Archives for 2003

This comes from The Old Man and Me, Elaine Dundy’s out-of-print and hard-to-find sophomore (but never sophomoric!) novel. It followed her 1958 cult classic The Dud Avocado (which, now that I think of it, is also a title I wish I’d written).

There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again–leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.

It’s amazing to me that everyone in Hollywood runs around snapping up rights to any book that sells any copies at all, and nobody has yet thought to film either of Dundy’s darkly charming books. OK, so some of those movies–well, at least one–will probably be good, but that doesn’t mean I have to like this compulsion to film everything in print, as though what really ratifies a book’s worth is having one of its characters end up as yet another notch in Anthony Hopkins’s belt. (In fact, they’re filming David Auburn’s play Proof in my neighborhood lately, and I walk around alternating between craning my neck to try to glimpse Hopkins, la Gwyneth, or Jake Gyllenhaal, and despising myself.)

Two new sites debut on the blogroll (look right, scroll down) today. They’re so new, they still have that new blog smell. One is the moviegoing Pullquote, written by the Cinetrix, a mysterious and witty being who knows what she’s talking about, and has good taste to boot. (Link via Old Hag.)

The other is the hard-boiled Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, a title that proves hard to abbreviate to blogroll width, so I’ve listed it under the name of its proprietress, Sarah Weinman. Confessions covers literary news generally and crime fiction in particular, all in a manner more sunny than noir.

It might be an understatement to say that my friend is pleased with last week’s #1 album:

This white girl has nothing but infatuation and admiration for the OutKast CD “Speakerboxxx/The Love Below.” It’s two CDs, actually–Dre and Big Boi have packaged their respective solo albums together in one jewel case and labeled it the next OutKast album. To those who think a house divided cannot stand, think again. The two display a voracious musical intelligence that is literally a trip. Big Boi’s “Speakerboxxx” is the less varied but no less intoxicating half of the project; he moves from channeling Earth, Wind & Fire to a gospel choir to more of the urbanity heard on Outkast’s last album, “Stankonia,” with complex raps that hold together in the middle of his riffs, not just around the edges. Singing about everything from Daniel Pearl and Operation Anaconda to the gangsta quadrivium of women, guns, drugs, and name brands, Big Boi explodes all over “Speakerboxxx” with an energy that can only be described as Olympian.

“The Love Below,” Dre’s contribution, is at the same time randier and more romantic–and musically all over the map. Underlying his erotic exhortations–i.e., to “shake it like a polaroid picture”–are grooves drawn from Prince, a mellower Hendrix, the best of neo-soul, George Benson; every offering strikes a different tone. How can you not like a guy who sweetly sings, “so what if your head sports a couple of gray hairs/Same here, and actually I think it’s funky in a Claire Huxtable-type way”? And then has me singing along to a song whose refrain is “crazy bitch”?

Sure, there are some fillers and cringers here and there, and the de rigueur talky interludes, but considering the mass of music they’ve put together here, the whole project has an astronomical batting average. It’s the most infectious, enthusiastic, ambitious music I’ve heard in a long time.

She’s not the only one. Read more about it here and here.

UPDATE: Slate’s Sasha Frere-Jones is similarly smitten.

The latest installment of the Washington Post Book World‘s “First Encounters” series has Michael Dirda unpacking a series of poems by Victorian writer George Meredith. Meredith is a tough nut to crack; there’s a reason he’s read and remembered mainly by scholars. Meredith has his rewards, but to the modern ear his writing does sound, in Dirda’s words, “labored, overblown and clunky.”

Still, Meredith was an original, and it’s nice to see his Modern Love get a little ink in the WaPo. The poems in question tell of the break-up of a marriage, and Dirda mentions in a general way that Meredith wrote from the experience of his own failed marriage to Mary Ellen Meredith (n

The weekend’s top movie, School of Rock, is perfect for what it is: a funny wisp of a premise played out with wit, sweetness, and seeming spontaneity. The beauty of it is how unlabored it all seems–and also, contrary to what you might expect, the fact that it’s been kept clean and family-friendly. Jack Black says in this interview that

Just because you take out the cuss words doesn’t mean you have to be less funny. In fact, I think I was more funny to make up for it. You get more intense. You have to communicate those cusswords through your face muscles.

You won’t mind that it’s formulaic and predictable and takes full advantage of the cuteness of its kid costars. You won’t care that Black has yet to show he can master more than one character (i.e., the same guy he played in High Fidelity). You’ll fall hook, line, and sinker for its seductive vision of the rock band as an ideal little society: a meritocracy that’s also all-inclusive.

Just go see it, and let the critic in you take the night off. I haven’t had this kind of effortless fun at a movie since the first time I saw Clueless.

I just received in the mail a copy of Paul Johnson’s Art: A New History. Like all his books, it is fabulously energetic and violently opinionated, and thus as a result irresistibly readable–you can open it almost at random and find gems. It also contains, as advertised, a categorical rejection of the modern movement in art, whose values and virtues Johnson denies virtually in toto (he does like Edward Hopper).

I’ve always been fascinated by this kind of clean-sweep rejectionism, in part because it speaks to a quirk in my own temperament. I vividly remember the thrill of guilty pleasure with which I read for the first time this oft-quoted passage from Evelyn Waugh’s 1957 novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold:

His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz–everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the ‘thirties: “It is later than you think,” which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought.

I don’t feel this way, but I think I know what it would feel like to feel this way, and I confess to finding it more than a little bit tempting. Since there is, after all, so much about the modern era that is worthy of loathing, why not simply loathe it all and be done with it? The problem is that I’ve never been able to reject the evidence of my senses, which tell me that Stravinsky was a great composer (usually) and Picasso a great painter (sometimes). For me, pretending otherwise would be a pose, and I don’t like poseurs.

It also helps that I have a good many interesting friends who are a good deal younger than I, and that insofar as possible I try not to waste their time telling them what things were like when I was their age. I feel the temptation to live in the past, but one can truly live only in the moment, and the last thing I want to do is end up like the pathetic narrator of “Hey Nineteen,” the Steely Dan song about a no-longer-young baby boomer who tries to tell his teenaged girlfriend about Aretha Franklin but discovers that “she don’t remember/The Queen of Soul,” subsequently realizing that “we got nothing in common/No, we can’t talk at all.” On the whole, I prefer to hear about the world they live in (though sometimes their stories make me shiver), and not infrequently they draw my attention to wonderful things about which I wouldn’t have known had I not been paying attention to what they had to say.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that the world is full of rejectionists of various kinds–not so many as when I was younger, but still quite a few. I have a number of older musician friends who claim to hate all kinds of post-Sinatra pop music, for example, and I also get occasional letters from readers who want to know how I could possibly admire the music of Benjamin Britten or the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, or take a movie like Ghost World seriously. What nearly all these latter correspondents seem to have in common is that they really, truly don’t like any modern art, a position which puzzles me. Now, I freely admit to having problems with large tracts of the modern movement, and I long ago brought in guilty verdicts on atonal music and minimalist art, but at no time in my life has it ever occurred to me to dismiss all modernism as a snare and a delusion.

Are these anti-modernists poseurs? Some probably are, but I can’t imagine that many of them are merely playing at the old-fogy game. A greater number, I suspect, are rejecting something about which they know nothing, or at least not nearly enough to have an informed opinion. (H.L. Mencken was like that, as I explain in The Skeptic.)

Not knowing much about modernism, needless to say, is an affliction not limited to the ranks of the confirmed modernism-haters. Hanging on the walls of my apartment are works on paper by William Bailey, Nell Blaine, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane Freilicher, Wolf Kahn, Alex Katz, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver, and I never cease to be amazed by the high percentage of my visitors who don’t recognize any of their names–though most of them do like the art, or at least claim to. I’d be interested in knowing whether the author of the following amazon.com customer review of Art: A New History is familiar with the work of any of the above-mentioned artists, all of whom are “modern” but only one of whom is an abstractionist in the conventional sense of the word:

This excellent, irreverent survey of art history is a breath of fresh air for those struggling artists and art historians who are dissenters from the contemporary art establishment. I hope that Johnson’s emphasis on training, technique, and realism will aid in the post-modern renaissance that is now quietly occuring, especially among younger artists who are burnt out on the stifling sameness of the arts community and want a return to classical training, beauty, and order in an arts climate that has for decades been inhospitable to those values.

But even after allowing for the effects of ignorance, there still remains a not insignificant residue of what I suppose must be called well-informed clean-sweep rejectionism, though I prefer to think of it as Pinfoldism. Paul Johnson is a prime example. He’s not even slightly ignorant (though judging by the index to Art: A New History, I suspect he doesn’t know as much as he should about the less radical forms of modern American art), and while I don’t know him personally, he doesn’t strike me as a poseur, either. He just doesn’t like modern art–modern visual art, that is, though my guess is that his rejectionism encompasses music and literature as well. I wouldn’t dream of arguing with him, either, since he seems perfectly happy to live without the fruits of the modern movement.

What’s more, Johnson’s rejectionism hasn’t stopped him from writing a good book. You don’t have to be right to be interesting. Insofar as possible, though, I’d rather be both.

“Gertrude was never polite to anything but material: when she patted someone on the head you could be sure that the head was about to appear, smoked, in her next novel.”

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

I’m pleased to announce that the trade paperback edition of my most recent book, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, can now be ordered in advance at amazon.com. To buy it, click here, and it’ll be sent to you on publication in November. It’ll make a great stocking stuffer (if your sock is big enough).

For those who’ve been asking, the unofficial publication date of A Terry Teachout Reader, Yale University Press’ forthcoming collection of my greatest hits, is April. This could change, depending on whether or not I get the book proofread and indexed on time! I haven’t seen it yet, but my editor tells me that the dust jacket (which makes use of the Fairfield Porter lithograph chosen by you, the readers of “About Last Night”) looks terrific.

Now all I have to do is get my George Balanchine biography written, and 2004 should be a very good year….