Archives for August 29, 2003

I reviewed The Thing About Men, an off-Broadway musical that opened Wednesday at the Promenade Theatre, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the lead:

I didn’t go to “The Thing About Men” expecting to have my mind changed about the diminished state of American musical comedy. The posters for the show, which opened off Broadway at the Promenade Theatre on Wednesday, feature a photo of the torso of a half-naked person of indeterminate gender whose necktie dangles from his (or her) open trousers in such a way as to suggest…well, you get the idea. And so, I thought, did I. But “The Thing About Men,” much to my surprise, turned out to be something altogether different from the silly sex farce I was prepared to endure. Instead, Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts, the authors of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” have now made another honorable and largely successful attempt to breathe new life into the moribund tradition of the middlebrow musical….

To read the whole review, simply go to the nearest newsstand, part with one (1) hard-earned dollar, and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section of this morning’s Journal, which is, as ever and always, full of good stuff.

Courtesy of the ever-interesting 2 Blowhards, some statistics gleaned from the magazine American Demographics:

According to a study commissioned by AD with research firm Ipsos-Reid, only 17% of American adults are aware of blogs, and only 5% claim to have read one. The awareness of blogs skews towards men; 21% of male Internet users report they’re hip to the blogosphere, while only 13% of women are. Financially, visitors to blogspot.com are either rich or poor; those making under $25,000 or over $100,000 a year are over-represented, while middle-income visitors are under-represented.

These numbers strike me as intuitively right, though I’m a bit surprised at the underrepresentation of middle-income visitors. It’s certainly been my experience that most people don’t yet know what a blog is. On the other hand, what the numbers don’t tell us is exactly who those 15 million American adults are, though I have some guesses. The income spread, for instance, strongly suggests that they are either well-to-do or young (since younger people are both less likely to be making a lot of money and more likely to be comfortable with the Internet).

If you’re interested in blogging about the arts, that should make you sit up and take notice. Given the well-established fact that the Internet is an ideal way to reach highly motivated niche audiences, it stands to reason that Web surfers with an interest in the arts are likely to stumble onto an arts blog sooner or later. Bloggers typically link to and write about one another (that’s a big part of what blogging is all about, as 2 Blowhards recently and rightly pointed out), and it follows that such interaction is bound to encourage significant growth in the art-related sector of the blogosphere, especially now that younger people are increasingly inclined to look to the Web as a source of news and information.

My own experience may be relevant in this connection. I first heard the word “blog” some three years ago, and like most blogwatchers of that period, it was Andrew Sullivan who first got me in the habit of looking at a blog or two each morning. Not long after I started visiting www.andrewsullivan.com, it occurred to me that it would be possible to launch an arts blog that worked more or less the same way as his political blog. What stopped me in my tracks was that I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to start such a site (the user-friendly software employed by most of today’s bloggers had yet to be invented). Within a few months, I got sidetracked by the need to finish writing The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, and my still-inchoate plans were filed away, though not forgotten.

The tremendous growth of the blogosphere in the past year revived my interest in www.terryteachout.com, and when I met Megan McArdle, who writes Asymmetrical Information, she persuaded me that it was time to give it a try. (In other words, blame her.) At that exact moment, Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com called me cold and offered to start a site for me. Within a week, “About Last Night” was up and running.

The surprising thing (or maybe not) is that it wasn’t until after “About Last Night” went live that I first encountered any other arts blogs. Think about that. Here I was, a potential blogger with a serious interest in the medium, yet I didn’t know of the existence of even one arts blog. It wasn’t until I started getting e-mail from fellow arts bloggers and clicking my way through their blogrolls that I finally discovered what was already out there, and how good so much of it was.

All this indicates to me that arts blogging is a phenomenon waiting to happen, in much the same way that political blogging gradually built up to a critical mass, then suddenly mushroomed in the wake of 9/11. The difference, of course, is that arts bloggers can’t count on a cataclysmic event to stimulate interest in what we’re doing. We’ll have to publicize ourselves, not only by linking to one another (though that’s important) but also by reaching out to potential readers who don’t yet know what a blog is. That’s why I always include the www.terryteachout.com URL in the shirttails to the pieces I write for the print media. That’s why I remind you each morning to tell someone you know about this site. People who come here will go elsewhere, too.

Am I having fun yet? You bet. But I want lots more people to come into the pool. As I wrote in this space a couple of weeks ago, I believe that serious arts journalism in America is destined to migrate to the Web. If you’re reading these words, you’re part of that migration. Don’t keep it to yourself.

A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting on film scores:

Add Johnny Mandel to your ALN list. Among his best on CD are I Want to Live (Rykodisc) and The Sandpiper (Verve). And The Verdict (it’s almost no writing, but what there is is perfectly placed).

I couldn’t agree more, and am chagrined to have momentarily forgotten about Mandel, whose name is universally known and admired throughout the world of jazz. This may explain why I forgot to think of him in connection with film scoring–he simply does too many things well, including songwriting. To have written “The Shadow of Your Smile,” the theme from The Sandpiper, is achievement enough for a lifetime. All praise to Johnny Mandel, then, for never having rested on any of his myriad laurels.

Incidentally, my favorite recording of “The Shadow of Your Smile” is by Singers Unlimited. It’s only available in a box set at present, but if you’re feeling extravagant, I can’t think of a better way to spend a hundred bucks.

The author of today’s almanac entry will be familiar to some of you, but for those who don’t recognize the name of the now-obscure Constant Lambert, he was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century English cultural life. I suppose he’s best known for his invaluable book Music Ho!: A Study of Music in Decline, though balletomanes with long memories will also know him as the first music director of what later became the Royal Ballet, in which capacity he served as a ballet conductor of genius, collaborated closely with Sir Frederick Ashton, and had a stormy affair with the very young Margot Fonteyn. He also wrote quite a bit of amazingly pungent music criticism, none of which has been collected (Music Ho! will give you a feel for the way he wrote about music), and made quite a few marvelously vital recordings, only a handful of which have been reissued on CD. Lambert even pops up as a major character in Anthony Powell’s multi-volume novel A Dance to the Music of Time (he’s Hugh Moreland).

In the long run, Lambert will be best remembered as a composer, and in recent years there has been a mini-revival of interest in his music, much of which has now been recorded. I once contrived to get Time magazine (which used to be interested in the arts) to list the premiere recording of Tiresias, Lambert’s last ballet score, as one of its ten best CDs of the year. It’s still in print from Hyperion, fortunately, as is an equally fine album that contains The Rio Grande and Summer’s Last Will and Testament, two superlative works for chorus and orchestra that used to be moderately well-known once upon a time, at least in England. All these pieces are at once jazzy and unnervingly melancholic–quite a combination, that.

Every few years I try to stir up interest in Lambert, most recently in a 1999 Sunday New York Times profile called “A British Bad Boy Finds His Way Back Into the Light” (no link, alas–the title refers to the fact that Lambert was a prodigy who died of acute alcoholism in 1951, two days before his 46th birthday). It went for naught, but I’m not done trying. Read today’s almanac entry and see if it doesn’t make you at least a little bit curious.

“After some of the most memorable and breath-taking experiences in my musical life it was indeed shocking to find that the critics next day were damning it with faint pseudo-academic praise, but it was not to me surprising. For the reason that I have, in the past, had to earn my living by that melancholy trade and realise all too well that the average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) ‘Above all no enthusiasm.'”

Constant Lambert, Opera (December 1950)