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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, March 2, 2007
TT: In the belly of the beast
In today's Wall Street Journal drama column, I review the four shows I saw in California last week, Speed-the-Plow at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, The Four of Us at the Old Globe in San Diego, Life Is a Dream at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, and Hedda Gabler at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco:
Going to Los Angeles to see David Mamet’s snarlingly comic snapshot of the movie business is like going to a sausage factory to make fun of the pigs, and this production pulls no punches. Greg Germann and Jon Tenney come on like buzzsaws as Charlie and Bobby, the up-and-coming studio execs who claim to be proud of their artistic whoredom, while Ms. Silverstone is just right as Karen, the (seemingly) innocent office girl who falls into their clutches….
Itamar Moses made a biggish splash two seasons ago with “Bach in Leipzig,” a historical fantasia in the manner of Tom Stoppard whose cocky virtuosity was all the more impressive in light of the fact that its author was just 28 years old. Now the Old Globe is putting on Mr. Moses’ latest play, “The Four of Us,” a two-man comedy about a pair of twentysomething writers, one of whom (Gideon Banner) is more successful than the other (Sean Dugan). “Nobody gives a damn about a writer and his problems except another writer,” Harold Ross, the founder of the New Yorker, famously declared. Mr. Moses has proved him wrong, for “The Four of Us” turns out to be a graceful little meditation on friendship and envy, smart and sweet and deftly pointed….
South Coast Repertory is a suburban theater (it’s 45 minutes from downtown Los Angeles when traffic is light, which it usually isn’t) known for having given the first performances of such successful plays as “The Clean House,” “Intimate Apparel,” “Prelude to a Kiss” and “Wit.” It’s also the West Coast home of Kate Whoriskey, one of America’s most creative young directors. Her latest show is a new translation by Nilo Cruz (“Anna in the Tropics”) of “Life Is a Dream,” Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s 1635 verse drama about a prince (Daniel Breaker) who doubts the reality of the world he sees around him….
Ms. Whoriskey is a hot name on the regional-theater circuit, but she hasn’t done anything in New York since the 2004 premiere of Lynn Nottage’s “Fabulation” at Playwrights Horizons. Don’t ask me why. Like all of her productions, this one is outrageously imaginative and unfailingly absorbing….
My last “Hedda Gabler” was the Sydney Theatre Company’s sped-up, semi-modernized adaptation, in which Cate Blanchett gave a flamboyant performance that reminded me of Bette Davis on a bumpy night. After seeing that wrong-headed but undeniably exciting production, I couldn’t help but feel that A.C.T.’s plain-Jane version was a bit too respectable for its own good….
No free link. Buy today’s Journal at your neighborhood newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal so that you can read all of the Journal’s Friday arts coverage, my drama column included. (If you’re already a subscriber, my column is here.)
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TT: Almanac
"Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey."
Marcel Proust, Cities of the Plain
| Thursday, March 1, 2007
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)
• Salvage (The Coast of Utopia, part 3)* (drama, PG-13, nudity and adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes May 13)
• 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)
• 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)
CLOSING SOON:
• The Madras House (drama, G, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 25)
• 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 NEXT WEEK:
• The Last Word… (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)
• The Vertical Hour (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)
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TT: Almanac
"All my life I’ve been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence."
Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh
| Wednesday, February 28, 2007
TT: Life is unfair
I seem to have caught a cold. No doubt I picked it up last weekend in an airplane cabin, which doesn't make me any happier about it. How could I possibly have gotten sick just when I have to spend the whole day writing about Tom Stoppard for Commentary, followed by a trip to the theater district to see Alfred Molina in Howard Katz? Damn, damn, damn.
Ah, well, the hell with it. In the immortal words of James Burnham, if there's no alternative, there's no problem. Back to work.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 28, 2007 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“I am pretty sure that, if you will be quite honest, you will admit that a good rousing sneeze, one that tears open your collar and throws your hair into your eyes, is really one of life’s sensational pleasures.”
Robert Benchley, “Hiccoughing Makes Us Fat”
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 28, 2007 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, February 27, 2007
TT: In the barrel
As always after a long absence, I find my desk piled high with accumulated work that can't be put off. I spent Monday chipping away at it and expect to spend the rest of the week doing the same. Count on the usual almanac entries and theater-related postings, and Our Girl will hold forth as usual on Wednesday, but otherwise I have no immediate plans to hold forth in this space other than briefly.
See you when the smoke clears.
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TT: Springing eternal
Apropos of Monday’s posting about my visit to Los Angeles, a friend who now lives in New York writes:
I'm from California, and had a close college friend who lived in Santa Monica, but other than strolling along the Palisades—the romance of palm trees, and they really are so ridiculous as to have to be romantic—I never really spent any time in LA until a few years ago, the coldest winter, when a close friend and I took off for LA with some sort of pipe dream of leaving everything and moving—really, anywhere. Anywhere that was absolutely elsewhere. And LA, from what we knew (nothing, really), seemed like a pretty good fit.
It felt just like you said: where was the there? Avenues extended for miles and miles and then a tiny huddle of shops and cafes that the natives thought counted as a neighborhood. I suspect all the action happens indoors. Did you go inside any of the Spanish-style homes? They're laid out in such a luxurious way. Ample square rooms with windows on all sides and the palm trees leaning in. The rents are low. You can have space. I think people don't mind getting in their cars and driving to one another's houses because when they get there, they get to stretch their legs. Here we live in closets, which takes some of the appeal off spending an hour driving around in one.
The one thing, though, I really loved (vain creature that I am) is that whenever we would stop driving and go into some funky cafe, everyone would look up. The neighborhoods, such as they are, are so isolated from one another and at the same time so possible to get to—and people will drive—that anyone walking in the door could be someone you want to know. As a Californian, I loved that. I loved all that misplaced hope....
And I love that last sentence.
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TT: Almanac
"Certainly for us of the modern world, with its conflicting claims, its entangled interests, distracted by so many sorrows, so many preoccupations, so bewildering an experience, the problem of unity with ourselves in blitheness and repose, is far harder than it was for the Greek within the simple terms of antique life. Yet, not less than ever, the intellect demands completeness, centrality."
Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance
| Monday, February 26, 2007
TT: No, I didn't watch the Oscars
Not having seen a new movie for the past year and a half, why would I bother? The only impact this year’s award ceremony had on me was that I had an unexpectedly tough time finding a hotel room in Los Angeles last week—it took me three tries.
Which reminds me: Manhattan looked awfully gray when I got back home late Sunday afternoon. Now it looks awfully white. The contrast between the heaps of dirty snow that line the streets of the Upper West Side and the blindingly blue San Diego sky beneath which I walked to the theater on Saturday afternoon was instructive, not to mention depressing. But I still love New York. Really!
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TT: Forget it, Jake
“I kissed him, but I never knew him,” Ingrid Bergman is supposed to have said about Humphrey Bogart. That’s sort of how I feel about my first visit to Los Angeles: I spent three days there, but I still don’t quite know what I saw.
Los Angelenos, I gather, are sensitive to stereotypes, especially the ones they come up with themselves. Now I understand why. I saw enough of their home town to know that it would take me a lifetime to see the rest of it, and though one cliché turned out to be painfully self-evident—the traffic is really, truly awful—I can’t say I found any of the others useful. I’ve never seen a city that was more resistant to generalization, not even the one in which I live.
Raymond Chandler famously claimed in The Little Sister that Los Angeles had “no more personality than a paper cup,” but that oft-quoted sideswipe deserves to be cited in context:
“I used to like this town,” I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but good hearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.…
“Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys like that fat boy that balled me out back there. We’ve got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit—and Cleveland. We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the Lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hardboiled city with no more personality than a paper cup….”
So quote Chandler if you will—I do it all the time—but remember that he was expressing the point of view of a grumpy, middle-aged nostalgia merchant who hated Los Angeles in 1949 because it wasn’t Los Angeles in 1919.
A better description of the city as it is now, or at least as it appeared to me last week, is to be found in Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz:
Los Angeles has no true neighborhoods—instead its distinctive cultures stretch out horizontally along specific streets. Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset Strip, Mulholland Drive, Olvera Street, Rodeo Drive, La Cienega—these are to Southern California what Greenwich Village and Soho are to New York. They are Los Angeles’ linear neighborhoods, its criss-crossing geometry of local colors. Each of these Southern California streets boasts a unique sensibility, one that defies city limits and zoning laws—a Sepulveda, a La Cienega might cut through a half-dozen separate townships without losing its special aura, although a couple blocks on either side of these thoroughfares city life collapse back into the faceless anonymity of cookie-cutter car culture. Travelers from other parts of the globe, faced with this specifically West Coast phenomenon, can see only urban sprawl—looking for village geography, they miss the stories encrusted alongside the pavement, the flora and fauna of the LA city street.
That’s the Los Angeles I saw, or thought I saw, and it’s so complicated that it’d be presumptous for me to say that I liked or disliked it. How can one affect to like or dislike a place so incorrigibly miscellaneous? Nothing there seems to fit together, just as nothing looks quite like you expect it to look. No sooner did I walk into the lobby of the Geffen Playhouse than I said to Stephanie Steward, the friend who showed me around town, “This place doesn’t look like a theater—it looks like an Italian restaurant.” The truth turned out to be even stranger: it was originally a Masonic clubhouse, just as my fancy boutique hotel had once been a Holiday Inn.
So what can I tell you about the City of Angels? Only what I saw with my own eyes. I saw two plays, both of them performed by well-established professional theater companies, of which Los Angeles and its environs have a goodly number. I saw Sunset Boulevard, Beverly Hills, and the Capitol Records building at Hollywood and Vine. I visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House and the Getty Museum, the second of which is less a museum than a site—everybody who goes there comes away talking not about the paintings but the view, with good reason. I lunched at Pink’s, California’s most famous hot-dog stand, and dined at the Westwood In-N-Out Burger and Hamburger Mary’s, a West L.A. restaurant and karaoke bar in which I saw Jane Lynch get up and sing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” much to the delight of the jumbo drag queen who introduced her. (That was my only celebrity sighting, unless you count Alicia Silverstone's performance in Speed-the-Plow at the Geffen.) I shopped at Record Surplus, which was like Championship Vinyl on steroids. I went to bed late each night, woke up against my will at five-thirty each morning, and wrote and edited several thousand words of prose in between my various appointments.
By the time I left for San Diego on Saturday morning, I was so tired that I barely knew my name, and I'd seen and done so much that I was no longer capable of taking in anything but the play I flew there to see, Itamar Moses' The Four of Us. All I can tell you about the final stop on my whirlwind tour of the Golden State is that Balboa Park is pretty. The rest will have to wait for my next visit.
As for Los Angeles, I hope to go back there soon, though I don't expect to understand it any better the second time around, or even the third. I’m too old to figure it out. All I can do is relax and enjoy the ride, then go back home and shake my head in puzzlement at its antinomian inexplicabilities. Some things—perhaps most things—are meant to be experienced, not understood.
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TT: Almanac
“Prejudices are useless. Call Los Angeles any dirty name you like—Six Suburbs in Search of a City, Paradise with a Lobotomy, anything—but the fact remains that you are already living in it before you get there.”
Clive James, Flying Visits
| Friday, March 3, 2006
TT: No orchids for Ella and Sarah
Here's a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:
After Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, the two most widely admired singers in the history of jazz are Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. They were officially canonized by inclusion in “The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz” along with Armstrong, Holiday and Bessie Smith, the only vocalists to be so honored. Their recordings, Fitzgerald’s in particular, continue to this day to be sliced, diced, repackaged and reissued in box sets and best-of-the-best compilations. To publicly suggest that they might have been less than perfect is thus to pin a bull’s-eye on your chest—but I don’t much enjoy listening to either one of them, and never have.
In saying so, I know I’m going up against a wealth of highly credentialed contrary opinion….
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: A great week for theater
Friday has arrived, and though I’m elsewhere, Our Girl has kindly consented to post this week’s Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. It’s a double-barreled hallelujah for two new Off Broadway plays, John Patrick Shanley’s Defiance and Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore:
I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but John Patrick Shanley has followed up “Doubt,” the best play of the 2004-05 season, with a new play of identical quality, performed to perfection by an equally fine cast.
“Defiance” is going to make a star out of Stephen Lang, whom I last saw in “Beyond Glory,” his riveting one-man show about eight winners of the Medal of Honor. Alas, “Beyond Glory” hasn’t played New York yet (I saw it in Chicago last fall). It belongs here, though, and I have no doubt that some smart producer will bring it to Broadway after seeing Mr. Lang burn up the stage in “Defiance.” Here he plays Lt. Col. Morgan Littlefield, a hard-headed yet unexpectedly idealistic Marine who’s keeping a secret that’s about to blow up in his face, and who can’t see why one not-so-little mistake (don’t ask—it’s better if you go in not knowing) should turn his otherwise blameless career into a handful of ashes....
One terrific follow-up deserves another: Martin McDonagh, who made the same kind of splash with “The Pillowman” that Mr. Shanley did with “Doubt,” is back again with a show that’s fully as impressive. “The Lieutenant of Inishmore,” now playing Off Broadway at the Atlantic Theater, is a tar-black comedy based on a daring and ingenious conceit: It portrays a cell of murderous Irish terrorists as a gaggle of drunken halfwits who love their pets more than their fellow men. Padraic (David Wilmot), the title character, is a psychopath whose only friend, a black cat named Wee Thomas, has been bludgeoned to death by persons unknown, thus inspiring his irate owner to start killing everyone in sight (“I’m just in the middle of shooting me dad,” he cheerfully remarks at one point)….
No link, so do your duty and shell out a buck for a copy of the Friday Journal. Better yet, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the full text of my review, plus plenty more art-related coverage where that came from.
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TT: Almanac
“There are about forty-nine masochists to every sadist.”
Cyril Connolly, The Rock Pool
| Thursday, March 2, 2006
TT: Three channels and plenty on
Having grown up in a small Midwestern town in the Sixties, most of my formative cultural experiences came to me via network television. This was one of them:
[Louis] Armstrong's moral wholeness was caught in the words his mother spoke to him on her deathbed in 1927: ''Son, carry on. You're a good boy. You treat everybody right, and everybody white and colored loves you. You have a good heart. You can't miss.'' Thirty-seven years later, I saw him for the first time, singing ''Hello, Dolly'' on ''The Ed Sullivan Show.'' I didn't know who the old man with the ear-to-ear smile was, but I can remember my mother calling me into the living room and saying: ''This man won't be around forever. Someday you'll be glad you saw him.'' That was in 1964, back when the public schools in my hometown were still segregated, two decades after a black man was dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope and set afire. Yet even in a place where such a monstrous evil had once been wrought, white people came to love Louis Armstrong—and, just as important, to respect him—not merely for the beauty of the music he made but also for the self-evident goodness of the man who made it.
Now that ABC, CBS, and NBC have lost their once-central position in American culture, I find myself recalling with intense nostalgia the TV shows that did so much to introduce me to the world beyond the city limits of Smalltown, U.S.A. These are the ones I remember best:
• NBC’s 1960 color telecast of Jerome Robbins’ musical version of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard, was shot on videotape and rerun annually for a few seasons thereafter (I probably didn’t get around to seeing it until 1962 or so). It was a rarity that has since become rarer still: a TV version of a Broadway show that reproduced the original production with complete accuracy. Years later Robbins restaged “I’m Flying” for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, and I was astonished by how clearly I remembered the number, in which Martin and the Darling children fly around the stage. Not long after that, the videotape was digitally restored and released, first on videocassette and then on DVD. I can see why it made so powerful an impression on me: it’s one of Robbins’ most perfectly realized pieces of theatrical work.
• I can’t remember when I first started watching Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts on CBS, but it must have been some time in the early Sixties. I found them enthralling, and still do. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal when they were first released on home video:
Leonard Bernstein spent an enormous amount of time and energy using TV, the ultimate middlebrow medium, to introduce ordinary Americans to the wonders of classical music. He taught a generation of children, myself among them, to love Bach, Beethoven, Brahms—and Copland.
No small part of his influence derived from the fact that the Young People’s Concerts were broadcast on CBS. Back in 1958, there were only three networks, and the FCC obliged them to devote a certain amount of time to high culture. Yet even without government oversight, I suspect they would have found time for Bernstein, because they were run by men who believed they had an obligation to offer their customers a not-so-occasional taste of something more elevating than “The Beverly Hillbillies.” I doubt that Ed Sullivan cared much for Maria Callas or Edward Villella, but that didn’t stop him from putting them on his show, along with Louis Armstrong and the original cast of “West Side Story.” All was grist for the middlebrow mill.
• My first exposure to great art was in 1964, when NBC broadcast a documentary called The Louvre: A Golden Prison. I don’t remember it clearly—I was only six when The Louvre aired—but the fact that I remember it at all suggests that I must have been paying pretty close attention.
• In 1966, near the end of the long-gone days when the three networks still aired high-culture programs on Sunday afternoons, I saw a telecast of a recital at which David Oistrakh and Sviatoslav Richter played the Brahms D Minor Violin Sonata, Op. 108. (This must have been the show I saw.) It was because of Oistrakh’s playing that I took up the violin. Eight years later, I played the first movement of the D Minor Sonata in a music contest and got a “1” from the judges.
• CBS telecast Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight! in 1967. Last summer Holbrook brought the show back to Broadway, and I reviewed it for the Journal:
Though Mr. Holbrook has based his self-directed interepretation on published reports of Clemens’ platform mannerisms—the ice-cream suit, the cigar that wouldn’t stay lit, the deadpan facetiousness and long, long pauses that gave the impression that he was making the whole thing up on the spot—his Mark Twain is no museum piece. Indeed, it scarcely seems like a performance at all. From the moment he steps on stage, you simply take for granted that Twain himself is up there talking to you, cracking sly jokes about the vanity of human wishes and the perpetual follies of “the political acrobats running for office.”
Like most theatergoers of my generation, I first saw “Mark Twain Tonight!” on TV. CBS aired it in prime time in 1967 (the telecast is now available on DVD from Kultur), and my youthful memories of the show remain indelibly vivid, far more so than the only existing film footage of Samuel Clemens, a tantalizingly brief clip shot by Thomas Edison in 1909 and viewable on the Web at www.hannibal.net/twain. No doubt in large part because Mr. Holbrook had to create his own characterization without the aid of film or sound recordings, it has the kind of thickly layered imaginative detail that no mere impersonator could summon up….
Talk about life coming full circle!
• The following year CBS aired a Carnegie Hall recital by Vladimir Horowitz in prime time. I was staggered by it—as well I should have been, since it was the first piano recital I ever saw. So far as I know, this concert has never been released on video (or repeated on TV, for that matter). The soundtrack of the telecast, however, is available on CD, and a quick listen shows that I had pretty damn good taste when I was twelve.
The three networks basically gave up on high culture after the founding in 1967 of PBS (which we didn’t get in Smalltown, U.S.A.). Forty years later, PBS has done the same thing, more or less. You can still find a certain amount of high-culture programming on cable TV, but you have to go looking for it, and it doesn’t have anything like the same impact that Horowitz had when he played Chopin, Scarlatti, Schumann, and Scriabin in prime time—and did so with the imprimatur of CBS, back when that still meant something.
Is life better in today’s radically decentralized world of entertainment-when-you-want-it? Maybe. Probably. But I still miss Peter Pan.
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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, extended through July 9)
• 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)
• The Pajama Game (musical, G, reviewed here, closes June 18)
• 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)
OFF BROADWAY:
• Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)
• I Love You Because (musical, R, sexual content, strong language, reviewed here)
• Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)
CLOSING SOON:
• The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Mar. 11)
| Wednesday, March 1, 2006
TT: Thumbs up
I got a very good report from the cardiologist yesterday. He's entirely pleased with my progress to date and wants me to keep it up. That's my plan.
On this high note, I'm blowing town for a few days, and taking off a few more days after that. Our Girl will be publishing my posts for Thursday and Friday while I go see Carolina Ballet down in Raleigh. Next week I mean to do no blogging other than the daily almanac and my usual theater-related posts on Thursday and Friday. I think I've earned a break, don't you?
Thanks to all who sent messages of encouragement. They meant a lot.
See you around!
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TT: One more time
This is an essay I wrote a decade ago for a magazine that never got around to publishing it. The piece subsequently disappeared into the bowels of my computer, and I forgot about it until the other day, when I was cleaning out a file and stumbled across it. I thought you might possibly enjoy reading it.
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The trouble with good advice is that nobody ever takes it. Kind friends warned me that a book tour is the only thing more humiliating than falling in love with someone who likes you back, but that didn't stop me from hitting the road and watching every single word they said come true. The TV people hadn't read my book; the newspaper reporters had, and hated it. As for the in-store appearances, the worst one was in a small town where I did an early-morning guest shot on the local radio station, then went to the mall and sat for five straight hours without signing a single copy.
But I did get to go to Kansas City, the place where I went to college and, later, spent four sweet-and-sour years playing jazz at night and waiting on customers in a bank during the day. I'm always glad to be in to Kansas City, and this time was no different, book tour or no book tour. I had lots of friends to call. I knew where to get good barbecue. And I could still pick up the Kansas City Star, turn to the weekly arts calendar, look at the jazz section and recognize nearly every name in it. I'd heard most of the musicians in town, jammed with many of them, written about some of them, worked with more than a few of them. I played my very first gig in Kansas City, which is something you don't forget, even if it goes well. And so it was that I ate a huge dinner at Italian Gardens, unfolded the Star, turned to the entertainment section, and ran my finger down the listings until I found the name I was looking for: Carol Comer.
Carol and I go back. I covered most of the Women's Jazz Festivals she put together in the '70s; I played bass at countless jam sessions where she bashed away at an electric piano and sang standards in a low, husky, set-’em-up-Joe baritone etched by hard use and chain smoking. I loved her strong, rumpled face, her bowl-cut mop of graying hair, her flip attitude that didn't fool anyone. I hadn't seen her for ten years, and now she was singing at a restaurant on the south side of town, and that was where I wanted to be. So I paid the check, got in the rented car and started driving, and after an hour or so I pulled into the parking lot of a shopping center deep in the heart of suburbia, just off one of the highways that ring Kansas City.
I've been here before, I thought. Not the restaurant, but the neighborhood. As soon as I got out of the car, I remembered: this was where my old girlfriend Debbie used to live. Across the street and around the corner was the house where she grew up, the place to which I returned her in the days when we were going out as often as I could scrape together enough money to buy enough gas to drive across town and back again. The past billowed up around me, tinting the crisp autumn night. I thought about other nights I had spent driving around this part of town, looking for the country clubs where I played dance dates with Bob Simes, the pianist who taught me all the standards I hadn't already learned off my father's 78s. A decade and more slid off my shoulders. I felt if I were still a boy, and still a musician.
The restaurant was just another yuppie-chow joint, run by some cockeyed optimist hopeful that a little music on weekends would make the customers drink more. I knew the jazz policy here would last three months at most, after which Carol would have to start carting her piano to private parties again and looking for another decent job, perhaps even a real jazz gig at a place where the customers knew better than to request “Feelings” or “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” I got to play maybe half a dozen real jazz gigs, most of them one-nighters, in the whole of my career. I remember them all, especially an Oldsmobile dealers' convention where everybody in the ballroom was falling-down drunk and we got up on the bandstand and blew twenty smoking choruses of “Sister Sadie,” wondering when somebody would sober up enough to ask if we knew “Tie a Yellow Ribbon.”
That evening stands out in my memory for two other reasons: it was the only time I ever played a four-piece job with Mike White, who was then the best tenor sax man in Kansas City, and it was my last gig. After that night, I never again played bass in public for money. Instead, I went off to New York to become a writer, while Carol stayed in Kansas City and sang her songs. I have never doubted, not even for a moment, that I did the right thing. Yet rarely does a day go by when I don't wonder what my life would have been like had I stayed in Kansas City and kept on playing bass. Gerry Mulligan once wrote a song called “I Know, Don't Know How.” That's the story of my life: I am, and am not, a musician. I used to be a musician, and once a musician, always a musician. But now I keep my bass in the closet, which means that I am no longer a musician, because I no longer play music.
I was reflecting on this paradox for the millionth time when Carol walked in, spotted me, came straight to my table and gave me the mother of all bear hugs. Another player, a guitarist, was on her heels. As he tuned up, Carol switched on her piano and started noodling. Then I saw, propped up in the corner of the bandstand, an electric bass. I looked around in vain for a bass player. And it came to me in a flash: Carol is going to ask me to sit in during the second set.
The room began to fill up with familiar faces as the music got going. Some were musicians, off for the night and stopping by to hear Carol and have a beer; others were civilians I used to see around town, the hardcore jazz buffs who came to everything. They all waved as they sat down. They remembered when I used to write about jazz for the Star and play it on weekends, utterly oblivious to any possible conflict of interest. The first set ended, and people started to crowd around my little table to say hello. Carol pushed her way through, grinning like a fool.
“So how the hell are you, anyway?” she growled. “I hear you wrote a book.”
“Oh, Jesus, Carol, I'm beat to the socks, you know how it is, if I have to get on a plane once more….”
“Yeah, I know what you mean. Hey, there's a bass over there in the corner. You want to sit in? I'm getting tired of working my left hand so goddamn hard.”
“Thanks, Carol, I'd love to, but…” But the truth is that I don't play anymore, Carol, I haven't touched a bass in years, it wouldn't be fun for either one of us, maybe some other time. Long pause. Deep breath. “But promise me one thing—don't make me take any solos.”
How could I say no? How many times in your life do you get to turn the skies back, to take the road not taken, if only for an hour or two? Even if I fell flat on my face in front of a roomful of people, even if I couldn't remember the bridge to “Don't Blame Me,” I knew I was going to get up there and play.
The literature of jazz is about the musicians who kept on playing until the day they died. The reality is different. For every Charlie Parker or Johnny Hodges, there are a thousand second alto players who spent six months on the road with Les Brown and now sell life insurance. There is nothing mysterious about them: they are the journeymen of jazz. The real enigmas are the virtuosos who quit at the top of their form, the Artie Shaws and Shorty Rogers and Dodo Marmarosas. They were the ones I could never figure out back when I was making music all day and most of the night and coming back for more the next day and the day after that. And yet good people are always quitting. Not long after I graduated from college, my viola teacher moved to Texas and went into the real-estate business. He'd been the principal violist of the Kansas City Philharmonic. I felt as if he were a deserter, a traitor to the cause.
As for me, I stopped playing when I decided that I wrote better than I played. Not that I saw my retirement as a turning point. I didn't understand then that I was quitting for good. Even though I must have known on some level that I would probably not make my living as a musician, it never occurred to me that there might come a time when I wouldn't play at all. Yet that was exactly what happened. I moved to New York and took a magazine job, and all at once my playing days were a thing of the increasingly remote past.
At first, my new life was too crowded for second thoughts, however tentative. But I began at length to feel an ache in my heart that couldn't be soothed merely by sitting in clubs and listening to other people play. I missed the act of spinning what James Lincoln Collier aptly calls “the ribbon of sound” that comes out of a jazzman as he improvises, floating blissfully in the eternal present. I missed the near-sensual pleasure of negotiating the changes of a ballad like “Body and Soul” or “Lush Life,” of knowing all the different ways of moving from chord to chord and choosing among them with ecstatic deliberation. I missed the feeling of being in the middle of a rhythm section on a good night, when every note you play is right and the beat becomes a great glowing presence that fills you with warmth and buoys you up. I also missed the culture of jazz, that endlessly tolerant late-night world of scuffling, easy camaraderie and wry jokes unintelligible to the outsider. It was the only club to which I had ever belonged, and it suited me right down to the ground.
So I dragged out my bass one evening and tried playing along with a few favorite records, and it just didn't work. The sounds that came out were all wrong. My ears remembered the clean, supple way I had played after years of practice and months of steady gigging, but my hands didn't. I simply couldn't play well enough to please myself, much less anybody else. I sighed, returned my bass to the bedroom closet and resigned myself to the inevitable.
In time, I even stopped writing about jazz, except for a dreamlike week-long interlude when I went out on the road with Woody Herman's band for a magazine piece. That was a fluke—or so I thought. But the piece grew and grew and turned into a book about growing up in the Midwest, which contained two chapters about my short, happy life as a jazzman. I found a publisher and signed a contract, and the next thing I knew, I was tuning up somebody else's bass in a restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas, nervously wondering what tune Carol Comer would call first. There are no coincidences.
I wish I could tell you exactly what happened next, but most of it is a blur. I do remember that I ended up playing two whole sets, and that I had lipstick on my collar when I got back to the hotel, because there was a lot of hugging and kissing after the last set. I also remember that Carol, glad though she was to see me, made no allowances for my rustiness. If I couldn't cut it, that was my problem: every tub, as they say in jazz, stands on its own bottom. She played her usual set, leaving me to stagger through some tricky turnarounds. (Lou Levy, Peggy Lee's old pianist, has a toast suitable to such occasions: “Here's to all the guys who died coming out of the bridge of ‘Sophisticated Lady.’” Thanks a lot, pal.) Then she called a blues, “Centerpiece,” and I finally settled down and found the groove. Grace descended and things began to swing, and suddenly it was all over and everybody was clapping, and I was crying.
Even as it was unfolding, I knew my evening with Carol was a unique experience, not to be repeated on pain of disillusion. I didn't sell my bass after I got back to New York, but I haven't gotten it out of the closet, either, and I don't plan to any time soon. As Crash Davis says to Annie Savoy at the end of Bull Durham, I hit my dinger and I hung it up.
This isn't to say I will never make music again. In fact, I make it nearly every day, if only for a few minutes. I like to sit down at the piano between paragraphs and fake a chorus or two, and sometimes I knock off for a half-hour or so and put in a little mock-serious practice. But it's purely for my own pleasure: there is no beast in view, and I was never more than a part-time piano player to begin with. In golf, there are duffers; in chess, patzers. I'm a piano patzer. Stealing licks off Bill Evans records is the extent of my latter-day performing career, and it’ll have to do. The real thing has come and gone.
Instead of playing music, I write about it, and I am a better critic for knowing how it feels to be on the bandstand. I'm never tempted to score off a player just to make myself look good. I understand the miracle of getting the curtain up every night. I also understand the power of an amateur's passion: it is the seed from which great audiences grow. That is something I didn't know until long after I threw away my union card and joined the ranks of the amateurs. They also serve who only sit and listen.
Somebody asked me once if I were a frustrated musician. “No,” I said, “I'm a fulfilled writer.” But that doesn't mean I never think about what might have been, much less what used to be. The way I feel about having once been a musician is not unlike the way some reformed alcoholics feel about booze. They know they can't live with it anymore, but they also know how much they liked it, and they remember, as clearly as if it were this morning, how good that last drink tasted. I remember, too.
| Tuesday, February 28, 2006
OGIC: Minor oddity
Ken Follett's 1978 spy novel The Eye of the Needle contains the following:
"His name is Frederick Bloggs, and he gets annoyed if you make jokes about it."
Color me puzzled. I can see why being named Bloggs might be joke-worthy in 2006. But in 1940, when the novel is set? What gives? Your suggestions/insights invited. Also, sorry I've been away; fresh content from my corner is on the way no later than Wednesday morning.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, February 28, 2006 | Permanent
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TT: Here's hoping
I'm off to the cardiologist's office. Wish me luck!
See you all tomorrow, one way or the other (or somewhere in between, most likely).
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TT: Elsewhere
Recently sighted and bookmarked:
• Says Edward Winkleman:
Warhol is credited with saying (and I paraphrase): The most sincere form of art appreciation is writing a check. Of course Andy would think that—being an artist—but I'm not so sure that's as true today as it was when Andy offered it. The "art" of collecting has evolved since then, and writing a check doesn't seem as sincere in some ways as it had been. When I start to think about how it's changed, the parallel that keeps coming to mind is the practice of fishing. Collectors used to spend the time getting to know the work, the artist, the movement, etc., much as a person with his/her fishing pole had to learn what weight of the line is needed, what bait is best, and what conditions are most ideal to land that big one. Collecting for some folks today is more akin to trawling. Sure, you have to toss out all that seaweed and release the occassional dolphin, but the sheer volume of your haul guarantees something in your net will be worth the effort….
I offer a corollary based on my own experience as a small-time collector: Richer isn’t (always) better.
• Mr. Anecdotal Evidence shares a lovely memory. It seems he ran into the great jazz pianist Dave McKenna on the street of a town in upstate New York the day after filing a review of his opening night at a local club:
Next morning, driving to the office, I passed McKenna walking up Erie Boulevard. He was wearing very white, unlaced sneakers, and he walked as though the sidewalk had been sprinkled with tacks. I stopped, he climbed in and asked me to take him to a nearby convenience store where he wanted to buy newspapers to check on his beloved Sox. Back in the car, four or five papers in his lap, McKenna asked if my review was in that morning’s edition. I told him where to find it, and had the uniquely uncomfortable experience of watching the subject of a review I had written read it while seated three feet away from me. He took his time reading, grunted a couple of times, cleared his throat and exploded into a laugh that I can remember immediately describing, in the writing compartment of my mind, as Rabelaisian….
(For what it’s worth, this is my favorite McKenna album.)
• Ms. Household Opera waxes ecstatic over an experience I take for granted, and shouldn’t:
The gods of seat-assignment must have been smiling, because I was in the third row of seats almost directly in front of the stage. I love watching musicians' faces as they play. It's a sight I don't get to see often enough, given how many concerts and operas I've seen from the upper reaches of the balcony. By the end of the evening, I felt as if I knew everyone in the orchestra.
And then there was Magdalena Kožená. To see someone sing at that close range is startling. You're not looking at a remote figure under the spotlights. You're almost near enough to touch another person whose voice seems almost too big to really be issuing from her. You wonder where it all comes from, this braided liquid current of song that contracts to an almost-whisper at some moments and then expands to fill the whole auditorium….
That’s the great thing about amateur criticism—it’s alive. I think I’m pretty good about staying fresh to the familiar, but even I had temporarily forgotten how privileged I am to sit in such fantastic seats every time I go to the theater (though my seatmates not infrequently remind me, which helps). To hear an orchestra from up close—especially if you’ve never played in one—is an experience everyone should have, though it may have the unintended consequence of rendering you dissatisfied with your stereo system….
• Mr. Superfluities, who is culling his library, reflects on the approach of the iBook:
I sense that the children growing up around me today won't have the same problem, even if they're as enamored of the written word as I am. They will have their iBooks (saving them money on grossly expensive textbooks so that they can spend more on tuition, or on drinking, at college), like they have their iPods for the music that endlessly accompanies their lives now, one book ("text" is probably the more appropriate word) scrolling down after another on their plasticene touchscreens. And if they download interesting books that they never get around to reading (as they download music that they never get around to hearing), they'll be no different from me. Despite these hundreds of books surrounding me this morning, it's true, I've not read most of them. In this I'm in a great tradition, though. Walter Benjamin reminds me of an anecdote about Anatole France. A visitor (a "philistine," Benjamin coyly says) to France once admired his extraordinarily full library and, in wonder, asked, as all of us bibliophiles are asked, "And you have read all those books, Monsieur France?" France responded, "Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?"…
Read the whole thing, please.
• Finally, Alex Ross has a link to a madly funny “Twelve-Tone Greatest Hits” infomercial you absolutely must hear.
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TT: Rerun
February 2004:
All of which leads me to ask: is the performance of classical music an intellectual activity? Did the breadth of Glenn Gould's culture make him a better interpreter of Bach? I wonder. I've known a lot of musicians in my time, some of whom were damned smart and some of whom were (ahem) less so, and I rarely noticed any clear-cut relationship between what went into their heads and what came out of their fingers or mouths. (In my more limited experience, the same is true of dancers and painters.) I'm not saying that a stupid person can become a successful musician, but I'm not so sure that having read T.S. Eliot equips you to play Beethoven's Op. 111 well. It certainly didn't help Gould….
(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)
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TT: Almanac
"I steer my bark with Hope in the head, leaving Fear astern."
Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams (April 8, 1816)
| Monday, February 27, 2006
TT: Reassurance
As I prepare for a follow-up visit to my cardiologist tomorrow, I find in my mailbox this message from a reader:
Cheer up! There's an obituary in today's Los Angeles Times for a woman who died of congestive heart failure—at the age of 115!
Born on September 13, 1890 in Mississippi; married for 72 (!) years
(1922-1994); never hospitalized in her life until she was 106
(gallstones); could still read the newspaper and sign her name at 114;
survived by her 96-year-old son.
Let's see: Hilary Hahn will be 27 this year. So, if you live to be 115,
you could review a concert of hers in 2071—when she's 91!
(Of course, there's several "ifs" included in that last sentence.)
Er, there sure are. And of course I’m anxious to hear what the doctor says—how could I not be? Nevertheless, I’m feeling pretty optimistic, not least because I’ve now lost thirty-one pounds since congestive heart failure sent me to the hospital a little more than two months ago, and have also changed my life in countless other beneficial ways.
All of which reminds me that I never cease to be amazed by the long list of important people born well over a century ago who lived long enough to have their voices recorded for posterity. (Yes, I know where I’m going with this—wait for it.) A few of these recordings have been released on CD in recent years, and these are three of the best collections currently in print:
• About a Hundred Years: A History of Sound Recording (Symposium) contains spoken-word and musical recordings by Sarah Bernhardt, Johannes Brahms, Winston Churchill, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Joachim, Scott Joplin, Lenin, John Philip Sousa, and Leo Tolstoy, plus a battlefield recording of a World War I gas bombardment made in 1918.
• Poetry Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to Plath (Sourcebooks, three CDs and an accompanying book) contains recordings by forty-two poets, including Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and W.B. Yeats.
• In Their Own Voices: The U.S. Presidential Elections of 1908 and 1912 (Marston Records, two CDs) contains recordings by William Jennings Bryan, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.
Alas, precious few record companies have thought it worth their while to transfer historic spoken-word recordings to CD—which is where the Web comes in. The BBC, for instance, has a page on its Web site containing links to interviews from its vast archives to which anyone can listen via streaming audio. The selection is spotty, even erratic, but it does include a handful of celebrated figures of the relatively distant past, including Yeats, Gandhi, Le Corbusier, Noël Coward, Walter Gropius, George Bernard Shaw, Albert Speer, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf.
For the rest, you have to go searching for yourself, and it takes patience. Most of the time you’ll come up empty-handed, but every once in a while you hit the jackpot, as I did on Friday. For once I had a free evening—no plays, no concerts, nothing but an early dinner with a friend. I decided to spend part of my night off trolling the Web for sonic curiosities, and I found two spectacular ones.
The first was a 1923 recording by Rudyard Kipling. He’s reading an excerpt from a poem called “France,” and though the poem itself is an occasional piece of no great interest, I was struck by how cultivated his voice sounded. I suppose I must have been expecting something more closely suited to the plebeian cadences of “Danny Deever.”
Even more astonishing, though, was an aircheck of the brief speech Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., gave at the end of a radio tribute broadcast live by CBS on the occasion of his ninetieth birthday. Holmes was still sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1931—he retired the following year—and so far as I know, this was the one and only time he went before a microphone.
Justice Holmes was the most eloquent jurist this country has yet produced, and it goes without saying that he rose to the near-final occasion (he died in 1935) with infinite grace:
In this symposium my part is only to sit in silence. To express one's feelings as the end draws nigh is too intimate a task.
But I may mention one thought that comes to me as a listener-in. The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voices of friends and to say to oneself: "The work is done."
But just as one says that, the answer comes: "The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains."
The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be, while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is to living.
And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago:
"Death plucks my ear and says, Live—I am coming."
G. Edmund White describes the broadcast in detail in the first chapter of his new brief life of Holmes:
The old man sat in his favorite chair in his study. He had a shock of white hair, a long white mustache that flared up at the ends, and piercing eyes that gave him a fierce expression. The year was 1931, and most men favored collars with the ends folded down, but he wore an old-fashioned type with the ends turned up and the tie visible, wrapped around his neck. He also wore an outmoded long coat with a vest. He had gotten dressed up to speak on the radio….
Then he quotes from the first-person account of Harold Laski, a friend whom Holmes had invited to watch him speak that night:
As I looked at him, his eyes seemed far away, and the swift realization that I was watching the face of a very old man, very greatly moved, kept me silent….I saw a new light come into those blue-gray eyes, and then a gay smile that played over all his features. The words he spoke as that smile met the flash of those vivid eyes are as living today in my ears as they were almost seventeen years ago. “When I came back from the Civil War,” Holmes said, “my father asked me what I was going to do, and I told him I was going to the Harvard Law School. ‘Pooh!’ said my father. ‘What’s the use of going to the Harvard Law School? A lawyer cannot be a great man.’” Then there came into his voice an almost wistful tenderness. “I wish,” he continued, “that my father could have listened tonight for ony two or three minutes. Then I could have thumbed my nose at him.”
Merely to read what Holmes said on that long-ago night is to be stirred to the core. But to actually hear the broadcast—to hear the tremulous yet unexpectedly firm voice of a man who fought in the Civil War, then spent the best part of three decades sitting on the Supreme Court—is an experience of another order altogether. I can’t describe it better than I did in the review of About a Hundred Years that I wrote for Fi in 1997:
To hear these ancient records, flawed though they are, is an intensely moving experience. The battered shellac sputters and crackles angrily, and you wonder for a moment what all the fuss could possibly be about—but then the curtain parts and the nineteenth century comes into view for a minute or two, sometimes through a glass darkly, sometimes with the near-hallucinatory sharpness of a Mathew Brady photograph.
How miraculous that such brief glimpses of the fast-receding past have survived into the unsure present—and how wonderful that the Web is now putting them at our fingertips. And how good it is, now that death has plucked my own ear, to be reminded by the electronic ghost of a very great man that the only possible answer to death is life, lived to the hilt.
I’m working on it.
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TT: Music to stay alive by
Here's the playlist of iPodded tunes to which I worked out on Saturday:
• Billy Joel, “Big Shot"
• The Beatles, ”Birthday"
• Rosanne Cash, "Black Cadillac" (an excellent do-this-or-die choice for lazy heart patients)
• The Violent Femmes, "Blister in the Sun" (which I first heard on the soundtrack of Grosse Pointe Blank)
• Una Mae Carlisle, "Blitzkrieg Baby" (with Lester Young on tenor saxophone)
• Fats Waller, "Blue, Turning Grey Over You" (the 12-inch 78 version)
• Count Basie, "Blues in Hoss' Flat"
• The Benny Goodman Sextet, "Boy Meets Goy" (with Charlie Christian on guitar)
• Swing Out Sister, "Breakout"
• The Rolling Stones, "Brown Sugar"
• Pat Metheny, "Bright Size Life" (with Jaco Pastorius on bass)
• Henry "Red" Allen and Pee Wee Russell, "Bugle Call Rag" (this is one of the celebrated Billy Banks Rhythmakers 78s that Philip Larkin loved so much)
• Elvis Presley, "Burning Love" (a song I'd forgotten all about until I heard it on the soundtrack of Lilo and Stitch)
Incidentally, I saw the following caption on one of the overhead TV sets in the gym midway through my workout:
DON KNOTS [sic] DIES LAST NIGHT OF POOR HEALTH
Hey, it happens.
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TT: Almanac
"My secretary has been very good in reading to me out of working hours, more serious matters finished. We began yesterday Wodehouse, Very Good, Jeeves which makes me roar. That chap is master of a light rather original slang that makes life joyous when all the carbonic acid gas seems to have fizzled out of it. Few benefactors can be compared with him."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Lewis Einstein (Feb. 8, 1931)
| Sunday, February 26, 2006
TT: Calling all listeners
If you're listening to Hello Beautiful!, you've come to the right place. Welcome to "About Last Night," a 24/5 blog hosted by artsjournal.com (we don't usually post on weekends, but we're making an exception today) on which I write about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, aided and abetted by Laura Demanski, who writes from Chicago.
At this moment Laura is in the studios of WBEZ-FM in Chicago, talking with Edward Lifson, the host of Hello Beautiful! I'm sitting at my desk in the office of my apartment on the Upper West Side of New York City, taking part in the conversation via cellphone. As Edward suggested, I'm putting up a post in real time during the show (typing with one hand and holding my cellphone in the other) in order to demonstrate the immediacy of blogging.
If this is your first visit to "About Last Night," our postings of the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Mine start with "TT," Laura's with "OGIC" (which stands for "Our Girl in Chicago," her online nom de plume). In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking "ALN Archives" at the top of the right-hand column.
You can read more about us, and about "About Last Night," by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You'll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to my most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and "Sites to See," a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you're curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you've come to the right site: "Sites to See" will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to "About Last Night."
As if all that weren't enough, you can write to either one of us by clicking the appropriate "Write Us" button. We read our mail, and answer it, too, so long as you're minimally polite. (Be patient, though. We get a lot of it.)
The only other thing you need to know is that "About Last Night" is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren't sure which way to turn.
If you're one of the above, we're glad you came. Enjoy. Peruse. Come back Monday...and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here lickety-split (as, of course, will the longer address currently visible in your browser).
We return you now to Hello Beautiful!
UPDATE: We had a ball. If you missed us and want to listen in, go here—the program will be archived at some point in the next few days, after which you can listen to it online whenever you like.
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TT: Sign of the times
From the Associated Press’ Don Knotts obituary:
The show [The Andy Griffith Show] was on the air from 1960 to 1968, and was in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings each season, including a No. 1 ranking its final year. It is one of only three series to bow out at the top: The others are I Love Lucy and Seinfeld.
I didn’t know that, and it’s more than just a trivia question: it says a lot about how America has changed since 1960. For one thing, no network would now think of giving the green light to a low-keyed sitcom about life in a more or less idyllic southern town. What’s more, that kind of long-term popularity has become increasingly rare in TV—and the Nielsen ratings are themselves far less significant than they were in 1960, now that cable TV and time shifting have become ubiquitous and series television must compete with so many other forms of electronic entertainment. When I was young, everybody I knew watched The Andy Griffith Show. Today there are no TV shows that “everybody” watches, and no movies that everyone has seen. Indeed, the American film industry is about to devote its annual prime-time infomercial to celebrating five movies that most Americans haven’t seen, don’t plan to see, and couldn’t even if they wanted to (at least not until they come out on DVD).
None of this is good or bad, merely different, but for a person born in 1956—even one who has kept a fairly close eye on postmodern culture—it’s definitely disorienting. And I think it explains why so many people my age have been starting Web sites devoted to Andy Griffith-vintage TV. Of course we’re feeling nostalgic for our lost youth, just as our parents felt nostalgic about big-band music. But it’s not just that we miss those old shows, and the simpler world view they collectively epitomized: we also miss the fact that they gave us something in common, something to talk about besides the weather. We all know who Don Knotts is, which is why it made us so sad to hear of his death (and why the obituary of a second banana got so much play on the evening newscasts, which are mostly viewed by older people). What percentage of us can recall the name of anyone who competed on American Idol two years ago?
Our Girl and I have lately found it hard to write a post that doesn’t mention Philip Larkin, perhaps because he so accurately foresaw so many of the ways in which the world would change under the aspect of postmodernity. Now I find myself thinking of this stanza from a Larkin poem called MCMXIV:
Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word—the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
| Friday, February 25, 2005
TT: Reading matter
If you haven’t read Ben Ratliff’s interview with Pat Metheny in today’s New York Times, do it now.
Three samples:
• “The guitar for me is a translation device. It's not a goal. And in some ways jazz isn't a destination for me. For me, jazz is a vehicle that takes you to the true destination—a musical one that describes all kinds of stuff about the human condition and the way music works.”
• “Well, for me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around. It's a cliché, but it's such a valuable one: something that is the most personal becomes the most universal.”
• “It's like when you first wake up in the morning and you don't really think about what you're doing, and maybe you write your best stuff. You're not in the way.”
• “B-flat minor, the saddest of all keys.”
UPDATE: For another point of view, read Alex Ross on E-flat minor, “the key of death.”
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TT: And counting
Eleven years ago I read an amusing book called Going, Going, Gone: Vanishing Americana that catalogued the long march of obsolescence through postwar America. It occurred to me as I opened my medicine cabinet this morning that the time had come for someone to publish a new book on the same subject. To that end, here are a few of the things I no longer use, do, or see:
• Toothpaste in tubes. I bought my last tube three years ago. Now my toothpaste comes out of a squeeze bottle.
• Ketchup in glass bottles. Ditto.
• Newspapers and magazines on paper. I can’t remember the last time I read one (except for a couple of the magazines for which I write). If I can’t read it on line, I don’t read it.
• Fax machines. I have one, but I rarely use it more than twice a month, both ways.
• Going to the post office to mail packages. I use FedEx and UPS almost exclusively.
• Black discs and cassettes. I got rid of the remnants of my collection when I moved to this apartment two years ago. I no longer own a turntable or a cassette deck.
• TV commercials. I now watch all TV programs after the fact (having previously recorded them on my DVR), meaning that I only see commercials as they whiz by silently and at very high speed.
• Typewriters. I disposed of my last one ten years ago. The only thing I miss about it is not having to address envelopes by hand…
• Stationery. …but since I rarely write personal letters on paper, it follows that I rarely address envelopes. Nor do I have fancy stationery with an elegant-looking letterhead. I used to, but that was three addresses ago. When I feel the occasional need to write a letter by hand, I use cards decorated with reproductions of paintings I like (I favor the Morandi notecards sold by the Phillips Collection).
• Going to the library. I don’t even have a library card anymore. If I really need a book I don’t own, I order a cheap used copy through amazon.com.
• Electric can openers. I don’t own one. Most of the cans I open nowadays have pop-top lids.
• Floppy disks. I back up my computer on line every night.
• “Water-cooler” TV shows. The last TV series to be viewed on a regular basis by more than a handful of my friends was The Sopranos.
• The evening news. My family watched Walter Cronkite religiously, and my mother still watches Dan Rather each night after supper. Not counting visits home, I can’t remember the last time I watched an evening newscast (or a Sunday-morning talk show).
• Dinner parties. I didn’t go to more than two or three last year.
• Renting videos. Again, I do it maybe three times a year, tops.
O tempora...
UPDATE: Jeff Jarvis has picked up on this thread. Among his nominees: stick shifts, corded phones, videotape, ice-cube trays, Christmas cards, and downtowns. His readers are commenting, too, and some of them are really angry, for reasons I find utterly inscrutable….
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TT: A touch of gore(y)
It’s Friday, meaning that you’ll find my weekly drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Today it’s a triple-header—an import, a revival, and a new play.
First up is Shockheaded Peter, in which I took extreme delight:
An actor who looks not unlike a freshly exhumed corpse strolls onto the stage of what looks very much like a blown-up toy theater. He fixes a fishy-eyed stare upon the hushed audience…and stands there. And stands there. Finally, to the sound of nervous titters, he speaks. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” he intones in a voice of ripest ham, “I am the grrreatest actor that has ever existed!” Then he leaves.
Welcome to “Shockheaded Peter,” now playing at the Little Shubert for what I hope will be at least a year. This homicidally hilarious British import is a musical version of the “Struwwelpeter” stories of Heinrich Hoffman, the 19th-century German author famous for his cautionary tales of ill-behaved tots who get what they deserve, and then some. (Guess what happened to little Conrad when he kept on sucking his thumbs after Mommy told him to stop?) It is, in theory, a children’s show, though the only child I can readily imagine appreciating “Shockheaded Peter” to the fullest would be Wednesday Addams….
Next up is the Irish Repertory Theatre’s splendid production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame:
If you were bothered by the twitchy excesses of the Worth Street Theater Company’s “Happy Days,” rest assured that “Endgame” is played straight down the middle. You couldn’t ask for a stronger cast (Alvin Epstein, amazingly enough, appeared in the American premieres of “Endgame” and “Waiting for Godot”). Nor do I see how Charlotte Moore’s simple, self-effacing staging could possibly be improved. To see it in a house as intimate as the Irish Rep is more than a pleasure—it’s a privilege….
Last is On the Mountain, about which I had substantial but not necessarily fatal reservations:
The first 15 minutes of Christopher Shinn’s “On the Mountain,” now playing through March 13 at Playwrights Horizons, contain references to AA, Ashton Kutcher, iPods, Radiohead, Tori Amos, group therapy, cell phones and Prozac. At the mention of the last of these, I snuck a peek at my watch, turned to my companion for the evening and whispered, “This isn’t a play, it’s a magazine article.”
Fortunately, I was wrong. “On the Mountain” really is a play, albeit one of a very particular kind: It’s a Gen-X kitchen-sink drama, right down to the kitchen sink….
No link. To read the whole thing (of which there’s much more), get thee to a newsstand, or go here and proceed as instructed.
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TT: Almanac
“Take that Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, how can that first presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little, and then to eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should only be played on certain important significant occasions, and then only when certain actions answering to such music are wanted; play it then and do what the music has moved you to. Otherwise an awakening of energy and feeling unsuited both to the time and the place, to which no outlet is given, cannot but act harmfully. At any rate that piece had a terrible effect on me; it was as if quite new feelings, new possibilities, of which I had till then been unaware, had been revealed to me. ‘That’s how it is: not at all as I used to think and live, but that way,’ something seemed to say within me.”
Lev Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata (trans. Aylmer and Louise Maude)
| Thursday, February 24, 2005
OGIC: Fortune cookie
"I often think that at the center of me is a voice that at last did split, a house in my heart so invaded with other people and their speech, friends I believed I was devoted to, people whose lives I can only guess at now, that it gives me the impression I am simply a collection of them, that they all existed for themselves, but had inadvertently formed me, then vanished. But, what: Should I have been expected to create my own self, out of nothing, out of thin, thin air and alone?"
Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Thursday, February 24, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: A little list
Done:
• WEDNESDAY: Finished a 6,100-word rough draft of the first chapter of the Louis Armstrong biography, which I am now tentatively calling Hotter than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (go here, scroll down, and click on the appropriate link to hear why). Met Maccers at Playwrights Horizons for a press preview of On the Mountain, followed by dinner at Le Madeleine, where she told me war stories from the dating front that made my hair stand up. I had nothing to offer in return but a tale so mild in the telling that I considered slinking out of the restaurant in shame. (She was quite nice about it, actually.)
To do:
• THURSDAY: Get up early to write Piece No. 1, my Wall Street Journal theater column, due at noon today. Houseguest arrives circa noon. Lunch at Good Enough to Eat, followed by intensive editing on Hotter than That, followed by dinner (allegedly to be prepared by houseguest) and nostalgic chitchat.
• FRIDAY: Get up early to write Piece No. 2, an essay about The Aviator and Being Julia, due by day’s end. Cram in as much Hotter than That editing as time permits. Take houseguest to dinner, followed by a press preview of David Mamet’s Romance.
• SATURDAY: Turn houseguest loose on an unsuspecting city. Finish editing first chapter of Hotter than That (si capax). Take Friend No. 1 to Lincoln Center to see her very first Apollo.
• SUNDAY: Start writing Piece No. 3, a Commentary essay about Joseph Horowitz’s Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, due by end of business on Monday. Take houseguest to dinner, followed by Jim Hall
at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola (has there ever been a dumber name for a jazz club?).
• MONDAY: Houseguest departs at 9:30. Meet Friend No. 2 (a/k/a Bass Player) at the Metropolitan Museum at ten for a press preview of Diane Arbus Revelations. Finish writing Piece No. 3. Start drafting second chapter of Hotter than That.
• TUESDAY: Get up early to start writing Piece No. 4, my monthly “Second City” column for Sunday’s Washington Post, due by day’s end. Take Friend No. 3 to dinner, followed by a press preview of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.
• WEDNESDAY: Continue drafting second chapter of Hotter than That. Take Friend No. 4 to dinner, followed by a press preview of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
• THURSDAY: Collapse of middle-aged party. Memorial service to be announced later. (This has a suspiciously familiar ring. Will I ever learn?)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, February 24, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”
Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s (all other versions of this quote are inauthentic and/or apocryphal)
posted by terryteachout @ Thursday, February 24, 2005 | Permanent
link | Wednesday, February 23, 2005
OGIC: Mr. Plimpton and Mr. Deedy
When we last tuned in to the adventures or misadventures of the post-Plimpton Paris Review, the Board of Directors had announced that they would not renew the contract of editor Brigid Hughes. Hughes by all accounts had been trying to keep the prestigious but not popular journal steered as near as possible to the trail her mentor George Plimpton had blazed for it. On the news of her certain departure, observers speculated that the board had different ideas about little matters like circulation and profitability, and were taking delayed advantage of the power vacuum left by Plimpton's death to remake the Review as a more relevant and remunerative publication.
At the time, all of this reminded me powerfully of something. But I didn't figure out what it was until this week: the opening scenes of an 1894 short story by Henry James, "The Death of the Lion." The story is freely available for downloading here. "The Death of the Lion" is narrated by the right-hand man of the recently deceased editor of a London weekly that has been taken over by a Mr. Pinhorn (is there anyone who is better at names than James at his best?). Mr. Pinhorn is all about the numbers.
Mr. Pinhorn was my "chief," as he was called in the office: he had accepted the high mission of bringing the paper up. This was a weekly periodical, and had been supposed to be almost past redemption when he took hold of it. It was Mr. Deedy who had let it down so dreadfully—he was never mentioned in the office now save in connection with that misdemeanour. Young as I was I had been in a manner taken over from Mr. Deedy, who had been owner as well as editor; forming part of a promiscuous lot, mainly plant and office-furniture, which poor Mrs. Deedy, in her bereavement and depression, parted with at a rough valuation. I could account for my continuity only on the supposition that I had been cheap. I rather resented the practice of fathering all flatness on my late protector, who was in his unhonoured grave; but as I had my way to make I found matter enough for complacency in being on a "staff." At the same time I was aware that I was exposed to suspicion as a product of the old lowering system. This made me feel that I was doubly bound to have ideas, and had doubtless been at the bottom of my proposing to Mr. Pinhorn that I should lay my lean hands on Neil Paraday. I remember he looked at me as if he had never heard of this celebrity, who indeed at that moment was by no means in the middle of the heavens; and even when I had knowingly explained he expressed but little confidence in the demand for any such matter. When I had reminded him that the great principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the demand we required, he considered a moment and then rejoined: "I see; you want to write him up."
Pinhorn, we learn, has turned a genteel journal into a glorified gossip rag. Under Deedy the journal appears to have been mainly critical; Pinhorn has turned it into a fin-de-siècle People Magazine. In hatching his plan to write something about the literary light Neil Paraday, the narrator is trying to thread a a very small needle, maintaining a shred of the old high-mindedness of the journal under Deedy while satisfying Pinhorn's demand for newsworthiness. In the interest of giving his piece the appearance of being a scoop, he arranges to visit the reclusive author Paraday at home.
I was unregenerate, as I have hinted, and I was not concerned to straighten out the journalistic morals of my chief, feeling them indeed to be an abyss over the edge of which it was better not to peer. Really to be there this time moreover was a vision that made the idea of writing something subtle about Neil Paraday only the more inspiring. I would be as considerate as even Mr. Deedy could have wished, and yet I should be as present as only Mr. Pinhorn could conceive. My allusion to the sequestered manner in which Mr. Paraday lived (which had formed part of my explanation, though I knew of it only by hearsay) was, I could divine, very much what had made Mr. Pinhorn bite. It struck him as inconsistent with the success of his paper that anyone should be so sequestered as that. Moreover, was not an immediate exposure of everything just what the public wanted? Mr. Pinhorn effectually called me to order by reminding me of the promptness with which I had met Miss Braby at Liverpool, on her return from her fiasco in the States. Hadn't we published, while its freshness and flavour were unimpaired, Miss Braby's own version of that great international episode? I felt somewhat uneasy at this coupling of the actress and the author...
So the narrator gets "bundled off" to Paraday's, where he sits down and writes "merely a finicking, feverish study of my author's talent"—i.e., something purely critical, dirt not included. Pinhorn's response is rapid:
That night my manuscript came back from Mr. Pinhorn, accompanied with a letter, of which the gist was the desire to know what I meant by sending him such stuff....Mr. Pinhorn's note was not only a rebuke decidedly stern, but an invitation immediately to send him (it was the case to say so) the genuine article, the revealing and reverberating sketch to the promise of which—and of which alone—I owed my squandered privilege.
This the narrator declines to do, marking the end of his tenure with the journal—his dismissal by the board, so to speak. The eventual fate of his critical piece goes to show whose side the reading public is on:
A week or two later I recast my peccant paper, and giving it a particular application to Mr. Paraday's new book, obtained for it the hospitality of another journal, where, I must admit, Mr. Pinhorn was so far justified that it attracted not the least attention.
This is grim, but not altogether easy to parse. Am I wrong to think that, despite the common pessimism of James's story (and for an even direr take on the 1890s literary scene, see George Gissing's 1891 novel New Grub Street) and today's Paris Review watchdogs, there's something slightly leavening in the realization that, 110 years on, it's essentially the same battle still being fought? This implies, at least, that it hasn't yet been lost. Besides which, we don't yet know what the new PR will look like, and under whose guidance it will be transformed—though there seems little doubt that transformed it will be. Finally, although the narrator of "Death of the Lion" seems decidedly on the side of the angels as far as the struggle for publishing's soul goes, that doesn't mean he's necessarily such an appealing figure himself. He has more than a little in common with the half-ridiculous, half-monstrous narrator of "The Aspern Papers," another Jamesian literary leech. Ambivalence, as usual in James and in life, carries the day.
I actually want to say more about "The Death of the Lion" and its portrait of a devolving literary sphere—there are some choice bits I've left out. Alas, it will have to wait until after I do a little (paid) finicking, feverish study of my own.
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Wednesday, February 23, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: The fame that got away
I'm in this morning's Wall Street Journal with a piece commemorating the centennial of the birth of Harold Arlen:
The greatest American popular songwriter of the 20th century was born a century ago last Tuesday. Warning: You may not know his name....
Arlen never quite managed to reach the top rung of renown, and though dozens of his songs are firmly stamped on America’s collective memory, he hasn’t a fraction of the name-above-the-title recognition of George Gershwin or Cole Porter. Only his peers fully grasped his greatness, among them Irving Berlin, who summed it up with characteristic economy when Arlen died in 1986: “He wasn’t as well known as some of us, but he was a better songwriter than most of us and will be missed by all of us.”
Why isn’t Arlen better known in his own right? One reason, perhaps the main one, is that his gifts were essentially undramatic. Though he knew how to write a show-stopper, his most characteristic songs were such intimate, introspective monologues as the yearning “That Old Black Magic” and the despairing “One for My Baby.” Like Johnny Mercer, the finest of the many talented lyricists with whom he worked, Arlen preferred evoking a mood to driving a plot. As a result, he never wrote a successful Broadway musical—most of his hits were hand-crafted for Hollywood films—and his reputation was built song by song, not show by show....
No link. To read the whole thing, buy a copy of today’s Journal, or (better yet) go here and subscribe to the online edition. It's a bargain.
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 23, 2005 | Permanent
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TT: Almanac
"There ought to be a limit (she thought as she steered the bronze Chrysler through the cemetery gate) on the number of open graves you had to look down into in any given lifetime."
Jon Hassler, North of Hope
posted by terryteachout @ Wednesday, February 23, 2005 | Permanent
link | Tuesday, February 22, 2005
OGIC: Items in brief
• Andre Mayer of CBC Arts presents the case against covers.
• Edie, the lucky (and now famous) kitty with the installation art of her own, is an absolute dead ringer for the more philistine creature who resides chez moi.
• The Little Professor asks a select few academic buzzwords to please just go away.
• Ever wonder what cheap-thrill-seeking gardeners look for at the newsstand? The Bookish Gardener has your answer. It feels a bit salacious to ask this now, but—when Spring?
posted by ourgirlinchicago @ Tuesday, February 22, 2005 | Permanent
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