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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 9, 2007
TT: We are all hypocrites now
Courtesy of Our Girl, who is tending the blog in my absence, here’s the weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I review two new plays in this morning’s paper, Alan Ball’s All That I Will Ever Be and Yasmina Reza’s A Spanish Play. Neither one, alas, did much for me:
Broadway is for big-budget musicals, celebrity revivals and the annual snob-friendly British import. If you want to see new American plays, you pretty much have to go Off Broadway nowadays. Even an author of such demonstrable commercial appeal as Alan Ball, the creator of “Six Feet Under” and the author of the screenplay for “American Beauty,” opened “All That I Will Ever Be,” his first stage play in a dozen years, not on Broadway but way downtown at the New York Theatre Workshop. Not that it deserves an uptown run, though I won’t be surprised if it gets one. Like all of Mr. Ball’s work, “All That I Will Ever Be” is glib, pretentious and very well made, a sure-fire recipe for success….
I’ve never much cared for Yasmina Reza’s brand of what I think of as boulevard surrealism, and “A Spanish Play,” her latest effort, strikes me as an especially wan specimen of that clever-clever genre. It’s a pretentious play about a pretentious play, meaning that the real-life actors play made-up actors who are acting in a play-within-a-play whose progress they periodically interrupt to give imaginary interviews about the art of acting. Or something like that: I was so bored that I lost track, especially when it turned out that one of the characters in the play-within-the-play (Linda Emond) is an actor who is rehearsing a play-within-the-play-within-the-play. Did I mention that “A Spanish Play” is two hours long, with no intermission? I checked my watch five times, wondering at one point whether I might possibly have died over dinner and awakened in hell….
No link. Go buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you access to my column and the rest of the Journal’s Friday-morning arts package.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, February 9, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“Literature is insight and synthesis, which means that poetry, ultimately, is heroic. Naked, weak, hungry, trembling, endangered by all the elements, all the beats and demons, the cave men performed that act of heroism for consolation, in the deepest sense of the word.”
Aleksander Wat, My Century (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, February 9, 2007 | Permanent
link | Thursday, February 8, 2007
OGIC: Spring and all
Two matching takes on spring, which seems in this city, this week, impossible—a wild fiction.
First, the copious:
Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untaught flower, is race of water,
Is earth's most multiple, excited daughter;
And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.
(Philip Larkin, "Spring")
And the succinct:
Spring is nearly here,
and I want.
(Rachel Ries, "Sad Saturday")
That's a fantastic full stop.
A nice essay on Larkin, including reflections on receiving "Spring" for publication in the author's poetry magazine, lives here. I don't know that I'm very satisfied with its reading of the lines above, however. It doesn't account for what seems to me the most interesting phrase in these lines: "their needs immodest." Who are these needy creatures, and why are they useless to her? This has bothered me for some time and, since I was born on the vernal equinox and have always put some vague stock in the coincidence, I hold something of a personal stake in understanding it better. Please write to me if you have a reading.
Meanwhile, Rachel Ries plays tonight at Chicago's Hideout, where I saw her perform splendidly before the holidays. I'm going to try to be there, but it might prove a little late for me on a school night.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, February 8, 2007 | Permanent
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OGIC: Not to be missed
From The House Next Door comes word that Charles Burnett's wondrous 1977 shoestring-budget film Killer of Sheep will be distributed to theaters for the first time ever this spring. It's been seven or eight years since I was lucky enough to see Burnett's haunting masterpiece, which was selected for the National Film Registry in 1990, part of its second crop of inducted titles. The film's distributor, Milestone Films, describes it this way:
Charles Burnett’s films focus on everyday life in black communities in a manner unseen in American cinema, combining incredibly lyrical elements with a starkly neo-realist, documentary-style approach that chronicles the unfolding story with depth and riveting simplicity.
In KILLER OF SHEEP, the protagonist, employed at the slaughterhouse, is suffering from the emotional side effects of his bloody occupation to such a degree that his entire life unhinges. His refusal to become involved in the similarly destructive, but human-focused occupations of his more affluent friends and acquaintances becomes the odd obstacle to the family’s well being. Burnett once said of the film, "[Stan’s] real problems lie within the family, trying to make that work and be a human being. You don’t necessarily win battles; you survive."
Oscar schmoscar; as far as I'm concerned, this will be the cinema event of the season. Expect more harassment from my corner leading up to its release, and remember: I only have your best interests in mind. Killer of Sheep will open in New York and Los Angeles April 6. I presume it will open in Chicago sometime thereafter, but just in case—Terry, will your Aerobed be free that weekend?
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, February 8, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: So you want to see a show?
Courtesy of Our Girl, who is managing the blog in my absence, 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)
• Translations* (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)
• 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)
• Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here, closes Feb. 25)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, February 8, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
Now I shall speak of evil as none has
Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
The white-hosed moron torturing a black
Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;
Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;
Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, February 8, 2007 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, February 7, 2007
OGIC: Amuse-bouche and a promise
This post begins identically to almost every non-business email I write lately: "Long time no talk to. My fault entirely."
Oh, I'm bad, here and there. And believe me, I do suffer for my sins. I miss the heady days when email was new and almost exclusively a mode of diarizing and dishing to friends both far and near (sometimes across the very room) and I had oodles of energy for long, sprawling, lovingly composed e-epistles. Terry and I, cementing over the internet what was still a nascent friendship, wrote to each other what seem, in retrospect, like chapters of autobiographies. Doubtless those few years are the best documented of my life, even if the documentation now exists only in files on Zip disks, and me without a working Zip drive.
Back to the less thoroughly chronicled here and now, however. I owe you some blogging, big time. And I plan on honoring my debt this evening and tomorrow. In the meantime, I couldn’t wait even that long to share something you’ll have seen if you’re an Arts & Letters Daily reader: this tremendously smart and entertaining Clive James review of the endless new Kingsley Amis biography by Zachary Leader. If you saw it but didn't read it, perhaps you were daunted by its length. Don't be. By the time I'd read a quarter of it, I was wishing it were longer. James's piece is more than a review, really; It has its own forceful ideas about the life, work, and reception of Sir Kingsley, all of them well considered, sparklingly put forth, and strikingly humane, especially at their most contrarian. I’ve had Amises on the brain lately, about which more later; for now, treat yourself to this happily lengthy, end-to-end diverting piece.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, February 7, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“Life admits not of delays; when pleasure can be had, it is fit to catch it: Every hour takes away part of the things that please us, and perhaps part of our disposition to be pleased. When I came to Lichfield, I found my old friend Harry Jackson dead. It was a loss, and a loss not to be repaired, as he was one of the companions of my childhood. I hope we may long continue to gain friends; but the friends which merit or usefulness can procure us, are not able to supply the place of old acquaintance, with whom the days of youth may be retraced, and those images revived which gave the earliest delight.”
Samuel Johnson, letter to Boswell, Sept. 1, 1777 (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, February 7, 2007 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, February 6, 2007
TT: Another landmark
Today is my fifty-first birthday, an occasion I didn’t expect to be celebrating a year and a half ago. Instead of dying, I lived, and in honor of that glorious fact I’m blowing town for a few days. My destination is Cape May, the island at the southern tip of New Jersey where I went exactly one year ago, there to reflect on my close encounter with the Distinguished Thing.
This time around my mood is considerably brighter, but I’m worn out from the nonstop deadlines of the past couple of weeks, so I intend to leave my iBook behind. Our Girl will be putting up my usual almanac entries and theater-related posts for the rest of the week, along with any other thoughts she may feel like sharing with you.
See you next Monday.
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TT: Elsewhere
I’ve been too busy of late to keep more than half an eye on the blogosphere, but here are a few things I’ve noticed that might interest you:
• Mr. Anecdotal Evidence, one of my favorite blogging eggheads, was tempted to read a Richard Stark novel as a result of all the praise that pseudonymous master receives in this space, and found it good:
I don’t read mysteries, except for Raymond Chandler. Their prose usually is tone-deaf and awful, and I don’t care who done it. Stark, based on the one-half of a Parker novel I’ve read, is a pleasant exception.
His prose is without fat yet his economy of means doesn’t call attention to itself in an astsy-fartsy way. It’s without pretensions, yet intelligent, minus the reverse pride of a “literary” writer gone slumming. Stark, like his protagonist, is a professional who, above all, values competence. Parker is cool, aloof and malevolent only in a practical way, when he needs to be. He takes little pleasure in being bad and hurting people, but neither does he lose sleep over it. His code is pragmatism. Like another one-named character, Odysseus, Parker survives by his cunning. So does Stark….
What he said.
• Attention, jazz buffs: the only surviving performance film of Clifford Brown, the great trumpeter of Brown-Roach, Inc., has surfaced on YouTube. It’s a 1956 kinescope from an old Soupy Sales TV show, and you can view it by going here.
• Some of you may recall my posting from last year about the music of Cy Walter, the great cocktail pianist. Now Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus, another Walter fan, has reviewed The Park Avenue Tatum, the CD that inspired my original tribute. The review is in Downbeat, but Iverson has also posted it here:
Walter is probably best understood not in the context of either jazz or Broadway, but in the tradition of classical composer/pianists like Leopold Godowsky and Ignaz Friedman, both virtuosos who loved to transfigure Viennese waltzes and other light fare into complicated piano music. Walter’s beautiful chorus of “All the Things You Are,” with the melody singing chastely in the middle-register, decorated on top and bottom with delicate slides and runs, sounds considerably like a Godowsky treatment of a Schubert song.
That is a very smart observation, and a typically Iversonian one as well.
Incidentally, there is now a fascinating Walter Web site started by his family. It contains, among gazillians of other good things, a page of downloadable Walter sound files. Check it out.
• Speaking of hotel pianists, an anonymous member of the breed has started a blog called, logically enough, The Hotel Pianist. It is simultaneously funny, wry, snarky, and self-deprecating:
Tonight, a 40-ish man, while playing chess with his son (and losing), sang every word to a song I was playing. Unfortunately, I was playing a song from the Top 2000-2005 Hits book, and he was singing a song from the 1970s.
I commend it to your attention.
• Lileks has been collecting “psychedelic” records from the Sixties:
You can imagine the band members sitting down to hash out (sorry) the overarching themes of the album, how it should like start with Total Chaos man because those are the times in which we live with like war from the sky, okay, and then we’ll have flutes because flutes are peaceful like doves and my old lady can play that part because she like studied flute, man, in high school. The lyrics are all the same: AND THE KING OF QUEENS SAID TO THE EARTH THE HEIROPHANT SHALL NOW GIVE BIRTH / THE HOODED PRIESTS IN CHAMBERED LAIRS LEERED DOWN UPON THE LADIES FAIR / NEWWWW DAAAAY DAWNNNING!
I bought some of those, too, back in 1967….
• Ms. CultureGrrl, who (like me) is a Frank Lloyd Wright buff, has posted a link to an excellent news story about a smallish Wright house in the Puget Sound area that has just gone on the market:
Many ideas here could easily translate into contemporary homebuilding: the quality of the daylighting, the efficiency of the built-in furniture, the richness of interior textures in the concrete block and honest wood paneling. But the most important point is that a house's square footage is irrelevant to the quality of life that it engenders. Wright himself proclaimed that "a house is more a home by being a work of art." That can be taken as elitist, but it also can be an argument for small, unpretentious, quietly beautiful buildings just like this….
By the way, I’m pleased to report that I just booked myself an overnight stay in a Chicago-area Usonian house that is now run as a bed and breakfast, one of four Wright houses that are available for short-term stays. (I’ll be spending the night there when I go to the Windy City in May to visit OGIC and see a couple of shows.) This will be my third such stay—I wrote about the first two here—and I can’t wait.
• I blogged a couple of months ago about a visit to the White House during which I saw John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, which was hanging in the East Room. Now Catesby Leigh has written a fascinating Wall Street Journal essay about presidential portraits in which the Sargent/Roosevelt canvas receives prominent and penetrating mention:
Sargent's wonderfully effective use of middling tones in this portrait's otherwise blank background casts Roosevelt into bold relief. Left hand assertively perched on hip, he faces us squarely, full of authority and executive energy. And yet the portrait is very much an optical record, devoid of symbolic content. A quite noticeable penumbra that follows the outline of Roosevelt's head and left shoulder, combined with Sargent's fluid handling of the figure itself, conveys an almost eerily dynamic sense of the act of perception. It's as if T.R. were coming into focus before us. He squints out at us through his spectacles, and we find ourselves squinting back at him.
The rich color harmonies and attention to finish evident in this and other Sargent portraits may link him to the Old Masters, but he fully subscribed to the modern notion that reality lay in perception and that the artist's duty was to accurately transcribe natural appearances as they appeared to him or her. This concept may not have originated with photography, but it was vastly reinforced by it. And when we see the National Portrait Gallery's rather depressing trove of "traditional" portraits of our postwar presidents, from Greta Kempton's Truman (begun in 1947, completed 1970) to Nelson Shanks's Clinton (2005), it is obvious that photography has completely displaced classical sculpture as the conceptual model….
Read the whole thing, please.
• Now, some unintended comic relief: I had a vague memory of reading long ago about a novel in which the letter “e” is never used. Guess what? It turns out that the complete text of Gadsby has been posted on the Web. Here’s how it starts:
If youth, throughout all history, had had a champion to stand up for it; to show a doubting world that a child can think; and, possibly, do it practically; you wouldn’t constantly run across folks today who claim that “a child don’t know anything.”A child’s brain starts functioning at birth; and has, amongst its many infant convolutions, thousands of dormant atoms, into which God has put a mystic possibility for noticing an adult’s act, and figuring out its purport….
Preposterous, of course, but fascinatingly so.
• Finally, here’s the best list I’ve seen in ages...
• …and the best t-shirt.
Remind me to do this more often, O.K.?
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TT: Almanac
“Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?”
Henry James, The Ambassadors
| Monday, February 5, 2007
TT: Landmark
Our Girl and I received our two millionth page view at 9:05 yesterday morning. (The lucky viewer, in case you're curious, was from Lee's Summit, Missouri, Pat Metheny's home town.) That’s small potatoes by the high-flying standards of such heavily trafficked political blogs as Instapundit or Daily Kos, but a pretty respectable total for an artblog sneaking up on on its fourth anniversary.
I put up our first posting on July 14, 2003. Since that day we’ve watched artblogging evolve from a rarity into a commonplace. I wrote about the process in a long essay called “Culture in the Age of Blogging” published last year in Commentary. Here’s how it ended:
It may be that blogging will encourage the creation of a new kind of common culture, exerting something of the same unifying force as did the old middlebrow media (and as About Last Night seeks to do). Or not: if the experience of political blogs is any indication, blogging may be more likely to foster discrete subcultures of shared interest, larger and more cohesive but nonetheless separate….
One thing of which I am sure is that the common culture of my youth is gone for good. It was hollowed out by the rise of ethnic “identity politics,” then splintered beyond hope of repair by the emergence of the web-based technologies that so maximized and facilitated cultural choice as to make the broad-based offerings of the old mass media look bland and unchallenging by comparison. For all the nostalgia with which I look back on the days of the Top 40, the Book-of-the-Month Club, and The Ed Sullivan Show, I prefer to make my own cultural decisions, and I welcome the ease with which the new media permit me to do so.
At the same time, however, I still feel the need for a common space in which Americans can come together to talk about the things that matter to us all. And so my hope is that the blogosphere, for all its fissiparous tendencies, will evolve over time into just such a space. No doubt there will always be shouting in the blogosphere, but it need not all be past each other. When the history of blogging is written a half-century from now, its chroniclers may yet record that the highest achievement of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, turned out to be its unprecedented ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.
The jury is still out on the larger question of whether blogging as a whole is more divisive than unifying, but I think by now it’s perfectly clear that artblogging is becoming an important and increasingly significant aspect of world culture. In the eight hours leading up to our two millionth page view, we received visitors from Australia, Bulgaria, France, India, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Pakistan, the Philippines, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and (I especially like this one) Elmers End.
As for Our Girl and me, we’ve poured a considerable amount of time, energy, and (occasionally) grief into this site, all of it for free, and we don’t regret a bit of it. In the process we’ve made some close friends, and we’ve also made the acquaintance of a legion of readers whose continuing interest in what we do is the main reason why we continue doing it.
To all of you from both of us, our heartfelt thanks for stopping by. And don’t worry—we’ll still be here tomorrow.
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TT: Dark delights
A friend writes:
I've been interested in exploring films noir further, and have been meaning to ask if you could suggest the ten (or twelve, or whatever) essential movies that fall under that category. I saw that you included a couple of them on your list last month of the “best sound films made in Hollywood prior to the coming of the New Wave,” but which others would you recommend? Several noir boxed sets have come out recently, and it would be helpful to have some direction here.
Strangely enough, I’ve never drawn up a list, so here goes:
• Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944)
• Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang, 1945)
• Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945)
• Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947)
• Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948)
• Pitfall (André de Toth, 1948)
• Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1949)
• Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949)
• The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950)
• In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950)
• Night and the City (Jules Dassin, 1950)
• The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer, 1952)
• On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952)
• Pickup on South Street (Samuel Fuller, 1953)
• Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958)
My friend also asked for my thoughts on “why noir flowered when it did, starting during WWII and ending pretty much in the early '50s, save for sporadic hommages later on.” That’s an even better question—good enough, in fact, to be answered in print, for money. I’ll do that one of these days….
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TT: Almanac
The things that were coming to be talked about
Have come and gone and are still remembered
As being recent. There is a grain of curiosity
At the base of some new thing, that unrolls
Its question mark like a new wave on the shore.
John Ashbery, “Blue Sonata”
| Friday, February 10, 2006
TT: Not their kind, dear
Yes, it’s Friday. Yes, I’m in The Wall Street Journal. No, I’m not in New York—OGIC is posting the weekly drama-column teaser in my absence, bless her! Two shows this week, one in New York (Charles Grodin’s The Right Kind of People) and one in Chicago (Chicago Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing). Here goes:
Reality-based theater—what I call theatrical journalism—comes in flavors ranging from the poetic (“Henry V”) to the pedestrian (“Guantánamo”). Sometimes a purely fictional play may be journalistic in the precision with which it embodies a historical moment (Wendy Wasserstein, who died last week, had a knack for writing plays like that). And every once in a while a show comes along whose journalistic appeal is so strong that you find it interesting even though it really isn’t very good. Such is the case with “The Right Kind of People,” Charles Grodin’s inside look at a Fifth Avenue co-op board, which had its New York premiere last night. Considered solely as a play, “The Right Kind of People” is creaky in the extreme, but if it’s dish you’re looking for, Mr. Grodin serves it up juicy….
I always make a point of visiting Chicago Shakespeare Theater whenever I’m anywhere near the Windy City. They’ve yet to let me down, and Marti Maraden maintains their winning streak with her production of “Much Ado About Nothing,” in which the play is reset in the mid-19th century to no disruptive effect—the costumes are the main new wrinkle. Ms. Maraden, a well-known Canadian stage director, has brought with her two Canadian actors, Kelli Fox (she’s Michael J. Fox’s sister) and Jim Mezon, who play Beatrice and Benedick, the quarreling lovers, with enormous charm…
No link. You know what to do to read the whole thing, right? (A) Buy a copy of the Friday Journal. (B) Go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instantaneous access to the complete text of my review, along with much, much more art-related coverage.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, February 10, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"If there should be no art it would be impossible that we should know what the other feels."
Moriz Rosenthal, speech at a gala concert in honor of his eightieth birthday (1942)
| Thursday, February 9, 2006
TT: Flowing once more
I'm writing from a secure, undisclosed location (though not my usual one) to announce that I resumed work on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong yesterday morning after a longish and eventful hiatus. The immediate stimulus was the recent arrival of the galleys of Thomas Brothers' Louis Armstrong's New Orleans, which comes out in March. I'll be writing about it at length in a future issue of Commentary, so suffice it for now to say that it's a very important book. No sooner did I put it down than I felt the irresistible urge to get cracking on Hotter Than That again—further proof, if it were needed, that I'm myself again.
Here's something I wrote earlier today:
The coming of modernity not only shrank America to a manageable size, but drained away much of its romance. In an age of airports and superhighways, the Mississippi River has long since lost the symbolic resonance that Abraham Lincoln evoked in 1863 when he paid tribute to General Grant’s victory in Vicksburg by proclaiming that “the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” The phrase, borrowed by Lincoln from James Fenimore Cooper, now has a quaint, almost fustian air. How can we who take the miracle of transoceanic flight for granted think of a mere river—even a 3,900-mile-long one that cleaves the country from top to bottom—as the Father of Waters? Those who live near the banks of the Mississippi need no reminding of the fearful extent of its dammed-up wrath, but for most of the rest of us, it is not a destination but a landmark, something to be flown over or driven across on the way from one megalopolis to another....
Now it's back into the barrel again. See you later!
P.S. I've been having such a good time that I forgot to post the Thursday almanac and theater guide before going to bed last night. Scroll down and you'll find them in their usual places.
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OGIC: Reverse psych, we think
Apropos of my Patrick O'Brian dilemma (skip down a few posts), the inimitable Outer Life writes:
As for O'Brian, I strongly counsel against picking up the books. I
have no innate interest in naval stories, little interest in historical novels qua historical novels, a terror of allowing an author to snare me in a 10,000 page trap and, frankly, too many other authors to read in too little time, so you can imagine how I felt ten years ago as he sucked me into his world, forcing me to devour every one of his novels, together with a history of Nelson's navy and a nautical dictionary, and left me begging for more up to the day he died.
The first book, "Master and Commander," has nothing to do with the movie of the same title. Looking back, it is probably the weakest book of the lot. The second book, "Post Captain," containing O'Brian's extended homage to Austen, is, perhaps, the strongest book. It hooked me. Then there's the book in which nothing happens, they just drift aimlessly in the doldrums. For some reason, that was a great book too. And then....
So BEWARE! Learn from my mistake. Don't let this happen to you.
Yes, it sounds like an awful fate. Well, as I said, the leaning tower of Aubrey is in Michigan, where I won't be until March, and I have books to read for reviewing purposes in the immediate future. Have to say, though, the rapidly proliferating piles of unread books around here are starting to haunt me. Later in our conversation, OL reminded me of a post I wrote long ago about the seriously depressing business of calculating, based on age and reading speed and habits, how many more books one can reasonably expect to read in one's lifetime. I can't put my hands on the post just now, but that's fine because it's a sobering enough thought in hazy memory.
The interesting question we eventually wound our way to was this: what percentage of that terribly finite amount of reading do you feel should be earmarked for incontestably Great books, and what percentage of fluff—elegant, witty, and delightful fluff, needless to say—are you comfortable including? I'm thinking a full 50%. But I have another wrench to throw into the machinery: how many of your 200 or 500 or 1,000 books will be books you've already read? For most of us, I'm guessing, this will be a non-negligible number.
Which just makes me wonder: why don't I clear some space for myself in here already? If I'm honest with myself, many of these books are never going to transcend their present status as baubles. I think my psychology runs this way: at any given moment I may be struck by the urge to read a particular book or a particular kind of book, and I want to have all possible options at hand when that urge strikes. While most readers are constantly at work trying to whittle down their to-be-read piles, I think I am half-consciously but nonetheless deliberately trying to build mine up. And succeeding. The problem is that, in the face of such vast possibility, it's easy to buckle under the pressure of having to choose—to read a few pages here, a few pages there, and to be distracted by the presence of other possibilities even after settling in with something. This, I think, is known as promiscuity, and is why I could probably use a good series to temporarily remove the burden of choice.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, February 9, 2006 | Permanent
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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:
• In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, extended to Feb. 18, reviewed here)
• Mrs. Warren's Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here).
• The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)
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TT: Almanac
"Those who love art and seek to understand it will always be anxious to see more, and if they are wise will look at certain objects they admire again and again. But they must avoid the sin of art greed, restrain the appetite to enjoy more than a digestible number of artistic sensations, and resist the temptation to engulf all the forms of art in their minds. In a world where beautiful and virtuous objects are numbered in the millions, the most judicious approach is to acquire a penetrative knowledge of one aspect of art, and on this basis develop a judgment which promotes a general capacity to evaluate quality. In art, a discerning if limited taste is preferable to enthusiastic voracity."
Paul Johnson, Art: A New History
| Wednesday, February 8, 2006
TT: Almanac
"'I don't mind what anyone says about my work,' said Allen, 'as long as it's intelligent.'
"'It can't always be what you want to hear,' I said, 'or it wouldn't be intelligent.'"
John P. Marquand, Wickford Point
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 8, 2006 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, February 7, 2006
OGIC: Modern-day Maturin and cold feet
This story makes me really want to see Master and Commander all over again. Which will make my dad invoke the tall stack of O'Brian books he months ago placed so invitingly on the bureau in my room back in Michigan. Could this be the year I finally tackle O'Brian? But what if I fall for him? How will I ever read anything else ever again? That stack positively towers—a commitment must be made. I just don't know if I'm ready for something quite so long-term...
In any case, don't miss the slide show.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, February 7, 2006 | Permanent
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OGIC: Fortune cookie
(This cookie dedicated to Tyler Green)
"In an otherwise generous review of my most recent novel, Barney's Version, that appeared in the London Spectator, Francis King had one caveat. Noting the sharpness of protagonist Barney Panofsky's intelligence and the breadth of his culture, he doubted that he could also be a sports nut. 'Would such a man, obsessed with ice hockey, be able to pronounce with such authority on topics as diverse as the descriptive passages in the novels of P.D. James, Pygmalion as play, musical, and film, the pornography published by Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press and Dr. Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes?—rather strains credulity.'"
Mordecai Richler, "Writers and Sports"
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, February 7, 2006 | Permanent
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OGIC: Half a book
I was in the Baltimore Sun last weekend with a review of Paul Watkins's novel about English mountaineers in World War II, The Ice Soldier. I found it a starkly divided book, half of it spectacular and half of it pedestrian. All of the best parts took place in the Italian Alps; describing exigent circumstances and this particular landscape seems to bring out the best in Watkins's writing, and when it is good, it is very, very good:
[Watkins's] rendering of wartime and combat is moored to reality by a vivid array of tiny but enormously striking material details: the graininess of the chocolate that serves as emergency rations, for instance, or the "rotten-lung gasping" sound that a flare makes when it is exposing one's position to the enemy. I've seldom read a more precise and sensually anchored representation of deadly confusion than the gripping late scene in which Bromley and his men are surprised by an advance guard of the German army on their way to the glacier.
The same is true of Bromley's final journey to the Alps with his friend Stanley.... This time their quest is idiosyncratic and personal rather than patriotic, but it is no less harrowing. Watkins' writing is at its best when it is focused on the minutiae of human survival in inhospitable conditions and when it is steeped in the Alpine landscape's menacing beauty. The summit that Bromley and Stanley must attempt, Carton's Rock, memorably stands "by itself, and the first impression was of a ship with black sails, moving slowly through an ocean made of clouds. It was like a mirage, shimmering in the heat haze which rose off the ice."
On human strength and frailty in extreme circumstances, Watkins and The Ice Soldier are superb. While I was immersed in Bromley's Alpine adventures, you could not have pried this book from my hands with a crowbar. When it focuses elsewhere, however, the book is often only serviceable, leaning too heavily on bursts of exposition and straining to deliver symbols and metaphors that arrive overdressed or flat-footed. Its pat, happily-ever-after conclusion is especially unworthy of the churning darkness and daunting beauty of its best stretches.
And when it is bad, it is...not horrid exactly, but certainly no better than so-so. Still, on balance, I'd recommend this book if the mountaineering or war angles strike a chord for you.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, February 7, 2006 | Permanent
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OGIC: Our inimitable referral logs
We got a hit yesterday afternoon from the results of the following Google search:
"Why didn't the snobbish potatoes want their daughter to marry a news broadcaster?"
And if anyone has a plausible answer to that question, I hope you'll share. I'm so curious, in fact, that there could even be a little something in it for you.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, February 7, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“The trouble was that he had set out to write a masterpiece. He had tensed his intellectual muscles and had sweated in his earnestness in order to make each word a jewel, each sentence a concise gem of thought, and the whole a symphony of words; and what was worse, you could tell that he had been thinking of what the critics would say.”
John P. Marquand, Wickford Point
| Monday, February 6, 2006
TT: What am I doing the rest of my life?
Today is my fiftieth birthday. So far I’m dealing with it surprisingly well, considering that I nearly died two months ago. It helps that an attractive woman d'un âge certain told me the other day that she thought my silver hair was sexy, though her choice of words struck me as something of a mixed blessing (she’s the first person ever to have used the word “silver” to describe the color of what used to be a mousy-brown mop once upon a time).
Here's how old I am:
• This is what my home town looked like fifty years ago.
• My maternal grandmother canned fruit and stored it in her root cellar.
• My mother was baptized in a river.
• My father witnessed a lynching.
• Milk used to be delivered to my family’s back door.
• We used to leave that door unlocked.
• When I was a boy, I read Li’l Abner
and Pogo
in the paper every Sunday.
• I caught a train from this depot in 1961. (Now it’s a museum, and I gave a lecture
there last summer.)
• This is the first movie I ever saw in a theater.
• I know who Clem Kadiddlehopper
was.
• I know what CONELRAD was.
• I used to send telegrams.
• I saw the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show.
• I learned how to type on a machine that looked like this.
• I watched the first moon landing on TV.
• I cast my first presidential ballot in 1976. (Don't ask.)
• I saw Star Wars and Animal House when they were new.
• I saw José Iturbi play the Mozart D Minor Piano Concerto with the Kansas City Philharmonic.
• I reviewed a concert by Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians for the Kansas City Star.
• My last surviving grandparent died two decades ago.
• I bought my first VCR in 1984 and my first PC three years after that.
I wish I were ten years younger, but I wouldn’t want to give up what the past decade taught me, though I’m not quite ready to endorse the notion that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger. Yes, I had a midlife crisis, and no, I didn’t buy a red sports car or have a fling with a woman half my age. I got out in one piece, more or less, greatly changed but still myself.
And now…what? The fourth decade of my life, after all, wasn’t exactly an unbroken string of disasters. In between driving into personal potholes, I published three books, in which I am (mostly) well pleased, and started work on a fourth, for which I have even higher hopes. I was appointed by the President to the National Council on the Arts, fingerprinted by the New York Police Department, investigated by the FBI, and unanimously confirmed by the Senate, all of which was occasionally irritating but basically pretty cool. I’ve spent the past three years as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, a job I never sought that has proved to be more fulfilling than I could possibly have imagined. More recently I began writing a new column for the Saturday Journal, and that, too, is giving me great pleasure. In addition, I taught a college course in criticism, gave a couple of dozen public lectures, and made a like number of radio broadcasts, discovering in the process that talking for money is fun. And—needless to say—I started this blog.
So what do I do next? Like many people, my life has been a series of goals, a things-to-do list, and at fifty I now find myself in the position, at once pleasing and disconcerting, of having accomplished most of them. As for the things I haven't yet done, nearly all of them are things I'm no longer likely to do, assuming I ever was: I doubt, for instance, that I'll learn a second language or write a novel or become a father. I could spend the rest of my life running in place, and I suppose that would be perfectly fine. Except that I know it wouldn’t. The time will come, if it hasn’t already, when I’ll want to try my hand at something new—and I haven't the slightest idea what it might be.
Perhaps the goals of my fifth decade will be purely interior and personal. To be sure, I can’t exactly see myself withdrawing from the world, like the politician-turned-mendicant of Rudyard Kipling's "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat":
Next month, when the city had returned to its sun-baked quiet, he did a thing no Englishman would have dreamed of doing; for, so far as the world’s affairs went, he died. The jewelled order of his knighthood went back to the Indian Government, and a new Prime Minister was appointed to the charge of affairs, and a great game of General Post began in all the subordinate appointments. The priests knew what had happened, and the people guessed; but India is the one place in the world where a man can do as he pleases and nobody asks why; and the fact that Dewan Sir Purun Dass, K.C.I.E., had resigned position, palace, and power, and taken up the begging-bowl and ochre-coloured dress of a Sunnyasi, or holy man, was considered nothing extraordinary. He had been, as the Old Law recommends, twenty years a youth, twenty years a fighter,—though he had never carried a weapon in his life,—and twenty years head of a household. He had used his wealth and his power for what he knew both to be worth; he had taken honour when it came his way; he had seen men and cities far and near, and men and cities had stood up and honoured him. Now he would let those things go, as a man drops the cloak he no longer needs….
Still, it could be that I’ve done all that I’m supposed to do out in the land of renown, the place where (as Philip Larkin put it) people pretend to be themselves. Or not: I’ve lived long enough to know that life is pandemonium and not to be second-guessed. If I hadn’t known that already, the events of the last few months would have taught it to me with a vengeance. The wise man is surprised by nothing—and everything.
This is something I wrote last April:
As for me, all I know is that nothing I imagined for myself when young has come to pass: everything is different, utterly so. I’m not a schoolteacher, not a jazz musician, not the chief music critic of a major metropolitan newspaper, not a syndicated columnist, not settled and secure. Nor am I the person I expected to be, calm and detached and philosophical: I still cry without warning, laugh too loud, lose my head and heart too easily, the same way I did a quarter-century ago. The person I was is the person I am, only older. Might that be wisdom of a sort?
I know one more thing now that I didn’t know then: I am blissfully, madly happy to be alive.
* * *
I’ll be out of town for the rest of the week. See you next Monday.
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TT: Almanac
“A watery sunlight breaks through the smoke of the Chef and turns the sky yellow. Elysian Fields glistens like a vat of sulfur; the playground looks as if it alone had survived the end of the world. At last I spy Kate; her stiff little Plymouth comes nosing into my bus stop. There she sits like a bomber pilot, resting on her wheel and looking sideways at the children and not seeing, and she could be I myself, sooty eyed and nowhere.
“Is it possible that— For a long time I have secretly hoped for the end of the world and believed with Kate and my aunt and Sam Yerger and many other people that only after the end could the few who survive creep out of their holes and discover themselves to be themselves and live as merrily as children among the viny ruins. Is it possible that—it is not too late?
“Iii-oorrr goes the ocean wave, its struts twinkling in the golden light, its skirt swaying to and fro like a young dancing girl."
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
| Friday, February 4, 2005
OGIC: What they saw
In this week's Chicago Reader (no link, boo hiss), Erin Hogan has a selling review of Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan's De Kooning: An American Master. She had a great time reading the book, though she notes that Stevens and Swan had some help from the painter in making it so readable: "De Kooning's life story is a biographer's dream, full of tragedy, triumph, and salacious, page-turning detail."
But I'm more interested in the built-in limitation she points to that afflicts many artists' biographers:
Writers apparently love to write about writing; they produce volumes about the creative process in general and their practice in particular, and there are countless books devoted to the topic of writers on their craft.…Painters, however, rarely talk about their process.
After de Kooning finished the magnificent Excavation (now housed at the Art Institute), it took him three years to complete another painting. That's not so surprising—all artists fall fallow or need time, after a major creative outburst, to recharge. What is surprising about de Kooning's three-year disapppearance is that he was working the whole time, with the same obsessive intensity as ever. And he was working, essentially, on one painting: Woman I, the first of the infamous "Woman" series.
For de Kooning, Woman I was an endless nightmare. He grew so angry with the work that, according to Stevens and Swan, at one point he "ripped [it] off the frame and left it in the hallway by his door, with a stack of old cardboard and odds and ends of wood." But while that might explain what happened to the physical object, bitterly rejected there at the end of the hall, we are no closer to understanding what would compel de Kooning to spend three years on one painting or why he would decide it was a hopeless failure….
Stevens and Swan heroically attempt to describe the creation of Woman I, but those three years remain elusive, as do much of the inner workings of de Kooning's mind. All of the contextual detail, description, lyrical interpretations, lectures, articles, and chronicles of conversations marshaled by the authors—none of it quite gets to the core. The fortress of fact protects the empty throne.
I haven't read enough artists' biographies to have realized this about them, but Hogan's observation especially interested me since I'm now about 80 pages into Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth, a novel that is narrated by a painter and that has me completely captivated. Half the book's spell over me is in its persuasive effort to represent the artist's eye. The narrator, Gulley Jimson, looks at the world—the curve of a woman's back, a coffee spill on a tablecloth—and reflexively sees possibilities for his painting. He sees so much this way—and misses so much. I've read novels about artists before, but never any that made this serious an attempt to minutely portray how a painter looks at the world, what he sees, and what he does with it. This is, I think, just what Hogan finds herself missing in art biographies, and it does seem more suited to the novelist's art than that of the biographer, who is indeed limited to "the fortress of fact."
More on the novel when I finish it someday. In the meantime, if you're in Chicago, pick up a free Reader and check out the rest of Hogan's review. (If you're not, keep an eye on this guy.)
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Friday, February 4, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Craftsman
I note with sadness the death of John Vernon. You won’t recognize his name unless you know a lot about movies, but it’s way better than even money that you’d know his face and voice in an instant. A Canadian character actor who came south to Hollywood, he specialized in playing a certain kind of villain—serious, deep-voiced, a bit prissy and creepy, almost visibly compromised—and did it with such vivid exactitude that he thereby found his way into a number of memorable films, among them Point Blank (his big-screen debut), Dirty Harry, Charley Varrick, and The Outlaw Josey Wales. Then he landed a part that allowed him to play his “natural” type for laughs, Dean Vernon Wormer of Animal House, seizing the opportunity with such self-evident relish that my generation will always remember him as the hapless stiff who put Delta House on double secret probation.
Like Strother Martin and J.T. Walsh, Vernon was that most admirable of small-part actors, a professional with flair, and I hope he gets some nice obits this weekend. (He made it into Friday’s Washington Post, but the New York Times, as is its increasingly frequent wont, dropped the ball.) He deserved them.
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TT: Beach blanket bungle
I didn’t enjoy myself at the theater last week, and my weekly drama column for The Wall Street Journal, in which two newly opened shows catch several kinds of hell, reflects that fact with alarming clarity.
First under the lash is Good Vibrations:
Harpo Marx described the famously awful, extremely popular “Abie’s Irish Rose” as “no worse than a bad cold.” Judged by that yardstick, “Good Vibrations,” the new Beach Boys musical that opened Wednesday at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre, is more like a stroke—one that leaves you capable of movement but knocks 15 points off your IQ. By the time I finally staggered up the aisle, I found it hard to remember that there was once a time when even the most blatantly commercial musicals were put together with a modicum of intelligence and craftsmanship….
I’m not saying there’s nothing good about “Good Vibrations.” I liked the tall, cheery-looking blonde in the blue top, for instance. But outside of the dogged professionalism of the hard-working cast, there’s precious little else to admire outside of the undeniable fact that it never pretends to be anything other than a big dumb applause machine. Somehow I can’t see paying $100 a seat for a musical that’s unpretentiously horrible.
No less unpleasing was Brooklyn Boy:
Donald Margulies, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “Dinner With Friends,” has now written a play about a struggling young Brooklyn author who writes a best-seller about his unhappy youth and promptly discovers that all that glitters is not gold. Excuse the cliché, please: “Brooklyn Boy,” the Manhattan Theatre Club’s latest offering, is nothing but. It’s as if Mr. Margulies had spent a week poring over Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas before sitting down to write his latest opus…
I suppose it’s possible for a playwright to write a good play about a writer, but the temptation to sink into a nice warm bath of self-serving self-indulgence is apparently too great for ordinary mortals to overcome. Harold Ross knew this so well that he turned it into an iron rule for contributors to the New Yorker: “Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer.” Too bad nobody told Mr. Margulies.
No link, so to partake of the rest of the carnage, buy a copy of today’s Journal, or (even better) get modern and go here.
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TT: Almanac
“The transition from tenseness, self-responsibility, and worry, to equanimity, receptivity, and peace, is the most wonderful of all those shiftings of inner equilibrium, those changes of personal centre of energy, which I have analyzed so often; and the chief wonder of it is that it so often comes about, not by doing, but by simply relaxing and throwing the burden down.”
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
| Thursday, February 3, 2005
TT: A non-announcement
Andrew Sullivan’s decision to put andrewsullivan.com on “hiatus” is the talk of the political sector of the blogosphere. Whatever you may think of Andrew’s politics, there’s no doubt that he’s been hugely influential in helping to put blogging on the map. After all, he’s been doing it every day for the past five years, well before most of us even knew what a blog was, and it was from him that a great many people—myself included—first got the idea to start blogs of their own. Well do I remember the morning I looked at andrewsullivan.com and said to myself, I’d like to do something just like this, only about the arts. A couple of years went by before I finally jumped in the pond, but that was how “About Last Night” came to be.
Andrew’s explanation of why he’s decided to give up regular posting is worth reading:
I want to take a breather, to write a long-overdue book, to read some more, travel to Europe and the Middle East, and work on some longer projects. Much as I would like to do everything, I've been unable to give the blog my full attention and make any progress on a book (and I'm two years behind). It's not so much the time as the mindset. The ability to keep on top of almost everything on a daily and hourly basis just isn't compatible with the time and space to mull over some difficult issues in a leisurely and deliberate manner. Others might be able to do it. But I've tried and failed….
I know whereof he speaks, though so far I’ve managed to keep all my journalistic balls in the air (that’ll be enough out of you, Mr. TMFTML). Even though I don’t post as often as Andrew does, “About Last Night” is still updated at least once each weekday, a schedule that has yet to stop me from also turning out a weekly drama column, three monthly essays, and a not-inconsiderable amount of miscellaneous writing. In addition, I’ve published two books since launching this blog, one of which I wrote from scratch (and whose progress I chronicled in this space).
On the other hand, All in the Dances was a brief life, whereas the biography of Louis Armstrong on which I just started work will be at least as long as The Skeptic. It’s going to be interesting, to put it mildly, to see whether working on the Armstrong book is compatible with writing as much as I do for newspapers and magazines. (I sure hope so—I need the money!)
And what about blogging? Believe it or not, I have few doubts about being able to keep that up. Paul Gigot, my boss at The Wall Street Journal, asked me not long ago where I found the energy to blog each day. I replied that writing “About Last Night” was so intellectually stimulating that the energy seemed to generate itself. As I’ve said before, I think of this blog as a kind of sketchbook, a public place in which I can think out loud in front of an audience, playing with ideas that in time may find their way into more elaborate print-media pieces. (H.L. Mencken did much the same thing with his weekly op-ed column in the Baltimore Sun, which is where I got the idea.) It’s a different kind of writing, of course, more immediate and less formal, which makes it easier to turn out. In addition, I’ve noticed that my contributions to “About Last Night” have grown considerably more personal in tone over the past year and a half, and I gather from your e-mail and our statistics that many of you have been pleased with the results.
Be that as it may, I know my compulsive tendencies are a part of what fuels “About Last Night,” which can’t be a good thing. One of the reasons why I asked Our Girl in Chicago to join me was that I thought her presence might free me to post less often. Instead, it’s encouraged me to post more often. About that I have mixed feelings (though definitely not about the contributions of my adored co-blogger). Those of you who’ve been reading “About Last Night” from the beginning are aware that I’ve been trying to teach myself how to take time off, not just from blogging but from work in general. Though it may not be immediately apparent, I’ve had a pretty fair amount of success at this, especially in the past four or five months, and I hope to have still more.
If you’re expecting me to segue deftly into an announcement to the effect that I won’t be posting as regularly in the future as I have in the past, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you. I love “About Last Night,” and I intend to keep on writing it pretty much the way I have all along. But one thing I am going to do (or at least try to do—we’ll see how it goes) is take an occasional impromptu day off without posting my usual I’m-up-to-my-ears-see-you-tomorrow notice. I think that’ll be good for me. Writing this blog is the furthest possible thing from a chore, and I want it to stay that way. So please don’t be alarmed when you come calling one day and find nothing new to read but the daily almanac. Instead, smile knowingly and say, Good boy, Terry! I hope you’re having fun today. And stay cool—I’ll be back.
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TT: Almanac
All that I can hope to make you understand
Is only events: not what has happened.
And people to whom nothing has ever happened
Cannot understand the unimportance of events.
T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion
| Wednesday, February 2, 2005
OGIC: Thomson agonistes
I don't generally enjoy author readings. I love books, but I'd rather be alone with them, moving through them at my own pace, backing up at will and lingering where I want to. I never feel as though I absorb very much at live readings, and I remain stubbornly more interested in books than authors—I don't go in much for author interviews, either. In special cases, however—magnetic personalities, prodigious talents, odd ducks—I do find it worth twenty or thirty minutes of mild squirming just to find out what sort of creature could have produced a particular work, and what it's like to be in the same room with them. So on Monday night I went to see David Thomson talk about his new history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation, at the corner bookstore.
For me, this counted as an Event with a capital E. Ever since Terry opened my eyes to Thomson's (New) Biographical Dictionary of Film several years ago, I've been fascinated with Thomson's mind, with the sheer encyclopedic ambition of the NBDF, and with its truly inexhaustible entertainment value. I use the book in two ways regularly: like a reference work, looking up people and movies that I've been thinking about or need to know something about; and, once a year or so, like a narrative, reading straight through from Abbott and Costello to Terry Zwigoff. One of the friends who accompanied me to Monday's talk bought the Dictionary, but not before raising the question "Why a dictionary and not an encyclopedia?" Without missing a beat, the clerk answered: because it's supposed to be definitive. Exactly right.
After being introduced, Thomson took a seat and spoke rather than reading, bless him, and I liked the talk even if I never did quite reconcile the genial and engaging raconteur he puts forth in person with the dervish of the NBDF, whirling his feelings about movies into definitions—things almost as solid as facts. And a leitmotif of his talk—which appeared at first to be an extemporaneous, offhand chat but eventually revealed itself to be quite deliberately structured—was not quite feeling vs. fact, but feeling vs. intellectualizing about the movies. His show of ambivalence about this opposition was the one part of the performance that was readily identifiable as performance. He kept playing devil's advocate with himself, floating the notion that perhaps we shouldn't analyze our enjoyment of movies any more than we analyze our enjoyment of sex or chocolate, but nobody, I think, was buying it. Not coming from this grand lexicographer, the man blurbed by Guillermo Cabrera Infante as "the Dr. Johnson of film." I think not.
Thomson began by describing a typical critics' screening. Reminding me of something Terry once wrote, he proposed that critics should be required to see the movies they review in the company of the general public at least once in a while. His reasons were different, however, from those behind Terry's similar prescription for art critics. He said that film critics are so concerned not to give away their feelings about a movie to their colleagues/competitors that nobody dares have an observable response at these screenings—no laughing, no gasping, no jumping, and under no circumstances anything bearing the least resemblance to producing tears (I believe his exact words were "I'd rather eat my face"). Sounds grim! And his point, that this constitutes a whole different realm of experience from what his readers are doing when they go to the movies, is a solid one.
But it's not about feeling vs. thinking, it's about the infectious unease and egotism of these critics when they get around each other. Though I do fully believe that strait-jacketing their own human responses must warp the critical judgments that get recorded in their reviews. Thomson went on from here to describe the first time he met Pauline Kael, which happened at a New York critics' screening. She was a small, rapt woman sitting next to him, never pausing in her copious note-taking and yet somehow never giving the screen less than her full attention. After the film he quizzed her about her method, ascertaining that a) she did this at every screening; b) she never watched a movie twice if she could avoid it; and c) this was because she felt the second time would be an imitation of experience (actual experience occurring only the first time one saw a film), and so somehow inimical to what seeing movies should be.
(Digression: years ago I went to Chicago's much-mourned McClurg Court Cinemas in Streeterville—containing the most colossal auditorium and screen in the area—to see, with guilty pleasure, John Carpenter's remake of Village of the Damned. Much to my and my companion's delight, Roger Ebert was in attendance. Our delight did not derive from mere celebrity-sighting, but from the fact that he had already reviewed the movie. And trust me, Citizen Kane it ain't.)
(Further digression: Ebert appeared to love the attention he got from other people in the audience, who sensed his approachability and took advantage of it. He was the chatty, beaming center of a ring of admirers that only dispersed when the lights went down. His presence gave the screening a social, almost festival atmosphere that I've seldom encountered at the movies.)
The opposition between approaching movies sensually and approaching them critically—to my mind a suspect if not simply false opposition—formed the backbone of Thomson's talk. In this context he spoke about the prehistory of film critics, when what critics there were (James Agee, Manny Farber) were writing for small-circulation journals and when everybody would go see everything, not needing the counsel of reviewers beforehand, not even needing to know the name of the movie. It was going to the movies that counted, not the movie itself. And although he didn't go so far as to endorse this as a healthier state of affairs, there was definitely a hint of nostalgia for a simpler or happier time. Which seemed odd coming from someone who work matters precisely because it is so finely attuned to the minutiae of individual careers, even performances—even pores, as here on Barbara Stanwyck, who is on my mind lately:
Her image of the hard-boiled girl of easy virtue was kept up in William Keighley's Ladies They Talk About (33) and in Baby Face (33, Alfred E. Green), in which she maneuvers her way up the length of the business ladder—by every seductive means at her command. It would be difficult to think of an actress so expressive of the early 1930s girl on the make—as intimate, shiny, and flimsy as a discarded slip, but with eyes ever sly and alert. So often with great movie actresses, we have a first thought of skin tone: with Stanwyck it is of tacky paint, too warm for glossy hardness.
It was disappointing when, to wrap things up, Thomson ultimately zagged away from nostalgia and movies-as-bonbons to endorse the critical approach. Disappointing not because he did so—you knew he would in the end, and if you bothered to come out and see him at all, you almost certainly wanted him to—but because of the reasons he gave. His young son, given a game system for Christmas, spent 37 hours of his first week of ownership playing it. Movies have made this and other dangerous forms of not-thinking possible. We must talk about them if we're to avoid being brainwashed or brain-deadened or sheepified by them.
Huh. And all my hours with the NBDF had persuaded me that it's good to talk about the movies because it enhances our pleasure at the art and the life in them, not because we need to protect ourselves from them. How very odd. But there has always seemed to be some fissure between the dour essayist in Thomson and the joyful lexicographer. It's much the same crack that appeared in his talk, separating the drably sociological-political closing remarks from wonderfully vivid details like how Kael, unexpectedly diminutive, wrote her notes in the dark in just the manner someone else might write letters. It's almost as if the freewheeling observer in Thomson—his best critical self—can only come out to play after doing his math homework or his civic duty.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, February 2, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Entries from an unkept diary
• I recently saw a stage actress I know in an episode of a popular TV series. This was a new experience for me. I’ve watched any number of writer friends hold forth on talk shows, and I’ve even tuned into David Letterman to see a band whose members I know quite well. But all those people were being themselves, more or less, whereas my actress friend was pretending to be someone else. Of course she was in one sense wholly herself (I knew her smile in an instant/I knew the curve of her face), and the part she played drew deeply on her familiar energy. Nor was she made up in any deceptive way: she looked like the person I know. Yet some uncanny transformation had nonetheless taken place, and I found myself to be more than a little bit disoriented as I watched her on the screen.
Perhaps it’s the sheer realism of TV itself that disoriented me, the fact that we turn to it in search of information as often as for amusement. Live theater is far more mysterious, for the paradoxical reason that the actors are physically present, in but not of the same space. Watching a play is like looking at a painting in a museum: the painting itself is real, a corporeal object that you could reach out and touch if the guards would be kind enough to look the other way, but it’s not the “objectivity” of the canvas with which you’re concerned. A TV series, by contrast, isn’t mysterious at all. It seems as real as life itself—unless you happen to know one of the actors, in which case the boundaries quickly grow blurry.
By the way, I sent the actress in question an e-mail saying that I’d seen her and was impressed. She wrote back as follows:
There I was, all 15 or 20 seconds worth, in the most unflattering closeup. I wanted to put a paper bag over my head!! At least my acting, what little screen time I had, was truthful. And....I had a pimple right in the middle of my forehead!!!!!! AAAGH!!!!!
Remember that the next time you wish you were a TV actor: all you see are the pimples.
• It rarely fails to surprise people when I tell them that I almost always know how long it’ll take me to write a given piece. (In fact, I think it disillusions them.) The part I forget to mention, though, is that the clock doesn’t start running until I start writing. I rarely get blocked, but I sometimes find the prospect of writing so disagreeable to contemplate that I stall for as long as I possibly can.
I don’t know why I do this. It isn’t as though writing were physically painful, after all. Nor do I do it all the time, or even very often. Most of the time I face the blank page the way Marcus Aurelius might have faced the guillotine: I get up first thing in the morning, climb down from the loft, boot up the iBook, and go straight to work, knowing that there’s no point in forestalling the inevitable. Yesterday, though, my brain switched into Maximum Stall Mode as soon as I started thinking about my “Second City” column for this Sunday’s Washington Post. I haven’t the slightest idea why I kept putting it off. I knew what I was going to write about and I knew what I wanted to say. Yet not only did I wait until the last minute to start writing, but I actually went so far as to blog instead, having previously announced that I was taking the day off from "About Last Night" in order to write my column. Obviously I was in the clutches of Benchley’s Law: “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it is not the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”
Fortunately, my editor in Washington called at two o’clock and asked, very gently, what time I’d be filing, immediately followed by a friend who reminded me that we were planning to get together to choose a pair of frames for my new glasses, and when did I want to meet her? The combined effects of these calls brought me to my senses, and the column was finished and filed by 4:45. And yes, it took exactly as long to write as all my other “Second City” columns.
Go figure. Please. And after you do, tell me what you figured out.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 2, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"A first-person account is, after all, a confession; and the one who has something to confess has something to conceal. And the one who has the word 'I' at his or her disposal has the quickest device for concealing himself."
Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 2, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, February 1, 2005
TT: First over the side
By way of Romenesko, this column by Laura Berman from the Detroit News:
The scene: A college classroom at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
The subject: Writing the newspaper column.
The question: "Can any of you name a columnist you read -- in a newspaper or magazine or online -- on a regular basis?"
In response: Dead silence.
Slowly, one hand rises. A sports columnist is mentioned.
Nobody else in the room hints at any recognition of the sports columnist's name: Anyone?
"My generation is very visually oriented," explains Ryan Schreiber, a U-M Dearborn junior from Dearborn who -- like most in the class -- is majoring in journalism but doesn't read much of it.
"My generation grew up watching MTV. We are used to short spurts of words, lots of images...We're used to immediate gratification."…
In another journalism class down the hall, the instructor annoyed his students. After asking how many read a newspaper regularly -- four or five out of 35 said they did -- he required them to bring a newspaper to class twice a week. "The students don't like it," says Laura Hipshire, one of the journalism students.
Read the whole thing here. Then notice what four-letter word is missing from the column: blog.
Why? Maybe because newspaper columnists and reporters (with a growing number of honorable exceptions) are either still largely unaware of blogs or loathe them so much that they prefer not to acknowledge their existence. Maybe because newspaper editors (with a lot fewer exceptions) are proving themselves to be deeply weird when it comes to blogging, which they apparently regard as a threat to their long-established ways of doing journalistic business.
But here’s another thought that occurred to me as I read this piece: could it be that the most immediate effect of the blogosphere on the mainstream media will be to make columnists obsolete?
While I don’t want to rev up the crystal ball too far this morning (I have to finish writing a column for a newspaper, as it happens), I've been wondering exactly what place the old-fashioned newspaper column still has in the new world of on-line opinion journalism, with its unprecedented blend of immediacy, interaction, and diversity of view. Reporting, yes: that continues to make sense, and it’s not going away any time soon, though its nature will doubtless be transformed as newspapers come to terms with the blogosphere. But who’s going to be reading twice-weekly op-ed essays on paper five years from now? For that matter, who’s going to be publishing them?
I don’t know. I’m just asking.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a deadline to hit….
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TT: Overpressed with sail
Apologies, but I've got to steer clear of the blog for the rest of the day. I've stumbled into a fever swamp of appointments, deadlines (including a couple of new ones that only just got added to my calendar), a mad dash to Washington on Friday morning, and not quite enough time to get everything done before I head for the train. Something's got to give, and it's you.
For now, go read some other blog. You'll find a long list of good ones in the right-hand column. I'll be back tomorrow.
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TT: Almanac
"I don't want anyone to feel I'm posing as a plaster saint. Like everyone I have my faults, but I always have believed in making an honest living. I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so. Many a night the boys in my neighborhood would go uptown to Mrs. Cole's lawn, where Kid Ory used to hold sway. The other boys were sharp as tacks in their fine suits of clothes. I did not have the money they had and I could not dress as they did, so I put Kid Ory out of my mind. And Mayann, Mama Lucy and I would go to some nickel show and have a grand time."
Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans
| Monday, January 31, 2005
TT: In the beginning
One of the ways in which e-mail is transforming our culture is that it is has become the channel by which certain kinds of bad news are increasingly likely to arrive. This morning I opened my mailbox and found a note from an old high-school friend: “I apologize for the impersonal mass e-mail but it is a little quicker….” My heart sank even before I could jump to the next paragraph, which told me that Richard Powell, the man who taught me how to play the violin nearly 40 years ago, died last night. I hadn’t heard from him for a long time, but no sooner did I see his name on the screen of my iBook than my head was full of snapshot-clear memories.
So much of life is a matter of pure coincidence (if that's what you think it is). I happened to see a televised concert by the Russian violinist David Oistrakh one Sunday afternoon, and the warmth and passion with which he played the Brahms D Minor Sonata, a piece I’d never heard by a composer I knew only for having written a lullaby, made a fateful impression on me. Dick Powell came to Matthews Elementary School a few months later to administer a musical aptitude test to the fifth grade, and I got a perfect score. This, he informed me the following week, qualified me to play a stringed instrument. I went home and told my astonished parents that I wanted them to buy me a violin, and that was that.
Powell was a small-time jazz bassist turned small-town music teacher who ran the string program in the public schools
of my home town. (He told me that he’d played in strip joints once upon a time, which seemed to me unimaginably exotic.) He thought I was talented and went out of his way to encourage me, and within a few years I was playing Bach, Vivaldi, and Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre with the high-school orchestra. It soon became clear to both of us, though, that my musical interests extended well beyond the violin, so he was no less encouraging when I asked to borrow one of the school’s plywood basses for the summer. That was the year I taught myself jazz by plucking along with Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Goes to College in my bedroom every afternoon, and a year or two later I started playing country music and bluegrass with a band called Sour Mash. It wasn’t Bach, but that was all right by him. He had no musical prejudices, and it was in large part because of his openness that I acquired the infinite sense of musical possibility that I carry with me to this day.
I found other mentors as I grew older, but Powell was the first, and there would never be a time when he failed to say whatever encouraging words he thought I needed to hear. He watched me go off to college to major in music, looked on with amusement when I became a part-time music critic for the Kansas City Star, and cheered from the sidelines when I rolled the dice and headed for New York City. By then he’d moved away from Smalltown, U.S.A., but he kept up with my progress, and from time to time his daughter Melodie (a nice name for a musician's child) would let me know how he was doing.
Now Melodie writes to tell me of her father’s death, and I find myself filled to overflowing with that most beautiful and transfiguring of emotions, gratitude. No one person, not even me, made me what I am, but Dick Powell ranks very high on the short list of those who did the most along the way. He taught me to read music—and reassured me that it was all right to play by ear, too. He introduced me to the vast world of classical music—but never for a moment suggested that no other musical worlds were worth exploring. I suppose I would have found my way into music on my own sooner or later, but I might well have had a lot to unlearn down the line had I not been fortunate enough to fall into the hands of so open-minded and open-hearted a teacher. He pointed me in the right direction, then gave me a push. I can’t think of a better epitaph.
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TT: Since we met
Remember me? I’m the one who was so absurdly happy last Friday afternoon, and I still am. It helped that I didn’t have a huge amount to do over the weekend, though I managed to keep quite sufficiently busy, thank you very much.
Among other things:
• On Saturday afternoon I went to a Broadway matinee, then took the night off (yes!).
• On Sunday morning I wrote the first draft of a 2,000-word essay called “Watching Westerns in Manhattan” for American Cowboy. Bet you didn’t know I wrote for them, did you?
• On Sunday evening I had an early dinner with the Mutant, my singer-painter friend, after which we retired to the Teachout Museum, a/k/a my living room, to watch Kind Hearts and Coronets, which both of us were seeing for the first time (O.K., Cinetrix, try not to look so shocked). No sooner did the Mutant head for home than I called my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., having previously sent a what’s-new e-mail to Our Girl, whose chatty reply awaited me when I hung up....
But I’m burying the lead. Here’s my stop-press bulletin:
• I kept my hand-on-heart oath to Bass Player, broke out my hitherto unopened watercolor set, and covered one whole sheet of cool-looking paper with homemade, gaily colored hieroglyphics. (I even have a witness—I showed the results to the Mutant earlier this evening.) It was, as I’d hoped, completely absorbing fun, and though I fear I have no obvious aptitude for the making of visual art, I still can’t wait to do it again.
What next? Today I get my eyes examined, pay bills, and do a little babysitting. Tomorrow I see my trainer, write my monthly Washington Post column about the arts in New York, and go to a preview of Good Vibrations, the new Beach Boys musical. On Wednesday I write my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal. Thursday is up for grabs. Come Friday I’ll be off to the nation’s capital to lunch with a blogger and watch American Ballet Theatre dance an all-Fokine program at Kennedy Center, followed by two previews back in New York and a birthday (mine).
As always, books will be read (most of them about New Orleans at the turn of the century) and CDs listened to (most of them by Louis Armstrong) in the interstices of all these occurrences.
Such are the ongoing adventures of a New York-based blogger-bon vivant. More as it happens.
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TT: Almanac
"I'm a backslider as a non-believer."
Penelope Fitzgerald (quoted in Dean Flower, "A Completely Determined Human Being," Hudson Review, Winter 2005)
| Saturday, February 7, 2004
TT: Almanac
"The question of capital punishment arising in connection with In Cold Blood, he says, 'At least in England they don’t keep them waiting about for five or ten years.' I point out that in the Christie case they should have and ask whether he thinks the death sentence is ever justifiable. 'Well, there have been people on whom I can picture it being carried out. Brecht, for one. In fact I can imagine doing it to him myself. It might even have been rather enjoyable, when the time came, to have been able to say to him, "Now let’s step outside." I’d have given him a good last meal, of course. Still, you must admire the logic of a man who lives in a Communist country, takes out Austrian citizenship, does his banking in Switzerland, and, like a gambler hedging his bets, sends for the pastor at the end in case there could be something in that, too.'"
W.H. Auden, in conversation with Robert Craft (quoted in Craft's Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship)
| Friday, February 6, 2004
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