Archives for January 9, 2004

One of the peculiarities of being a critic of all the arts is that your relative interest in different art forms inevitably fluctuates over time, sometimes quite sharply. It occurred to me the other day, for instance, that I hadn’t turned on the stereo in my living room for several weeks, and as I reflected on that hitherto-unnoticed fact, I realized that I hadn’t been to the opera, or to a classical concert, for at least that long. Nor have I been listening to music files on my computer as I write–a near-habitual practice for me. Instead, I’ve been looking at and thinking about paintings and plays, and I’m about to spend the next couple of months immersed in the ballets of George Balanchine. Music, by contrast, has lost its savor: I’m always happy to listen whenever it crosses my path, but I don’t feel any special need to seek it out.

Does this trouble me? Not really. I’ve lived long enough to know that the rhythms of an aesthetic life run in cycles. Sooner or later, probably sooner, I’ll hear a piece by a previously underappreciated composer, or a CD by a new singer whose voice tickles me in all the right places, and suddenly music will resume its place in the spotlight, while another art form retires temporarily to the wings. Most likely my love of music is simply lying fallow, regaining its strength. Back in the Seventies and Eighties, I reviewed classical music and jazz for the Kansas City Star. It was great fun, but it was also a burden, not because of the bad concerts but because of the merely adequate ones–of which there were far more than too many. Once I moved on to the next part of my life, I went for two whole years without going to a concert. It was necessary: I had to clear my ears. And when they were back in working order, I resolved never again to let myself get burned out, on music or anything else. Since then, I’ve made a point of writing about a steadily widening variety of artistic experiences. Whenever my interest in one art form starts to flag, I simply concentrate on another. That’s what’s happening now.

And yet…I’ve spent the better part of my life up to my ears (so to speak) in music of all kinds. After literature, music was my first art form, and it remains the one I know most intimately. I “speak” it as naturally as I speak English. I write a lengthy essay about musical matters nearly every month for Commentary. That’s why it feels strange to find the spring no longer flowing. It’s as if I’ve become alienated from myself, in much the same way that the victim of a stroke might feel he was no longer himself. I’m not all here.

Ivy Compton-Burnett, the English novelist, told a friend late in life that she could no longer read Jane Austen with pleasure, not because her admiration for Austen had lessened but because she’d read her novels so many times that she had them virtually by heart, and hence could no longer be surprised by them. When I read that, I wondered: is it really possible to exhaust a masterpiece? Much less an entire art form? I can’t imagine being unable to hear anything new in Falstaff or the Mozart G Minor Symphony, though I suppose it could happen. And as for a person who came to feel that music or painting or poetry had nothing more to say to him, he’d be in dire straits indeed. Such a terrible prospect puts me in mind of one of Dr. Johnson’s most famous utterances: “Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” The arts are like that. To be tired of them is to be tired of life.

Needless to say, I’m not tired of life–far from it–and even though I do seem to be tired of music, I know the time will come when I fall in love with it all over again. Until then, I’ll keep in mind Carolyn Leigh’s beautiful lyric to one of my favorite songs, “I Walk a Little Faster”:

Pretending that we’ll meet
Each time I turn a corner,
I walk a little faster.

You’ve probably already heard about it from BuzzMachine, but if not, the most interesting thing I’ve seen on the Web lately is Jay Rosen’s “Journalism Is Itself a Religion,” a long, challenging essay posted two days ago on his Pressthink site. Here’s the billboard:

The newsroom is a nest of believers if we include believers in journalism itself. There is a religion of the press. There is also a priesthood. And there can be a crisis of faith….

The essay was written to herald the launch of The Revealer,
a promising-looking on-line magazine about religion and the media. The Revealer is definitely worth a look, but read Rosen’s essay first. As BuzzMachine says, “I can’t quote it without mangling it so go pour a cup of coffee and have a good read.” I agree. It’s a must.

Whoops! OGIC just reminded me that I forgot to post the Friday teaser for my Wall Street Journal drama column. So here goes: I wrote in this morning’s Journal about my recent visit to Chicago,where I saw Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of Rose Rage, a five-and-a-half-hour-long adaptation by Edward Hall of all three parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, and the Steppenwolf Theater Company’s production of Man From Nebraska, a new play by Tracy Letts.

Rose Rage I liked, with some qualifications:

Of course there’s more to “Henry VI” than this–four hours more, to be exact–but Mr. Hall’s own ruthless cutting of the original text, combined with the cartoony conceptualism of his production style, stuffs Shakespeare into a straitjacket. At first I found the results tricky and exasperating, but theater is an empirical art whose practitioners make their own rules, and well before the dinner break arrived, I realized that I had gotten completely caught up in the ferocious sweep of “Rose Rage.” Mr. Hall may suffer from tunnel vision, but at least his tunnel goes someplace interesting: The comic scenes bristle with vitality, the battles are angry and clamorous, and when the long evening is finally over, you’ll find it hard to shake off the dark spell cast by this sometimes over-clever but nonetheless thrilling show….

Man From Nebraska I loathed:

Ken Carpenter (Rick Snyder), a Baptist family man from Lincoln, Neb., awakes one morning to find he has lost his faith. He thereupon embarks on a pilgrimage to London, where he falls in with Tamyra (Karen Aldridge), an arty bartender, and Harry (Michael Shannon), a mediocre sculptor. These enlightened folk introduce the benighted Ken to the Religion of Art, and he returns to Lincoln a fully fledged member of the herd of independent minds, there to renounce fundamentalism, fast food and small-town narrowness. Such smug little exercises in cross-cultural condescension are par for the course in the capital of Blue America, but I wasn’t expecting to stumble across one in the City of the Big Shoulders. I guess there’s no hate like self-hate: Mr. Letts, a member of the Steppenwolf ensemble, was born and raised in Oklahoma….

No link, hell and death, so to read the whole thing, march to your friendly neighborhood newsstand, lay down one cold hard dollar, buy a Friday Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and feast yourself on all sorts of other good stuff (including the book review that supplied me with today’s almanac entry).

“When I look at it now, it looks like something made by someone who wants to think he’s deep but really isn’t.”

Steven Soderbergh (on sex, lies, and videotape), quoted in Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures