Archives for November 2003

Last week, I got a call from a record-company publicist who asked if I’d be willing to do an “EPK” with a well-known musician–I’ll call her Jane Doe. “Duh, what’s an EPK?” I replied, and was informed that it stands for “electronic press kit,” the canned celebrity interviews that are made available to TV and radio producers in lieu of face-to-face personal appearances. The actual interviewer–that is, the person asking the questions–is carefully scissored out of the videotape, leaving only the talking head of the celebrity in question.

I’m a journalist, not a publicist, and I normally wouldn’t have thought twice about saying no, but Jane happens to be an old friend of mine (we met before she became successful). Since she spends most of her time on the road, we rarely get to see one another, so I agreed to be the mystery interviewer, and the record company promptly messengered over a top-secret “white-label” advance copy of Jane’s new CD, which will be released next spring.

I put the album on, and was staggered. I knew it would be a major stylistic departure for Jane–I’d talked to her longtime producer about it a few months ago–but even so, I wasn’t fully prepared for how self-revealing, even confessional, her music had become. As I listened and marveled (for the album is extraordinarily beautiful), I thought to myself, How on earth am I going to talk to Jane about this in front of a TV camera?

The record company sent a big black car to pick me up Sunday morning, and the driver whisked me to the discreet front door of a boutique hotel on a midtown side street. I made my way to a chic sardine can of a room into which had been stuffed an entire video crew. A few minutes later, Jane arrived, trailed by her assistant and her stylist. (Don’t laugh–famous women musicians never step in front of cameras without first being fussed over by a stylist.) We hadn’t seen one another for two years, but no sooner did she walk through the door than we were hugging and chattering, just as if she were fresh off the bus, hoping to make it in the big city. I told her I’d become a drama critic, and she giggled and said, “Not like Addison DeWitt, I hope!” (Jane has seen All About Eve more times than any straight person I know.) Once her makeup was in place, we sat down in a pair of high chairs, and after what seemed like a half-hour’s worth of tinkering with the lights, the cameraman rolled the tape.

Like many performers, Jane is shy, which sometimes causes her to seem standoffish. In addition, she’s learned from hard experience to be on her guard when talking to journalists. For her to speak frankly about so personal a work of art would thus have been difficult under the best of circumstances. Yet there we were, brightly lit and surrounded by a tight knot of technicians and handlers, and for a brief moment my heart sank. Then I screwed up my courage and asked a question, and within a matter of minutes we might just as well have been sitting together in an empty room, swapping stories and passing a bottle. We talked about the record, the experiences that inspired her to make it, and everything else that came into our heads. She came close to getting choked up at one point, and my own eyes filled with tears in response.

The cameraman signaled for us to take a break so that he could change reels. “Omigod, was that too much?” Jane asked. “I feel weak in the knees after talking about all that stuff. I’ve never really talked about it like that. Was I rambling? Did I sound dumb?” She ran to the bathroom to fix her face, and I let out a sigh. As a Kingsley Amis character once put it, I felt as if I’d just sat through a complete performance of La Traviata compressed into one and a half minutes. (It took a little longer than that, but you know what I mean.) Jane returned, the cameraman rolled the tape again, and we wrapped up the interview. More chatter, more hugs, then I descended to my waiting car and we went our separate ways.

As I headed home, I recalled a passage from one of my favorite books, Andr

“Gentlemen, do you want to know the secret of living? Have deep principles and then improvise.”

Leopold Stokowski, quoted in Oliver Daniel,
Stokowski: A Counterpoint of View

A reader writes, apropos (I think) of my Wall Street Journal piece on The Producers:

My $85.00 evening at the Ahmanson, Los Angeles, was very enjoyable. I laughed, giggled, and smiled. I am so glad that in my many years of theatregoing I have never read a review prior to seeing the production.

Amen to that! I think reviews should be read after the performance, not before, mine included. And even then, don’t let critics tell you what to think. I’ve known too many critics to take their opinions too seriously. A critic’s point of view is just that–a point of view. The theory, of course, is that he knows more than you and thus can enhance your enjoyment of the art object under consideration, but it ain’t necessarily so. Here’s an almanac encore, from C.S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism, a book I passionately commend to your attention: “If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.”

Having said that, though, I must add that a goodly number of the people who wrote to me about my comments on The Producers, possibly including my present correspondent, have somehow gotten the mistaken impression that I didn’t think the show was funny. When readers misunderstand me, I usually take it for granted that I failed to make myself clear, but in this case I don’t think I’m to blame. I said The Producers was out of date, not unfunny, and I described it as “nothing more (or less) than a virtuoso reminiscence of the lapel-grabbing, kill-for-a-laugh shtickery on which so much of the stand-up comedy of my youth was based.” Does that really sound like I didn’t think it was funny?

I sometimes wonder whether the professional deformation of bloggers is the sort of black-or-white opinionizing that leaves no room for carefully shaded qualifications. Around here, OGIC and I do our best to say exactly what we mean, at least at the moment we’re saying it.

Next Wednesday afternoon, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris will speak about his work at the University of Chicago, an event that is free and open to the public. Details are here. Later that night, the university’s Doc Films will present a special screening of Morris’s new film The Fog of War, which comes highly recommended. As far as I can tell, tickets to the screening will be available following the lecture and can’t be ordered ahead of time. No ticket price is mentioned; sounds free to me.

I’m skipping town tomorrow, but the aforementioned Doc Films has a full plate of good stuff for the Chicago-bound this turkey week: there’s Satyajit Ray’s The Branches of the Tree Tuesday, Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch Wednesday, a Hitchcock/Bu

Click here to read what Greg Sandow wrote the other day about the experience of listening to Jean Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. Then go thou and do likewise. If you don’t have a recording, this is the best one. (I’m listening to it right now.) When you hear it, you’ll understand what Sibelius meant when he wrote, “God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.”

Thanks, Greg.

Dear OGIC:

I’m with you, almost completely. None of the artists you mentioned rings the bell for me, least of all Godard (whom I’ve always thought to be wildly overrated). As for Picasso, I said my say about him when I reviewed the Museum of Modern Art’s “Matisse Picasso” show for The Wall Street Journal:

In the visual arts, the race has always been between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and Picasso has always been the front-runner. Certainly Americans, with their puritan distrust of beauty, have typically favored his relentless experimentation to Matisse’s less obviously innovative stylistic pilgrimage. Even now, Picasso’s paintings look modern to the least tutored eye–you can’t help but come away from them secure in the knowledge that you’ve been challenged with a capital C–whereas it is perfectly possible to skate happily atop Matisse’s luscious, angst-free surfaces without feeling the slightest need to come to grips with the existential problem of…well, anything. (That’s why Picasso’s “Guernica,” which wears its antiwar message like a bumper sticker, is far better known than any Matisse painting. It’s modern art for modernists who don’t like art.)

Rarely has an artist done more harm to his own reputation than Matisse did when he declared that he wanted his work to serve as “a kind of cerebral sedative as relaxing in its ways as a comfortable armchair,” a remark as subtle and misleading as T.S. Eliot’s observation that Henry James had “a mind so fine no idea could violate it.” You have to think hard about it to understand how profound it is, just as you have to look hard at Matisse’s paintings to see how radically original they were, and are….

Picasso’s painting is the work of a spiritual contortionist who twists the visible world into angry patterns that betray his interior fury; Matisse, the disciplined sybarite, tells us instead of his joy.

My Dickens problem, on the other hand, vexes me. I know I’m missing something good, and can’t seem to find a way around it (whereas I’m perfectly happy to be deaf to whatever good there is in the music of Wagner). Maybe you can set me straight.

Obviously I now need to up the ante by making a confession of significantly higher voltage. So, um…well…how about this? I wouldn’t lose a bit of sleep if all the German paintings in the world vanished first thing tomorrow morning. Poof.

Top that, you piker.

Dear Terry:

In answer to your challenge issued here, I’ve sweated a bit, but I’m ready to come clean. And, by the way, Michael Blowhard’s original post is an excellent and useful reminder that we don’t have to bend our tastes to love everything of value. I’m sure you’ve noted all the interesting responses he’s been getting in his comments section. Some definite patterns have emerged (and things have gotten more than a little heated).

For writers, I’ll play my Virginia Woolf and William Blake cards.

Painters? Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin. Several years ago I might have said Monet, but the big show that passed through Chicago a while back reminded me that his paintings are not equivalent to their bland reproductions on a million coffee cups and mouse pads. But I might still cite his series paintings–making an exception for those enormous, very late water lilies.

Among filmmakers, I’ve seen a lot of Godard movies without chomping at the bit to see any of them again (well, maybe Breathless, but just for its iconicity). Films that fall into this category are harder for me to think of than anything else. It’s a seductive medium. And, more so than with other art forms, I tend to believe that if I don’t like a film, it’s just not that good. Can you make any sense of that?

On Dickens we’ll have to agree to disagree. Maybe we’re reading different Dickens, but that man makes me laugh out loud. When he is sharp, he is very, very good, but when he’s sentimental he’s horrid. For me, the former outweighs the latter.

Whack–back into your court!

I could change my mind, but I’m not planning to post anything new today, having been obsessively active yesterday. Instead, I’ve updated the “Teachout’s Top Five” and “Teachout Elsewhere” modules of the right-hand column (and yes, I know it took me long enough). Browse at your leisure. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Rumor has it that OGIC has something up her elegantly tailored sleeve, but I could be wrong. She never tells me anything! So I’ll know when you do….