Archives for 2003

A reader writes, apropos of my recent here that younger New Yorkers don’t seem to be collecting affordable serious art:

When I go to people’s houses, I routinely have to drool at the art on the walls, and if there’s not real art, there’s really nice posters and reproductions. See, baby boomers and Gen-Xers who are science fiction/fantasy or comics fans routinely have inexpensive high-quality art on their walls, as
well as sketches by the famous tucked away in various places. I’m not an especially huge art collector and I’m not making much, but I have the following in my collection: (1) A painted cover layout by Jack Gaughan. (2) Two sketches by Hannes Bok (I paid too much for these, frankly). (3) Six pages of sketches by Phil Foglio. (He gives out his old scratch paper for free at conventions. We like.) (4) A quick-sketched portrait by Mark Wallace (“William Blackfox”). (5) A drawing by Matt Roach. I’ve also got five paintings by lesser-known folks and a ton of laser prints. Oh, and I’ve been known to buy animation cels and artwork as gifts for others.

I could easily pick up a really good cover painting for 500-1000 dollars if I attended the right science fiction conventions, but frankly, I don’t have enough space on my wall and my apartment has this little thing called rent. But lots of fans make lots more money than I do, and they buy. A lot. Most fans have more art stuck away somewhere in the house than on the walls, and there’s plenty on the walls. But every convention features an art show, with work by the most revered professionals cheek-by-jowl with rank beginners. A lot of stuff is clumsy, and some of the stuff with good technique is too pretty-pretty or too dark or too interested in showing large expanses of female flesh. But there’s a lot of good and interesting stuff out there.

Shh! Don’t tell anybody!

Pop quiz: What do you think my reaction to this letter was?

If your answer was (A) amused snobbery, you are sooooo wrong. One of my most prized pieces of art is an original cel setup (animation cel plus background painting) from The Cat Concerto, an Oscar-winning Tom & Jerry cartoon. It shows Jerry Mouse scampering up a piano keyboard, a vexed expression on his face. I love animated cartoons, and I think they’re art, too, the same way I think All About Eve is art–that much, and no more. That’s the reason why my Tom & Jerry cel setup is hung in my office, but my John Marin etching is hung in my living room.

To quote from the preface to A Terry Teachout Reader, out next spring from Yale University Press: “Just as city dwellers can’t understand what it meant for the residents of a rural town to wake up one day and find themselves within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, so are they incapable of properly appreciating the true significance of middlebrow culture. For all its flaws, it nurtured at least two generations’ worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows–but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture.”

The point being that it’s absolutely O.K. to like both John Marin and Tom & Jerry, so long as you know that there’s a big difference between them, and that one is better than the other. Which ought to be needless to say…but we all know it isn’t anymore, don’t we?

“The Thomas Crown Affair is pretty good trash, but we shouldn’t convert what we enjoy it for into false terms derived from our study of the other arts. That’s being false to what we enjoy. If it was priggish for an older generation of reviewers to be ashamed of what they enjoyed and to feel they had to be contemptuous of popular entertainment, it’s even more priggish for a new movie generation to be so proud of what they enjoy that they use their education to try to place trash within the acceptable academic tradition.”

Pauline Kael, Going Steady

I wonder how many readers of the New York Times remember Harold C. Schonberg, who died Saturday at the age of 87. He was the Times’ chief music critic from 1960 to 1980, during which time he published two very popular books about classical music, The Great Pianists (1963) and The Lives of the Great Composers (1970), and won a Pulitzer prize for criticism, the first ever awarded to a music critic. Yet he was regarded as increasingly irrelevant even during his tenure at the Times, and though his old paper gave him a proper sendoff, by now I suspect he is best remembered (if at all) for having taken memorably worded but ultimately philistine potshots at Leonard Bernstein and Glenn Gould, neither of which was quoted in his Times obituary. (It was Schonberg who wrote of an especially flamboyant Bernstein performance that “he rose vertically into the air, a la Nijinsky, and hovered there a good 15 seconds by the clock.”)

A no-nonsense journalist who understood in his bones that a performance is also news–something many working critics never figure out–Schonberg was conservative to the point of reaction in his musical values, and this, I suspect, is what has caused his memory to fade. It wasn’t just that he rejected the avant-garde: The Lives of the Great Composers, otherwise a rather good book, is surprisingly unreceptive to 20th-century classical music in general. But he got one thing on the nose, as he recalled in his farewell column, from which the Times did quote:

I thought the serial-dominated music after the war was a hideously misbegotten creature sired by Caliban out of Hecate, and I had no hesitation in saying so. Nor has it been proved that I was all wrong. Certain it is that the decades of serialism did nothing but alienate the public, creating a chasm between composer and audience.

Schonberg lived long enough to see time prove him dead right about the music of Schoenberg, Webern, and their progeny–although a good many of his fellow critics have yet to figure out what he sensed at once. And as unfashionable as his rejection of 12-tone music was in the Sixties and Seventies, he never hesitated, then or at any other time, to say exactly what he thought.

Not the worst possible epitaph for a critic.

Deaf West Theatre’s revival of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opened last night on Broadway. Here’s the first paragraph of my review in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Why on earth–and how on earth–would a deaf theater company bring a musical to Broadway? Neither part of this question can be briefly answered, but in the case of Deaf West Theatre’s magical production of “Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” which opened last night at the American Airlines Theatre, the results need no explaining. This stage version of Mark Twain’s novel, first seen on Broadway in 1985, is now being revived by a mixed cast of deaf and hearing actors who not only speak and sing their lines out loud but simultaneously “say” them in American Sign Language. Laborious as the process may sound, Jeff Calhoun, the director and choreographer, has shaped it into a miraculously fluid theatrical spectacle….

To read the rest of the review, you’ll have to fork out a dollar for the Journal, whose “Weekend Journal” section is worth at least that much in gold.

I had lunch the other day with a classical composer I know. He told me, perfectly seriously, “I just had the worst nightmare–I dreamed I was trapped inside an E minor chord.”

He also told me about attending a drunken dinner party of fellow composers, who clustered around the piano after dessert to sing funny songs. Did you know that every poem Emily Dickinson ever wrote can be sung to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme? “Beeeeee-cause I could not stop for death/He kind-ly stop-ped for me….” Or that all limericks can be sung to the tune of “It Ain’t Necessarily So”?

Think about this the next time you see a composer take a bow at a new-music concert. Don’t let appearances fool you–these people are kinky.

P.S. A reader writes:

I’ve only very recently overcome the unfortunate habit of singing Emily Dickinson’s poems. “Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” “The Marine Corps Hymn,” and, perhaps worst of all, “Deep in the Heart of Texas” also work. But I warn you: That way madness lies.

“Boredom is one of the flattest, most self-evident, most self-justifying of all esthetic judgments. There is no appeal from boredom. Even when you tell yourself you like boredom, there the verdict is.”

Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics

Film noir is the porn of pessimists, who like nothing more than to watch stylishly photographed movies in which the Robert Mitchums of the world make the mistake of going to bed with the Jane Greers of the world, for which they pay with their lives. In LaBrava, Elmore Leonard dreamed up the perfect title for a nonexistent film noir: “Obituary.” That’s a movie somebody needs to make.

Alas, I’m just as hopeless a case–I’m one of those pathetic cinephiles who can’t settle on the best place to hang his framed On Dangerous Ground lobby card–and in the interests of spreading my addiction more widely, I want to pass the word that Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place is now available on DVD. In a Lonely Place is well known to serious film buffs and Humphrey Bogart fanatics, but if you don’t fall into either of those two categories, you probably haven’t seen it. Do so. Bogart plays Dixon Steele, an almost-washed-up screenwriter who gets tagged with a brutal murder at the precise moment that he falls hard for Laurel Gray, a blonde with a past-and-a-half. Gloria Grahame, the ultimate film-noir babe, is eerily perfect as Laurel, and as all cinephiles know, she was simultaneously (1) married to Nicholas Ray and (2) having an affair with Ray’s teenage son while the movie was in production. Yikes!

As for Bogart, he never made a better movie, and I do mean Casablanca. David Thomson nails it: “This last [film] penetrates the toughness that Bogart so often assumed and reaches an intractable malevolence that is more frightening than any of his gangsters.”

This, by the way, is the film in which Bogart rasps out the line of a lifetime: “I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me.” If that doesn’t make you go ooooh, film noir is not for you.

“If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.”

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism