Archives for August 2003

Theodore Dalrymple is in a fine old change-and-decay-in-all-around-I-see mood in the current issue of City Journal, wherein he manages to blame everything from Marilyn Manson to S&M on the 1960 unbanning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book he describes as “radically humorless,” placing a few choice examples in evidence. To be sure, plucking dumb sentences out of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is like shooting dead fish in a small barrel, but Dalrymple goes unerringly to the worst line in the book, which also happens to be my personal candidate for the title of Silliest Sentence Ever Emitted by an Allegedly Major Writer: “Sir Malcolm gave a little squirting laugh, and became Scotch and lewd.”

If my memory is functioning correctly, this is the very sentence Max Beerbohm had in mind when he pronounced his immortal epitaph on the creator of Lady Chatterley and her lascivious gamekeeper:

Poor D. H. Lawrence. He never realized, don’t you know–he never suspected that to be stark, staring mad is somewhat of a handicap to a writer.

I really, really, really wish I’d said that.

Here’s a great fact–the film screened most frequently at the White House during the past half-century was High Noon. (Bill Clinton saw it 20 times.) Bravo is airing a documentary this Thursday about movies at the White House, and it’s full of similarly toothsome facts, courtesy of Paul Fisher, the official White House projectionist, who kept a log of the 5,000 movies he showed there between 1953 and 1986.

Another statistic worth recording for what it’s worth, if anything: Jimmy Carter watched 580 movies, more than any other president.

“Today’s literature: prescriptions written by patients.”

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

I was dining on the Upper West Side the other evening with a composer friend (the one who sings Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme, as a matter of fact), and we got to playing a game that we dubbed “Canonical Death Match.” You play it by rating classical composers on a scale of zero to 10–comparatively. If Bach is a 10, what’s Poulenc? (Answer: 7.) Or Wagner? (That’s when we started throwing rolls.)

The comparative aspect of the game is what makes it interesting. The reigning cultural orthodoxy of the present moment states that all values are relative, so invidious comparisons are naturally discouraged on penalty of contemptuous sneers. But we all know the reigning cultural orthodoxy of the present moment is hogwash, even if we wouldn’t necessarily care to say so in the faculty lounge with our pants down. Of course Joseph Conrad is better than Toni Morrison–not just as far as I’m concerned, but period–and anybody who doesn’t know it or won’t admit it is a dolt and a buffoon. In the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert, “In short, whoever you may be,/To this conclusion you’ll agree,/When everyone is somebodee,/Then no one’s anybody!”

After disposing of a couple of dozen composers and a bottle of wine, my friend and I started playing the desert-island game. In our version, you can put five works of art into your bag before departing for the proverbial desert island, and you have to decide right now. No dithering–the enemy is at the front door, lasers blazing. What do you stuff in the bag?

The flavor of “In the Bag” is obviously somewhat different from “Canonical Death Match,” because it’s not about absolute values but arbitrary preferences. Yes, I grant you that Bleak House is a great book, but would I grab it if the building were on fire? Not a chance–I’m a Trollope man. And top-of-the-head answers are of the essence, lest you find the temptation to posture overwhelming. (Why, yes, I’d take Beethoven’s Ninth and War and Peace….)

In the interests of stimulation and outrage, I’ve decided to play “In the Bag” each Monday as a regular feature of “About Last Night.” You are welcome–nay, encouraged–to send in your comments, which may range from Nice list this week, dude to Are you serious? I never heard anything so pretentious in my life! I, in turn, do solemnly swear that my lists will be utterly unpremeditated and unsparingly honest, even if I look into my secret heart and realize that what I really want to see at the bottom of the bag this morning is a DVD of The Dirty Dozen. (Hey, these things happen.) I will also invite selected colleagues to play the game from time to time, so long as they agree to swear the same blood oath on a copy of The Secret Agent.

So here goes. As of this moment, my top-five in-the-bag list, subject to change at the drop of a hat, is as follows:

FILM: Alfred Hitchcock, Shadow of a Doubt

PLAY: Stephen Sondheim/Hugh Wheeler, Sweeney Todd

BALLET: George Balanchine/Paul Hindemith, The Four Temperaments

PAINTING: Paul Cézanne, “The Garden at Les Lauves”

BOOK: Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Brickbats, anyone?

I wrote last week, apropos of the death of Bob Hope:

In the words of my favorite refrigerator magnet, “Time passes quickly, whether you’re having fun or not.” (I wonder what that sounds like in Latin.)

That parenthesis was wistful. Despite having studied four foreign languages, one of them Latin, I’m still a humiliatingly single-tongued monoglot. Fortunately, two of you came through, lickety-split. One reader, who admits to “an almost total lack of fluency in Latin,” nevertheless resorted to an on-line dictionary and came up with this homemade rendering: Tempis fugit aut oblectas aut non.

A few hours later, I heard from a Latin teacher who offered a more plausible-sounding alternate version: Tempus celeriter degit, utrum frueris necne. He obligingly explained:

It may be suggested, and rightly so, that the phrase, “Time passes quickly,” could be translated “Tempus fugit.” Strictly speaking, “tempus fugit” translates to “time flies.” It is a rather well-known sententia Latina antiqua (old Latin maxim). But “tempus celeriter degit” accurately parallels “time quickly passes.” (The word order may seem odd, but that’s how it should be in Latin.)

Won’t you sleep better tonight knowing someone is out there obsessing about this sort of thing?

Absolutely. Now, can anybody out there do cross-stitch?

“All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt.”

Kingsley Amis, The Amis Collection

Avenue Q, an X-rated musical satire of “Sesame Street” performed by a cast of singing puppeteers, opened last night on Broadway, and I reviewed it for this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt:

“Avenue Q,” which opened last night at the Golden Theatre, is as raucously, cruelly, unsparingly funny as “Big River” is sweet and warm-hearted….The songs, written by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, are wicked, often unprintable parodies of such smile-and-be-sensitive ditties as “Bein’ Green” and “The Rainbow Connection.” One of them, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” is so dead on target that I halfway expected the theater to be picketed during the last verse: “Everyone’s a little bit racist–it’s true/But everyone is just about as racist–as you!/If we all could just admit/That we are racist a little bit/And everyone stopped being so P.C.,/Maybe we could live in–harmony!”

To read the rest of the review, pick up a copy of the Journal and turn to “Weekend Journal,” the Friday arts-and-lifestyle section. Then go right out and get a ticket, because I have a feeling that this show is going to ring the gong very loudly, in its own weird way.

I’ve seen Finding Nemo twice and liked it both times, yet something about it left me cold, the same way all Pixar animated features leave me cold. That something is the animation itself, which is, as you probably know, digitally created, and looks that way. I don’t mean that it’s rigidly mechanical–the character animation in Finding Nemo is actually quite deftly realized. What bothers me are the three-dimensional backgrounds, which are both fantastically elaborate and hyper-realistic. It’s an impressive achievement, I suppose, but I can’t help feeling a incongruity between the characters, which are obviously animated (meaning unreal), and their environment, which just as obviously aspires to a different set of visual objectives.

Am I being persnickety? Probably. I mean, I really liked Finding Nemo. But every time I see a Pixar movie, I think of the dead end down which the Disney animators of the Thirties and Forties charged so heedlessly. Artist for artist, the Disney team packed a greater technical punch than any animation shop in history, but its product got duller and duller, while the Warner and MGM cartoons of the same period became more vivid and witty with every passing year. What made the difference? Disney’s creative team was fixated on the chimerical goal of realism, whereas Chuck Jones and Tex Avery knew that no matter how well you drew it, an animated cartoon was going to look like drawings of a talking animal.

This sounds like a debate over modernism, doesn’t it? Well, that’s just what it is. You can’t watch a cartoon like Jones’ “Duck Amuck” or Avery’s “King-Size Canary” without understanding that what you’re looking at is a cartoon. Both men accepted the inherent limitations of their chosen medium, thereby freeing their imaginations to run rampant within those limitations. Not so Walt Disney, whose goal was to make his studio’s cartoons look as real as possible, meaning that the imagination of the artists got tied up in knots. (Unlimited virtuosity can be a trap.)

I know there’s more to animation than animation, so to speak. Pixar’s features are good not just because of the way they look but also because of the way they’re written and voiced and scored. In those departments, Pixar stands head and shoulders over just about everybody else’s stuff. But the best animated feature of the past decade, Lilo and Stitch, is just as imaginatively written and voiced and scored–but also makes generous use of hand-drawn characters and hand-painted backgrounds that don’t aspire to Pixar-like hyper-realism. I can’t help but think that this is part of the reason why Lilo and Stitch touched me, whereas Finding Nemo mostly only charmed me.

Speaking of bluegrass, the Washington Post recently ran a great profile of Eddie Stubbs, the 41-year-old fiddler, disc jockey, and Grand Ole Opry announcer whose midnight-to-eight show on WSM is one of the last preserves of traditional country music and bluegrass in commercial radio.

Which reminds me to tell you–and no, this is not a confession, it’s a boast–that I love country music, though not the idiot kind you usually hear on the radio nowadays. I like the hard stuff, the high-stepping honky-tonk anthems and wrist-slitting laments about adulterers and adulterees that you used to hear on the radio back in the parallel universe that was my youth. On the other hand, country doesn’t have to be old to be good. An up-to-the-minute case in point is Allison Moorer, the warm-voiced, hard-rocking young Alabama balladeer whose new album, a two-for-one CD/DVD live set called Show, is absolutely as good as country gets.

I once gave serious thought to writing a book about the contemporary country scene (I wanted to call it Middle-Class Music, because country is so self-evidently by and for people who work for a living), and even went so far as to pitch it to my publisher. A funny thing happened on the way to the band bus, and I ended up writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken instead, but I still love country music. And Westerns. And cool jazz and abstract art and George Balanchine and Avenue Q. And Chuck Jones. So there.