Archives for August 2003

A reader writes, apropos of various recent postings about the possibility of New York City Opera’s moving to a new house at or near Ground Zero:

About the opera house on Ground Zero–I admire the idea, and would certainly think it moving. But really, how long would it be before some sort of play or production was put on commiserating with the plight of the poor oppressed hijackers? Or possibly a reading by some famous Jihadist poet? I’d love to see great art at Ground Zero, but the other possibilities make me fear the idea just as much as I love it.

Point taken. I myself have written testily on more than one occasion about what one might euphemistically call the wide-ranging responses of quarter-witted artists here and abroad to 9/11, and I’ve no doubt that somebody, somewhere, would dearly love to do just what my pessimistic correspondent fears most.

On the other hand, Paul Kellogg, who runs City Opera, is a man of taste, and I’ve also no doubt that anything he presented in a Ground Zero Memorial Opera House would be worth seeing–which doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d like it, of course. But if I required artists to make only works of art with whose underlying premises I agreed, I’d be an unhappy soul indeed. Kellogg, for example, is a fan of Jake Heggie’s operatic version of Dead Man Walking, which City Opera performed last season. I disagree, to put it mildly, but I also recognize that it’s a serious piece of work (as opposed to, say, the bisected pigs of Damien Hirst), and so I respected his intentions in producing it. If I didn’t–if I thought City Opera were in the hands of a cultural politician who didn’t give a damn about beauty–I wouldn’t be backing the company’s plan to move to Ground Zero.

So I guess the smart-ass answer to this perfectly reasonable question would be something like Opera houses don’t kill opera, opera directors do. Which is also a perfectly reasonable answer, when you think about it.

The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a four-CD set containing 56 extremely well-chosen Warner Bros. cartoons from the Forties and Fifties (plus a couple of gazillion DVD-type special features), is now available for pre-ordering on amazon.com. Click here to do so. It’ll be on the street Oct. 28.

The amazon.com page also contains a customer review from an animation fanatic with inside skinny:

It’s hard to believe, but Warner Brothers is reportedly not sure that these cartoons can sell. This set is a test to see whether DVD collectors are in the market for Looney Tunes fully restored and presented with in-depth extras. If the set sells well, there will be more big boxes like this one, with still more cartoons (including earlier classics that are still in the process of restoration). If it doesn’t sell, all we’ll get is bare-bones samplers aimed at kids alone. So don’t buy the bare-bones “Premiere Collection,” a poorly presented kid-oriented release with no extras and only half of the cartoons on this set….Help make “The Looney Tunes Golden Collection” a best-seller and you’ll not only be helping the cause of classic animation on DVD, you’ll be getting some of the best comedy films ever produced, animated or live-action. You’ll be getting fascinating extras and supplements. You’ll be getting hours and hours of great entertainment. What could be better than getting great entertainment in a good cause? Buy this set, and if enough people do, we’ll get to see more sets of Bugs, Daffy, and the rest, to enjoy at home as often as we want–and believe me, we’ll want to watch it often.

Clearly, the Golden Collection is the set to buy. (And yes, I’ve put my money where my blog is.)

The Paul Taylor Dance Company will be performing for free next Tuesday and Wednesday at Damrosch Park, in between the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theater, as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series. Both performances start at eight p.m. For those of you who know about modern dance, that’s all I need to say. (Did I mention the word free?)

For everybody else, a word of explanation: Paul Taylor is the world’s greatest living artist, irrespective of medium. I don’t deny that I’ve been known on occasion to exaggerate, but I happily stand by every word of that high-octane statement. If you want further details, I wrote the foreword to the 1999 paperback reissue of Private Domain, Taylor’s autobiography, in which I summed up my opinion of his work as concisely as possible. (Private Domain is a wonderful book, by the way, by far the best memoir ever written by a choreographer.) His dances are serious and funny, lyrical and frightening, harsh and poignant–sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once. If you’ve never seen any of them, go and be blessed.

P.S. Not to scare you off, but these are free performances, so try to get to Damrosch Park at least an hour before curtain time if you want to snag a halfway decent seat.

“All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

A reader writes, apropos of last week’s posting on vicious critics, in which I argued that “sometimes it’s your duty–your responsibility–to drop the big one. But you shouldn’t enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can’t, even when you don’t think they do it very well.” He thinks otherwise:

Why not take pleasure in “dropping the big one” on works that are truly hateful? (I’m thinking of stuff like Ancient Evenings, the films of Ken Russell or Peter Greenaway, The Night Porter, Piss Christ.) These works present issues that go way beyond quality of execution. They are fundamentally anti-human, not to mention anti-art. As such, their infliction on the culture should evoke righteous anger and disgust from any critic with blood in his veins. As I see it, identifying the false, the mindless, or the pretentious (which so often are taken for the real thing) is no less important than heralding the beautiful and the wise–and should afford the critic no less satisfaction. Of course, I don’t have in mind here works that are bad in a trivial or routine way. I’m speaking of stuff that is importantly or dangerously bad.

I think this is a fair distinction, and I won’t deny that I smiled quietly as I piled up dynamite around, say, Franco Zeffirelli’s Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen, with which I dealt rather summarily in the New York Daily News a few years ago:

The Met chorus covered itself with glory, but the orchestra was out of sorts, and James Levine conducted as if his mind were elsewhere. I sympathize: Mine was, too. I kept thinking, “Has everybody at the Met forgotten that ‘Carmen’ is a French opera?” Evidently so: Thursday’s performance featured a German Carmen, a Spanish Don José, a Romanian Micaela, a Russian Escamillo and an Italian director. The results were as confused as the casting. Bizet’s elegant, deadly opera is a feather-light soufflé with a pinch of cyanide; this production is a Wiener Schnitzel smothered in red sauce. Too bad the Met can’t send it back to the kitchen.

That was fairly nasty, and we’re not even talking anti-human anti-art, just a piece of gold-plated junk. So sue me. (No, don’t.) But I will say this in my own defense: now that I mostly pick and choose my own assignments, I find I want to spend as little time as possible putting myself through hell on the aisle. I’ve come to feel that as a rule, the thing I do best is point people in the direction of that which and those whom I love. Let somebody else ice “Piss Christ.” I’d rather spend my remaining hours on earth telling you how beautiful “The Open Window” is, especially if you’ve never seen it before. In the long run, silence may be the most powerful form of negative criticism.

Incidentally, please don’t bother to remind me of what I just said the next time you catch me beating up on a bad play in The Wall Street Journal. I mean, you don’t have to sit through it, right?

P.S. For those youngsters who only know Randy Newman as a composer of sappy movie scores, he’s had his moments, as the title of this post recalls.

“I detest a man who knows that he knows.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Holmes-Laski Letters

I’ve been reading a lot of biographies in recent weeks (I’m judging a literary award), and I’m struck by the fact that so many of them, including several of the best ones, start out more or less like this:

“In an old barn fixed up to serve as a studio, Arshile Gorky backed away from the canvas on his easel.”

“Alexander Hamilton realized instantly that he would die.”

“Guilty. He heard the verdict and flinched.”

“‘I am going to Washington Saturday night to make a speech at the Gridiron Club dinner,’ H. L. Mencken wrote to a friend on December 7, 1934. ‘This is a dreadful ordeal for me, and I bespeak the prayers of all Christian people.'”

In case you didn’t guess, the last of these books is my own The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, so I think I can poke fun at this particular stylistic quirk with a fairly clear conscience. Yes, jumping in at the deep end can be a fine way to lure the reader into the tent, but it’s also becoming a trifle overfamiliar, and I wonder if perhaps the time has finally come to put it out to pasture, once and for all.

I don’t mean that starting a book in medias res can’t still be effective, even brilliantly so. Virtually all of Kingsley Amis’ novels begin that way (“‘They made a silly mistake, though,’ the Professor of History said, and his smile, as Dixon watched, gradually sank beneath the surface of his features at the memory”), propelling the reader into the midst of the action in much the same way you might shove a nervous paratrooper out the hatch. But biographies aren’t novels, much less magazine articles, and there’s something to be said for launching them in a no-nonsense manner. Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers (out of print, believe it or not) has the best of both worlds, leading off with a conventional fanfare, then slipping in a blue note: “Jay Vivian Chambers was born on April 1, 1901–April Fool’s Day, as he liked to point out.” Very neat.

As for the best of all possible biographies, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, it gets underway with a preamble worthy of a Haydn symphony:

To write the Life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.

To paraphrase what John Coltrane once said about Stan Getz, we’d all write like that if we could. Failing that, we do the best we can, and I will confess that as of this moment, my brief life of George Balanchine will probably begin with the premiere of one of his greatest ballets, Serenade. I could always change my mind, though, and I’m inclined to start my Louis Armstrong biography on the day he was born (which wasn’t July 4, 1900, alas, though Armstrong liked to pass off that superlatively resonant date as his bonafide birthday).

Your thoughts?

Courtesy of my fellow artsjournal.com blogger Greg Sandow, I read a terrific piece from Opera News about the gradual disappearance of opera on public television. It seems the ratings just aren’t there–nobody wants to watch opera on TV, or on PBS, anyway. (And it’s not just opera. When did you last see a first-rate ballet on public TV?)

Two telling quotes. The first is from John Goberman, who produces Live at Lincoln Center for PBS:

In a way, we’re denying the use of our airwaves to a gigantic number of people by not offering something that more will find appealing. I’m not necessarily talking about pandering. I just feel it’s my obligation to deal realistically with our potential audience. I wouldn’t put an opera on that I thought would appeal to practically no one, or even an opera people thought they might want to see but if they saw it, I thought they would hate it. Is Porgy and Bess an easier sell than Dead Man Walking? Yes. With television, you have to keep in mind that you’re dealing with access to the greatest number of people. In the same way that you wouldn’t put on a specialized opera in Madison Square Garden or at Yankee Stadium, there is the same sort of calculation with what we’re doing here.

The second is from Paul Kellogg, the general and artistic director of New York City Opera and the man responsible for making NYCO the most interesting big-city opera company in America:

Lincoln Center and Live from Lincoln Center and PBS are all interested in works that have a very broad public appeal. When I first came here, six years ago, John Goberman said we would have the final word on what we would broadcast. Well, we did wind up broadcasting a couple of things that were not of huge public interest–Lizzie Borden and Paul Bunyan. I was idealistic in those days. I still am, but back then I certainly thought these operas would have an audience, that a loyal audience that turned on Live from Lincoln Center for whatever was on would become involved. But that is not how this works. So, increasingly, what television audiences are asking for–and this is being responded to by the network and the sponsors and the whole enterprise of Live from Lincoln Center–are operas that have a name and a broad public appeal. I don’t use the word “warhorses.” I would say, things that are generally known to a wide public. This year there’s just nothing in our repertory that works. I would love to broadcast Dead Man Walking. It is and would be TV-friendly. But we are one of many constituents who make up Lincoln Center. And Live from Lincoln Center now determines what it is that it wants to broadcast.

I want to add two things:

(1) Three cheers to Paul Kellogg for telling the truth. Not many people in his position would do that in public.

(2) If this is the kind of calculation PBS is making about its arts coverage, then there’s no justification whatsoever for the existence of PBS–that is, for a subsidized, “public,” non-commercial TV network that presumably exists to do what the commercial networks won’t do, starting with the dissemination of high art. None. Zero. I’m picking up a strong whiff of hypocrisy here, and I don’t like it one bit. To hell with Live at Lincoln Center. Screw Ken Burns. Pull the plug and leave the job to the commercial arts channels, which don’t pretend to be anything other than profit-making entities. At least they’re honest about it. PBS isn’t.