Archives for 2003

Things are silting up here as I prepare for my long weekend in Raleigh (I have two more pieces to write before I can get on the plane and go), so I’ll be keeping it fairly short. Today’s topics, from testy to zesty: (1) Zankel Hall reviewed–by other people. (2) “Today’s Installment” explained, sort of. (3) Today’s installment. (4) Last night’s playlist. (5) The latest almanac entry.

You know what I want. You know who you are. You know what to do.

I haven’t been back to Zankel Hall since the media preview concert–unlike the music critics, I have other things to do–but I’ve been keeping a close eye on what’s been written about New York City’s newest concert hall since it opened a couple of weeks ago. Generally speaking, the reviews accord pretty well with what I said about the hall here and on NPR’s Performance Today. In brief, most critics like the design but are variously skeptical about the acoustics. Beyond that, the consensus is all over the place, sort of like a drunken ballerina.

Unlike certain well-known bloggers, I’m disinclined to trash my print-media colleagues (I have to live with them, after all), but I do want to make a few, ahem, general observations about what’s been written up to now:

(1) Most critics have discussed the appearance of the hall without attempting to evaluate its functionality. Were the seats comfortable? Are the aisles wide enough? How hard is it to get in and out of the place? Will the interior design wear well–and does it seem to have any effect on the perceived acoustics? These folk are henceforth on Double Secret Probation, and will be watched closely for further signs of shortsightedness.

(2) A few critics had nothing whatsoever to say about the acoustics, or commented on them without drawing any distinction between the differing responses of the hall to amplified and unamplified sound. These clowns get the Lifetime Booby Prize–a dunce hat, nailed on their heads–and are permanently disqualified from any further discussion of Zankel Hall.

(3) Most critics (but not all!) at least mentioned the subway noise that leaks into the hall during performances, and one, Barbara Jepson in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (go here to read her piece), singled it out for extensive and unfavorable comment, suggesting that until the noise can be lessened significantly, the success of the hall must remain in doubt. Good for her. (In fact, I fear the noise problem will become more obtrusive over time, not less.)

I might add that at least one Carnegie Hall head, and probably several, should be gently lowered to the chopping block at the earliest opportunity. Anybody who didn’t think noise wouldn’t be a huge problem in a hall that is nine feet from the nearest subway tunnel is a quarterwit.

(4) Nearly everybody has praised Zankel Hall’s multicultural programming to the skies. In my opinion, it’s sucker bait for the print media. I’m not saying the programs aren’t good–some are, some aren’t–but come on, folks, this is New York City, where every imaginable kind of music can already be heard all over town. Not only are performing arts centers soooooo Seventies, but Manhattan was the biggest and best performing arts center in the world long before Zankel Hall switched on its escalators. In any case, presenting a lot of different kinds of art in one place doesn’t make any of them any better. Does Emmylou Harris need a Good Housekeeping seal of approval from Carnegie Hall to be considered the greatest country singer of her generation? Puh-leeze. And just because the (mostly classical) critics who’ve been writing about Zankel Hall don’t get out much doesn’t mean the rest of us have to bow and scrape before them.

So one mild cheer to the management of Carnegie Hall for having discovered something the rest of us already knew about, and another when they figure out how to make amplified music sound halfway decent in a hall that so far doesn’t appear to be very well suited to it.

Back when I was a wee thing, one or two light years ago, an extremely smart smartass who edited the “Goings On About Town” section of The New Yorker got tired of writing new capsule summaries of The Fantasticks, which by that time had been running off Broadway since shortly before the birth of Christ. Much the same problem had manifested itself years before: Robert Benchley, who used to be The New Yorker‘s drama critic, got equally tired of writing capsule summaries of Abie’s Irish Rose, the Fantasticks of the Thirties, and started coming up with cute one-liners like “No worse than a bad cold.” Forty years later, Mr. Anonymous Smartass approached the problem differently. In place of summaries, he serialized Ulysses…one sentence at a time.

I seem to be the only person alive who remembers reading those snippets from Ulysses in “Goings On About Town” (I couldn’t find any reference to them on the Web), so I decided it would be fun to do the same thing in “About Last Night” and see who noticed. Hence “Today’s Installment,” in which I have been serializing a well-known short story one sentence at a time. One reader, Marla S. Carew, noticed and nailed it on the second installment. Another checked in with the right answer an hour or two after Ms. Carew, while a third correspondent guessed the author–but not the story.

Care to give it a go?

4.

He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal.

Here’s what I listened to on my iBook while writing yesterday’s blog:

(1) Polly Podewell, “After You, Who?”

(2) Larry Goldings Trio, “Asimov” (the hippest organ trio in jazz)

(3) Fred Hersch Trio, “At the Close of the Day” (an exquisite study in pastel harmony–the title is from a poem by Walt Whitman)

(4) Gerry Mulligan Concert Jazz Band, “Lady Chatterley’s Mother” (composed by Al Cohn, with an amazing shout chorus at the end)

(5) Stan Kenton, “Young Blood” (composed by Gerry Mulligan, ditto–and dig that Lee Konitz alto solo!)

(6) Mabel Mercer, “The World Today” (in memory of William Roy, the composer, who died a few weeks ago)

(7) Liz Phair, “X-Ray Man”

(8) Jimmy Webb, “Wichita Lineman” (the best record ever made of this perfect little song)

(9) Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, “Where’s the Money?”

(10) Peter Warlock, “Sleep” (sung by John Mark Ainsley).

And so to bed….

THE JOKER: I’m the world’s first homicidal artist. I make art until someone dies.

Sam Hamm and Warren Skaasen, Batman

My Site Meter tells me that “About Last Night” was read around the world yesterday, in time zones ranging from here to–I think–Iraq. Quite a few Asian and European readers, somewhat to my surprise (at one point during the day I seemed to have more readers in Central Europe than in the Mountain Standard Time zone of the good old U.S.A.). The kudzu is spreading!

I’m no less pleased, as well as a bit stunned, to announce that my mailbag is now empty. (I cleared out 500-plus e-mails in the last 48 hours.) I also switched off my autoreplier, a token of my determination to answer my mail promptly from now on, or at least while I’m in New York, which I won’t be this weekend, so don’t get your hopes up.

I found plenty of interesting things in my mailbox, including an e-mail from the long-lost woman who played Flora to my Miles in our small-town high-school production of The Innocents (talk about way weird), a note from someone who thinks I’m a redbaiter for having pointed out that Dalton Trumbo was (gadzooks) a Communist, and a large number of e-mails weighing in on the subject of which work of art Yale University Press should put on the cover of A Terry Teachout Reader. Most of you preferred Fairfield Porter’s lithograph Broadway. I reported your choice to my editor at Yale, who wrote back as follows:

That’s good news indeed because that’s the image that both I & the designer strongly prefer. It’s elegant, classy, & a bit nostalgic without the treacle.

How about that? Your vote did count, sort of.

In other news, Maud Newton
picked up on my hints about Friday’s guest blogger. No announcement yet–you’ll have to wait while the suspense continues to build.

Now on to today’s topics, from natty to dishevelled: (1) A genuinely fresh contribution (no fooling!) to the Frank Lloyd Wright debate. (2) Four poker faces. (3) Why we blog. (4) Who now reads Pope? Nobody. (5) Today’s installment. (6) The latest almanac entry.

I e-mailed my entire mailing list for the first time in several weeks, reminding everyone to come visit www.terryteachout.com, and what do you know? The numbers soared. Why can’t you do that, too?

A reader writes:

Regarding living in a work of art, the idea of living in a Frank Lloyd Wright house is indeed attractive, but as one who was recently privileged (and despite my remarks, it was a privilege) to spend a week in one, I have to tell you it was in many ways damnably uncomfortable. It would be nice to put it in a frame and gaze at it in wonder–in fact, standing in the living room and feeling the room around you is one of the great pleasures of the visit, but oh, my back! He may have been a egoist, but he was clearly also a sadist–bolt-upright chairs with short seats, low to the ground with inadequate padding and leg support, insufficient light in the kitchen and insufficient legroom everywhere. My favorite was the leather-covered chaise–whenever I sat on it, the slippery surface of the cushions began a two-way slide, both away from the chair and away from me. Eventually I ended up on the floor. It is the most comfortable chair in the house.

Plus, all the showers were designed for someone about five feet tall.

On the other hand, the place is exquisite, breathes out calm, and seems to swallow large groups of people so that you are never in each other’s way. It is not an untouchable kind of art: There is always a corner in the sun, always a place to gather and a place to find solitude, and a stone fireplace big enough for most people to stand in that seems to grow right out of the mountains and provide an anchor that family can build ties around.

Interestingly, the family built an addition, approved by the Wright foundation, that resembles the main house architecturally, but with some things “corrected”–deeper seats, more comfortable proportions, better padding. It’s very nice and far more comfortable to live in, but it is indefinably different: a cabin, not a cathedral, and with only a fraction of the peace and presence of the main structure. Mr. Wright definitely knew what he was doing, even if he did say so himself.

After I’d been there for a week, I generally felt that, genius or no genius, he was a malicious man with a detestation of the tall. A week at home on my comfortable chairs, and all I can remember is the feeling of standing in the main room, of being given something important by virtue of being in that space.

I must go and buy my hosts a thank-you gift.

Well, I can’t thank my correspondent (who requested anonymity) enough. The ongoing blogosphere debate over Wright has had a certain abstract quality, precisely because none of us has ever lived in a Wright house–which is, after all, the heart of the matter. Right?