
Hey, ALN pal and local public radio impresario Edward Lifson has a new blog! It's called Teatro Lifson, is part of the website of his Sunday morning arts show Hello Beautiful!, and is off to a very auspicious beginning. Edward is a great arts polymath, though he's especially passionate and knowledgeable about architecture and design. In fact, he was responsible for one of the great moments of Terry's visit to Chicago last weekend. Following the Chris Thile-Mike Marshall mandolin concert at the Old Town School of Folk Music, we strolled with my friend David down Lincoln Avenue to indulge in what turned out to be one of the best cups of hot chocolate I ever have encountered. En route, we passed a striking storefront, but it wasn't until we retraced our steps that I discovered it was none other than Louis Sullivan's last building, the Krause Music Store. And the only reason that I, alone among us, knew of the significance of the Krause Music Store? Mr. Edward Lifson, natch.
Last summer Edward hosted a special live edition of HB! devoted to music and architecture, which I attended. I wrote about it only briefly here, holding back the best material as the show hadn't aired yet. (It has now, and you can still listen.) Edward's guest for that show, Chicago Cultural Historian Tim Samuelson, ended the episode with a story about the symmetry of the ends of two great careers, Scott Joplin's and Louis Sullivan's. By the end of his life, each man had outlived the fame and fortune of his earlier career and, around the same time, each pursued what would be his last projects in relative obscurity. The last building Sullivan designed was the facade of the modest Krause shop; he needed the money, if you can believe that. Joplin's last surviving composition was the luminous "Magnetic Rag." That evening at the Cultural Center, Tim Samuelson had brought with him a player piano reel of "Magnetic Rag" that recorded Joplin's own performance—his last known recording of his last surviving composition. We looked at slides of Sullivan's building while listening to Joplin play. I don't know when else I've been in an audience that was simultaneously so hushed and so electrified by a recording. It was an amazing thing to see and, especially, to hear. And that's why it was so cool to run headlong into the Krause Music Store last weekend, even without the benefit of the proper soundtrack. And that's one of the reasons we might kind of gush when we say, Hello Teatro!
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, January 31, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Pigeons on the grass
Fame is intense but fleeting in a TV-driven culture, which is one of the many reasons why I love watching the old What’s My Line? kinescopes that air at three-thirty each morning on the Game Show Network. Most of the celebrities who appeared on the show between 1950 and 1967, when CBS cancelled it to make way for Mission: Impossible, are now dead, but a few are very much with us, though many of them are long forgotten. I saw an episode a couple of nights ago in which Mitch Miller
was the mystery guest. The audience all but tore the roof off when he came on stage—yet who now remembers him save for pop-music historians and retired oboe players? On the other hand, Jerry Lewis, a guest panelist on another of last week's episodes, is both alive and well remembered, so much so that I’m actually giving serious thought to reading his new book, unlikely as it may sound.
The difference, of course, is that Lewis was a movie star. As a rule, TV stars are remembered until their shows are cancelled, after which they fade away quickly. Sometimes they find work in the legitimate theater, but it’s been a long time since success on Broadway made anyone a household name. (Pop quiz for readers outside the New York area: who is Cherry Jones? Don't peek.) Yet the producers of What’s My Line? regularly booked stage stars, confident that the show’s viewers would know who they were. Sic transit gloria Broadway!
Ben Gazzara, the mystery guest on a 1961 What’s My Line? that I saw recently, is a case in point. He created the role of Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof before relocating to Hollywood, where he appeared in a hit TV series, Run for Your Life, in 1965. Alas, he never quite managed to parlay his short-lived small-screen celebrity into bonafide big-screen stardom, though he’s worked steadily ever since and turns up from time to time in choice little roles (he’s in The Big Lebowski). Still, Gazzara is far from famous, and the fact that he starred in the original Broadway production of a celebrated American play is scarcely more than the tricky answer to a better-than-average trivia question, especially since some other fellow was tapped to play Brick in the movie.
It happens that Gazzara is returning to Broadway this spring: he’s been cast in Lincoln Center Theater’s revival
of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing, which opens April 17 at the Belasco Theatre. Odets, who died in 1963, is another one of those half-remembered names who used to be really, really big. In the Thirties he was one of the best-known American playwrights of his generation, a red-hot fellow traveler who palled around with all the big left-wing names (he commissioned Aaron Copland’s wonderful Piano Sonata, for instance). Then, like Ben Gazzara, he moved to Hollywood, and now he’s better known, if at all, for Sweet Smell of Success than Awake and Sing, Golden Boy, or even Waiting for Lefty.
It happens, too, that I’ve never seen a production of an Odets play, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing Awake and Sing, about which I first learned from reading “Clifford Odets: Poet of the Jewish Middle Class,” one of Robert Warshow’s finest essays (it’s collected in The Immediate Experience, an essential book to which I paid tribute in the Teachout Reader). I’ve never seen Ben Gazzara on stage, either, though I remember watching Run for Your Life as a child, and more recently was impressed by the videotaped snippet of his stage performance as Brick that Rick McKay included in Broadway: The Golden Age.
I’m not going anywhere with this: I’m just rambling. It's the privilege of a blogger with a long memory who turns fifty next Monday. Believe it or not, I don’t live in the past. No working journalist does, especially one with so many young friends. Even so, I do enjoy rummaging around in my well-stocked memory, and I don’t mind admitting that there are times when I prefer communing with the increasingly distant past to grappling with the uncomfortably proximate present. Ben Gazzara, Clifford Odets, Aaron Copland, Robert Warshow, even Jerry Lewis: today they all seem far more real to me than the pretty people I’d be reading about in Entertainment Weekly if I read Entertainment Weekly. No doubt this has something to do with my recent brush with mortality. To borrow a line from Patrick O’Brian, I’ve been a bar or two behind ever since I got out of the hospital, and though I’m sure I’ll catch up sooner or later, I find it oddly pleasant to linger among ghosts.
I reread Brideshead Revisited last week, and found that Evelyn Waugh had once again summed up my mood better than I could myself:
My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.
These memories, which are my life—for we possess nothing certainly except the past—were always with me. Like the pigeons of St Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, single, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl.
I, too, am surrounded by pigeons this morning, and I'll be sorry when the noon gun booms.
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TT: Almanac
Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.
Friedrich von Schiller, The Maid of Orleans
| Monday, January 30, 2006
TT: Who could ask for anything more?
I got up first thing Saturday morning, ate a whole-grain English muffin and a bowl of raisin bran, took a cab down to Integral Yoga in Chelsea, and spent a couple of hours twisting myself into heart-healthy positions. I came back to my Upper West Side apartment to take a shower, then picked up a Zipcar and drove to the Newark Museum of Art, where I spent a couple of hours looking at paintings like this and this.
Once I’d seen enough, I drove to Rutt’s Hut and dined on a pair of “rippers” slathered in Rutt’s secret relish, thereby satisfying to the fullest a long-standing wish. (No, they weren't the least bit heart-healthy, but ooooh, did they ever taste good!) I read the first chapter of Peter Ackroyd’s newly published brief life of J.M.W. Turner as I stood at the counter.
I popped a Fats Waller album into the CD player of my Zipcar as I drove home on the New Jersey Turnpike. At five o'clock on the nose I pulled off the exit ramp of the George Washington Bridge and onto the Henry Hudson Parkway. The sun was mere seconds from setting and the bright blue sky was flooded with Turneresque orange light (it looked something like this). Mr. Waller obligingly chose that precise moment to launch into It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie.
I dropped the car off at a garage around the corner from my apartment, picked up some oatmeal-raisin cookies and two bottles of lemon-lime seltzer at the neighborhood deli, and spent the evening watching Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait. As Laird Cregar leered diabolically at Don Ameche, I said to myself, I couldn’t possibly be happier.
I hope your weekend was as good as mine.
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TT: Book 'em, Sony!
Some of you may have read my Wall Street Journal column about the return of the e-book, in which I reported on the Sony Reader and speculated on the possible effects of the e-book on the culture of reading and writing. (If you didn’t see the column, it’s here.) In that column I made a point of saying that eventual popular acceptance of the e-book was inevitable:
So will it fly? I don't know. Still, I'm certain that something like the Sony Reader will catch on, if not this year then in a short time. The phenomenal success of the iPod strongly suggests that many, perhaps most, consumers are ready to start buying digital books on the Web and storing and reading them electronically.
I did this for three reasons. One was rhetorical: I thought it would make the column more effective to take the coming of the e-book for granted. One was practical: my “Sightings” columns are only 850 words long, and I preferred to devote my space to speculating on the long-term effects of the e-book rather than taking the time to explain why I thought it would become popular. And one was a simple matter of honesty: that’s really what I think.
I got an e-mail the other day from my friend Rick Brookhiser, author of many fine books about the founding fathers (I especially like this one), in which he begged to differ:
e-book = iPod? Same solution, different problem, so maybe not.
The iPod created a universe of immediately available songs—not in the order the Beatles laid the album out; not with the dumb songs included (don't like “Maxwell's Silver Hammer”? Skip it!). Glenn Gould's paradise had arrived, as you wrote in the Teachout Reader.
The DVD does the same thing for movies. Watch that car chase fifteen times!
But, unlike albums/CDs or movies, readers already enjoy immediate availability, in the form of pages. This was the book's great advance over the scroll, and the reciting bard. You can skip ahead, go back, read one paragraph over and over, etc. If you had been alive in the dark ages, or whenver scribes began writing in books, you would have commented on it in Ye Teachoute Reader (Gutenberg made reproduction faster).
The e-book will NOT increase immediate availability, because you must hit a control of some sort to move. Even a thumb click or a finger tap is as much of an effort as a page turn. (The e-book you showed doesn't even have two pages open at once, though that presumably is fixable.)
The great gain of the e-book is having several thousand books in one little machine. But apart from the psychotically inattentive—a large audience, given computers and the tempo of TV editing—people read one book at a time, or at most two or three. In that situation the e-book provides no advantages, or few.
What e-books will make wonderful is research—Grove, the encyclopedia, and all those bound volumes of the Atlantic Monthly may well be killed by them.
If your prophecy is fulfilled, and all books are sent to a landfill, in five years some geek in Bangalore will announce breathlessly his newest discovery—the printout, bound together with glue for easy live-ware accessibility.
These are all good points. The printed book, as I said in my column, is an “elegant” technology, meaning that it solves a great many problems in an attractive, simple, and economical way, and e-books will not catch on if they don’t solve the same problems with comparable elegance. But assuming they do, here are some of the further advantages of the e-book:
• It will allow you to buy books without going to a brick-and-mortar store and have them delivered to your computer more or less instantaneously.
• In theory, it will give you immediate access to a vastly larger number of books than even amazon.com can provide.
• You’ll be able to carry dozens of books with you wherever you go (unlike Rick, I think this is one of the e-book’s biggest draws).
• Books in bulk are heavy and awkward and take up a huge amount of space. E-books take up no physical “space” at all, thus freeing up wall and storage space—a major consideration for apartment-dwellers and other people with good-sized personal libraries. Yes, books do furnish a room, but I’d rather furnish my living room with more art—and I’d be more than happy not to have to box up my thousand-odd books the next time I move to a new apartment.
In addition, the e-book is a technology so powerful and far-reaching in its implications that I’m sure it will offer countless additional advantages I can’t even begin to foresee. Scott Walters, who blogs at Theatre Ideas, suggested two of them in this e-mail he sent after reading my column:
As a 47-year-old recent convert to the iPod (which I use for listening to books on tape from Audible.com), I am fascinated by the new Sony e-book hardware. As a college professor, I can see all kinds of opportunities. For instance, what if students could download all of their textbooks to their Sony e-book—no more huge backpacks filled with a dozen heavy textbooks! Also, it might help us disconnect from the pirates running current textbook publishers. I published a textbook with McGraw-Hill that is about 120 pages and lists for $30, which is ridiculous! I would certainly consider pulling the book from the publisher and selling it myself via download. This could be a real solution for the student!
All of which serves as a reminder that the coming of the e-book will trigger the law of unintended consequences. That’s what I was getting at in my column:
Best-selling novelists, for instance, will soon be in a position to "publish" their own books, pocketing all the profits—but so will niche-market authors whose books don't sell in large enough quantities to interest major publishers.
Might the e-book make the writing of serious literary fiction more economically viable? Consider the experience of Maria Schneider, the jazz composer whose CDs are sold exclusively on her Web site, www.mariaschneider.com. Ms. Schneider uses ArtistShare, a new Web-based technology that makes it easier for musicians to sell self-produced recordings online. Not only did she win a Grammy for her first ArtistShare release, "Concert in the Garden," but she kept all the proceeds as well. Several other well-known jazz musicians, including the guitarist Jim Hall and the trombonist Bob Brookmeyer, have since signed up with ArtistShare, which frees them from the need to compromise with money-conscious record-company executives. Will e-books have a similarly liberating effect on authors? I wouldn't be surprised.
I’m not saying, by the way, that the unintended consequences of the coming of the e-book will all be pleasant or desirable. Our Girl and I went shopping the other day at a well-stocked brick-and-mortar bookstore in Chicago. I bought three books for myself and a belated Christmas present for OGIC, and enjoyed the experience immensely. As we drove home afterward, we chatted about how delightful it is to browse the shelves of a good bookstore. But is it delightful enough to survive the coming of the e-book? I doubt it. To be sure, I had a lovely time—but it was the first time I’d done any serious in-person book-browsing in nearly a year. I now buy virtually all of my books online.
As I wrote in the Journal:
Yes, I miss the bookstores of my youth, and I'm sure I'll miss the handsomely bound volumes that fill the shelves in my apartment as well (though I won't miss dusting them, or toting them around by the half-dozen whenever I go on vacation). The printed book is a beautiful object, "elegant" in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses of the word, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology—a means, not an end. Like all technologies, it has a finite life span, and its time is almost up.
Am I right? We’ll see—soon.
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TT: Almanac
“Perhaps the strangest aspect of life is the sense it conveys of having a pattern—everything falling into place, nothing happening by chance; outward phenomena an image of the inward reality; and therefore inevitable in their relation to that inward reality.”
Malcolm Mugggeridge, Affairs of the Heart (courtesy of Christopher Porterfield)
| Friday, January 28, 2005
TT: Boundless
Last night I took two friends, a music critic and a jazz pianist, to watch New York City Ballet dance what George Balanchine’s admirers refer to as “the Greek program”: Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon, the three great Balanchine-Stravinsky collaborations. The pianist was seeing all three dances for the first time, and the critic had never seen any of Balanchine's ballets. They reacted pretty much the way I'd expected, and we went our separate ways after the performance looking as though we’d all had one too many. Or maybe two.
I got up at seven-thirty this morning, knocked out the last 850 words of an essay on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and shot the piece off to my editor in Washington via e-mail (the galleys are rolling out of my fax machine as I'm typing this sentence). Then I jumped in a cab and headed crosstown to meet my friend Bass Player at Knoedler & Company, where we spent an hour looking at Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves (the show closes on Saturday, so if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t wait!). From there we went to Tibor de Nagy to see Jane Freilicher: Paintings 1954-2004, she for the first time, I for the second. By then we were booming and zooming, so instead of hitting a third gallery, we decided to grab a bite to eat, after which we talked our heads off. (Bass Player and I are so closely in sync that we don’t really need to tell each other what we’re thinking, but we do it anyway.)
At length she went downtown to pick up her bass and take a lesson, while I returned home to do…nothing. I have no more appointments today, no deadline to hit, no work of any kind that can’t wait, no show to see tonight, and nowhere in particular that I need to be until 1:45 Saturday afternoon. Limitless luxury, in other words, made all the sweeter by the fact that it’s so bitterly cold outside. What do I care? My calendar is blank, my refrigerator full. Josh White is playing on my iBook, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Kind Hearts and Coronets are cued up on the DVR, and a book I’m looking forward to reading awaits me in the loft. The only thing I have to do in the next twenty-three hours is keep the solemn promise I made with hand on heart to Bass Player at lunch today: I’m going to pop open my watercolor set and put brush to paper before I go to bed tonight.
I know exactly how lucky I am today, in part because I also know how it feels to be so busy that you can’t see straight. As a matter of fact, I’ve been feeling outrageously happy for the past couple of days. Whatever troubles the future may hold in store for me are currently being held in abeyance, and instead of worrying about them, or even thinking about them, I’ve been following the advice of the man who made the ballets my friends and I saw last night. “Why are you stingy with yourselves?” Mr. B used to ask his dancers. “Why are you holding back? What are you saving for—for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.” And that’s where I've been all today: in the moment, and glad to be. Ecstatic, really.
I’ll see you Monday.
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OGIC: Fallow Friday
Nothing new from my corner today. Life insists on my active participation, besides which my modem connection has gone funky again. I'm expecting a big box of DSL sometime late next week or early the week following, but until that miraculous time I have to type with my hands suspended above the keyboard and holding my breath if I want not to disrupt the dial-up.
Should have lots to say next week, including a wrap-up of Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile at Dominican University Saturday night and possibly a report on what's so great about The Horse's Mouth.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, January 28, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: And she can write, too
Time again for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This Friday I reviewed Little Women: The Musical and the off-Broadway revival of Hurlyburly, and I seem to have cut sharply against the grain of critical wisdom as regards the former:
Sutton Foster is a gawky, gamine version of the young Judy Garland whom the Great Producer Upstairs clearly intended for a revival of Jerome Robbins’ “Peter Pan.” Until somebody down here gets the message, though, I’ll make do with “Little Women: The Musical,” the immensely likable stage adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved 1867 novel that just opened at the Virginia Theatre. Ms. Foster, lately of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” plays Jo, the bookwormy tomboy who “reminded one of a colt,” and gets her just right. She’s not an immaculate singer—her voice is raw on top—but her spunky charm and hell-for-leather energy are impossible to resist. I didn’t even try. Ms. Foster caught my heart on a short string the second the curtain went up, and I twitched at her command all night long.
Apparently I’m one of the few people in America who has neither read “Little Women” nor seen any of the countless stage and screen versions that preceded this one. A quick riffle through the book, though, made it clear that Allan Knee has not only slashed it to ribbons but modernized the dialogue extensively, if not egregiously (the punchlines are all his). In addition, he has turned “Little Women” into a meta-narrative about the writing of “Little Women”: Jo, an aspiring author who launches her literary career by churning out swashbuckling tales for the Weekly Volcano, decides to fictionalize her own family life, and the show reaches its climax when she takes pen in hand to write the first chapter of the story we’ve just seen played out on stage. It’s a clever idea, and if the result is more a filet than a full-fledged fish, it still zips along with confidence and skill….
I also had good things to say about Hurlyburly:
It’s a grimly funny tale of cocaine and its discontents, written and set in Hollywood in the early ’80s and horrifyingly reminiscent in every particular of what I now think of as the Age of Jay McInerney.
I didn’t see Mike Nichols’ 1984 production, which had an awesome cast—William Hurt, Judith Ivey, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, Ron Silver, Jerry Stiller and Sigourney Weaver, believe it or not—but I can’t imagine how this one, directed with surgical precision by Scott Elliott, could be bettered. Ethan Hawke, for one, is breathtakingly fine as Eddie, the drug-sodden, woman-hating casting director on whose tortured soul the California sun has set, and Halley Wegryn Gross, Catherine Kellner and Parker Posey are nicely matched as the three women who skitter across his zigzag path....
No link—you’ve got to pay to read the whole thing. Why not shell out for today’s Journal and find out while you’re at it how we cover the other arts? Or go the whole hog by clicking here. Either way, you won’t be sorry….
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TT: Almanac
"'Good, that,' he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be changed—neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives—a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers."
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
| Thursday, January 27, 2005
TT: The momentary miracle
Most of my e-mail regarding what I wrote about Johnny Carson’s death has turned out to be unexpectedly favorable, but I won’t burden you with it. Instead, I want to pass on a thoughtful letter from a reader who disagreed.
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I’ve been a daily visitor to your delightful blog for several months now. I’ve never written to you before and I am pained to find myself one of the people commenting about your Johnny Carson post….
I am truly sorry that you got some rude e-mails in response to your thoughts on Mr. Carson’s death. I agree that it is quite unreasonable of anyone to be offended by what you wrote. However, I do think that sort of personalized outrage is a common, if illogical, response when the worth of someone or something you love is being questioned. And I think a great many people loved Johnny Carson. Or rather, they loved what they | | |
