Archives for 2003

“There is a passage in the autobiography (more or less true) of Alonso de Contreras, who began life as a scullion and ended it as a Knight of Malta, that has always seemed to me a masterpiece of narrative and an example of perfect style. Having at one period of his picturesque career married the well-to-do widow of a judge his suspicions were aroused that she was deceiving him with his most intimate friend. One morning he discovered them in one another’s arms. ‘Murieron,’ he writes. ‘They died.’ With that one grim word he dismisses the matter and passes on to other things. That is proper writing.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

The Criterion Collection’s DVD of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, all scrubbed up and fitted out with gazillions of special features, is now available for pre-ordering at amazon.com by clicking here. Do so. Even if you don’t share my passionate belief that it’s the greatest movie ever made, surely you’ll agree that it comes damned close–and if you’ve never seen The Rules of the Game, now’s the time. The street date is Jan. 20.

For some reason, mention of The Rules of the Game put me in mind of the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, whose unfortunate winner, Aniruddha Bahal, was announced last week. Or maybe it was vice versa. The Rules of the Game, after all, is a film about sex (among other things) in which you don’t see anything but people talking and (occasionally) kissing. Yet there’s never any question in your mind about what’s going on behind all those closed doors.

I’m not prudish about on-screen sex: I just don’t think it tends to be especially memorable or persuasive. More often than not, as in the case of Kissing Jessica Stein, it’s far more effective–not to mention sexy–when the details of the act itself are left to the viewer’s imagination. But I readily make an exception for those rare sex scenes that are used to deepen our understanding of the characters. John Sayles is particularly good at this, especially in Baby It’s You and Lone Star, where the sex scenes tell us important things about the participants. Another film in which an on-screen portrayal of sexual intercourse is used to brilliant (and joltingly unsexy) effect is The Dreamlife of Angels. And I hasten to add that I can also think of a few fairly explicit on-screen sex scenes that are just plain arousing, foremost among them the ones in The Big Easy.

Any thoughts on this topic, OGIC?

“With her brightest students Miss Batterson was always on terms of uneasy, disappointed admiration; their work never seemed to be helping their development as much as the work of the stupider students was helping theirs. Every year there was a little war–an eighteenth century one, though–about whether the school magazine was printing only the work of a clique. Miss Batterson was perfectly good-hearted in this: if you cannot discriminate between good and bad yourself, it cannot help seeming somewhat poor-spirited and arbitrary of other people to do so. Aesthetic discrimination is no pleasanter, seems no more just and rational to those discriminated against, than racial discrimination; the popular novelist would be satisfied with his income from serials and scenarios and pocket books if people would only see that he is a better writer than Thomas Mann.”

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Joseph Epstein, my favorite essayist, has a witty and thoughtful essay in the current Weekly Standard:

Funny, but I do look Jewish, at least to myself, and more and more so as the years go by. I’m fairly sure I didn’t always look Jewish, not when I was a boy, or possibly even when a young man, though I have always carried around my undeniably Jewish name, which was certainly clue enough. But today, gazing at my face in the mirror, I say to myself, yes, no question about it, this is a very Jewish-looking gent….

I have always wondered what it might be like not to be Jewish but to have a Jewish-sounding name–Sarah Jacobson, Norman Davis, Mark Steyn–and often be taken for Jewish. First, there would be the worry that someone might hold your being Jewish (when you’re not) against you; and, second, there is the discomfort entailed in getting special treatment from another Jew or philo-Semite because that he or she thinks you are someone you are not. I once saw a man who was a dead ringer for the old actor Cesar Romero wearing a bright red T-shirt with bold white lettering that read “I Am Not Cesar Romero.” Perhaps people with Jewish-sounding names ought to wear T-shirts, or at least carry business cards, that read, “I’m Sidney Ross, But Not Really Jewish.” Glenn Gould, whose name and face and manner all falsely suggest Jewishness, could have used such a T-shirt.

Read the whole thing here.

So far as I know, I’ve never been “taken for Jewish,” nor do I expect to be. I doubt if anyone in the United States looks more goyische than me, and “Terry Teachout” is roughly as Jewish-sounding as “Thurston Howell III.” I do, however, have highly cultivated tastes for lox and bagels, the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Jewish jokes of the way-too-close-to-the-knuckle sort, and it also happens that I’m the music critic for a magazine Jewish enough to have been mentioned by name in Annie Hall. I keep hoping that some raving anti-Semite who only knows me on paper will jump to the wrong conclusion, thus allowing me to reply, “No, but I wish I were.” Alas, it hasn’t happened yet….

I know a very WASPy-looking WASP musician, by the way, who used to play a lot of recitals at synagogues, where she would invariably be approached at the post-concert reception by at least one old lady who told her, “You don’t look Jewish, darling.” Eventually she came up with the perfect response: “I know, that’s what everybody says!”

UPDATE: Cup of Chicha links to this posting, and (as always) adds some intriguing comments of her own. Take a look.

Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com, our prize-winning host site, has installed a search button in the top module of the right-hand column. Click on CLICK HERE TO SEARCH SITE and you will be taken to a Google-driven search engine that allows you to search the “About Last Night” archives at will.

Try it, you’ll like it.

A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting
on the postmodern decline of the movie theater:

I decided to brave the storm and go to Times Square to see the latest version of Fellowship of the Rings. Made me think of your latest blog about the demise of the movie theatre. Sorry, this may date me, but for me there’s nothing that will replace sitting in the dark watching a world unfold before me larger than life. I must get it from my mom, who was a teenager in the forties and like most of her friends lived in the movies. She was not content to keep it to herself either – I first saw ‘Gone With the Wind’ on the big screen when I was 9. You forget that for the young, going to a movie theatre is a social thing of getting out of the damn house and even if the whole concept of the dinner -n- movie gets tiring after the third decade, it still gives a couple of strangers something to discuss before they really know each other.

Point taken, and it explains why the movie theater remains a popular destination among the young–why, in fact, they are the only demographic group that still matters to Hollywood. For teenagers, theaters are affordable meeting places whose appeal has little or nothing to do with the aesthetic appeal of Film as Art. This suggests that as the median age of Americans continues to soar (driven by the graying of the baby boomers), the trend away from theatergoing will increase.

Needless to say–or perhaps not–I, too, will miss the uniquely enveloping experience my correspondent so beautifully describes. I think that was part and parcel of the original appeal of movies: the fact that we saw them on a large screen, sitting in the dark. And maybe that helps explain why the appeal of theatergoing has diminished for me, since the theaters of my high school and college days were smallish-screen multiplexes. The transition from a small multiplex screen to home viewing is pretty easily made. I’ve mostly made it, though I feel the tug of the old ways on the rarer-than-rare occasions when I get a chance to see a widescreen Technicolor western in a large theater. Such films were not made to be seen at home–and that’s the only place we get to see them nowadays.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies on TV in the past couple of days, by the way (that’s what catching a bad cold does to you), and it’s been interesting to see which ones work and which ones don’t. Black-and-white films shot in pre-widescreen aspect ratios almost always translate well to the small screen–even William Wellman’s Yellow Sky, a Gregory Peck Western whose early scenes are conspicuously landscape-driven. Widescreen color films tend not to work unless their subject matter is intimate, as in the case of The Cincinnati Kid, the Norman Jewison-Steve McQueen film about big-time poker players. And indie-type flicks, significantly but not surprisingly, always work: Amy’s Orgasm and Kissing Jessica Stein could have been made for TV.

Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to draw your attention to Cinetrix’s recent posting about the use of music in Magnolia, and why it’s smarter and more essentially cinematic than the fruits of “the so-called renaissance of the movie musical.” V. smart, v. much worth reading.

I just received in the mail the Spring 2004 catalogue of Yale University Press. I opened it to page 35, where I found (drumroll) A Terry Teachout Reader, complete with a thumbnail photo of the dust jacket, whose centerpiece is a reproduction of Fairfield Porter’s lithograph Broadway.

I can already see one problem with the Reader, which is that Yale has placed it under the category “Music/Essays,” which is right and not right at the same time. Yes, music figures prominently in it, but so do lots and lots of other things.

Here’s the flap copy, which I didn’t write:

Terry Teachout, one of our most acute cultural commentators, here turns his sharp eye to every corner of the arts world–music, dance, literature, theater, film, TV, and the visual arts. This collection gathers the best of Teachout’s writings from the past fifteen years. In each essay he offers lucid and balanced judgments that invariably illuminate, sometimes infuriate, and always spark a response–the mark of a critic whose thoughts, however controversial, cannot be ignored.

In a thoughtful introduction to the book, Teachout considers how American culture of the twenty-first century differs from that of the last century and how the information age has altered popular culture. His selected essays chronicle America’s cultural journeyover the past decade and a half,a nd they show us what has been lost–and gained–along the way. With highly informed opinions, an inimitable wit and style, and a genuine devotion to all things cultural, Teachout offers his readers much to delight in and much to ponder.

Anyone who comes from a small Midwestern town is genetically programmed to squirm at the prospect of seeing such effusive words emblazoned on his own dust jacket, but publishing is a business, and a boy, as Truman Capote once said, must peddle his book. At any rate, I’m proud of the Teachout Reader, and to see it in the Yale catalogue is a comfort on a cold, snowy day.

The Teachout Reader will be published in May–posthumously, if I become the first author ever to succumb to the common cold. Otherwise, I’ll be reminding you of its insidious approach, and as of today, you can pre-order it from amazon.com by clicking here.

I rise from my bed of discomfort (my cold is worse, it’s snowing again, and I have a preview tonight) to remind you of what you should already know, which is that my most recent book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, is now out in trade paperback–and still available in hardcover.

If you like this blog, you’ll like The Skeptic, and so will your friends. So did the critics: the reviews were spectacularly warm, as you can see for yourself by going here.

I blog for pleasure but write to pay the rent. If you’d like to support both causes, think about giving The Skeptic for Christmas, or buying a copy for yourself if you don’t already own one.

To purchase the paperback, click here.

To purchase the hardcover edition, click here.

Now I need to go blow my nose.