Archives for January 2004

Here are some of the many interesting pieces of e-mail I’ve received in recent weeks:

I’d planned on writing today, and maybe even going out to see a movie, but the truth is that I’m worn to the nubbin. I wrote too much and did too much this past week, and it’s too cold outside this afternoon. I think maybe what I need to do is stay indoors and look at my new Arnold Friedman lithograph and catch up with some of the movies stored on my magic cable box.

Last night I watched Kings Row. The movie itself is more or less preposterous, a whole field full of stale corn, but I marveled at the late-romantic beauties of the Erich Wolfgang Korngold score–more Straussian than Strauss–and marveled, too, at how utterly inappropriate it is to the small-town story it purports to illustrate but in fact overwhelms. I was no less surprised to discover that Ronald Reagan was a damned good actor. The only Reagan movie I’d ever seen was Bedtime for Bonzo, not exactly a fair test of his skills, but he was definitely up to the challenge of the demanding part he played in Kings Row. (In case you’ve forgotten, it’s the one where he wakes up, sees that his legs have been amputated, and shrieks “Where’s the rest of me?”) Just to confirm my first impressions, I looked up Otis Ferguson’s 1941 New Republic review of the film, and found that it refers in passing to “Ronald Reagan, who is good and no surprise.” Obviously Ferguson, the best American film critic of his generation, took Reagan’s gifts for granted–surely the finest kind of tribute.

Today, in an odd parallel, I’ve been watching Will Penny, a Seventies western with a slightly off-key score by David Raksin (he wrote “Laura”), lovely to hear but not quite right for the Old West in winter, and a first-rate performance by Charlton Heston, another gifted actor whose reputation has gotten lost in the political shuffle. Whatever you happen to think of gun control, he sure could act–in the right roles, anyway–and he’s excellent here as an aging cowboy whose best years have slipped away from him. Heston actually made quite a few interesting small-scale films in between Ben-Hur and the big-bucks disaster movies with which he occupied himself in the waning years of his stardom. Will Penny is one of the best of them, not at all the sort of vehicle you’d expect from a name-above-the-title Hollywood star, and decidedly worth seeing on a cold Sunday afternoon.

What do you know? I actually wrote something! But that’s enough for now: I’ve got a lot of work to do this week, and I think it might be smart for me to lay fallow for the rest of the day. I may tinker with the Top Fives, and I might even post a bit of reader mail if I start to feel restless, but otherwise I’ll stick to sitting on the couch, chewing through some of the other old movies my digital video recorder has stored up for me. Have a nice day.

“I tell about myself, and how I ate bread on a lasting hillside, or drank red wine in a room now blown to bits, and it happens without my willing it that I am telling too about the people with me then, and their other deeper needs for love and happiness.

“There is food in the bowl, and more often than not, because of what honesty I have, there is nourishment in the heart, to feed the wilder, more insistent hungers. We must eat. If, in the face of that dread fact, we can find other nourishment, and tolerance and compassion for it, we’ll be no less full of human dignity.

“There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk. And that is my answer, when people ask me: Why do you write about hunger, and not wars or love?”

M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

I’ve written too much this week, here and elsewhere, and I’m not done yet, alas: I’ll be going to New York City Ballet this afternoon to see Double Feature, Susan Stroman’s new full-evening pop-music ballet, after which I intend to finish another chapter of my Balanchine book, or cry trying. So no more posts until Sunday, if then.

Later.

A reader writes:

You have indicated that you delight in the works of Patrick O’Brian. Are you also a fan of P.G. Wodehouse? E.F. Benson? Saki? R. F.
Delderfield?

When the world is getting you down, and you want total comfort reading, who or what do you turn to?

I asked this question at a gathering of friends this weekend and half the people there said “Winnie The Pooh”. For me, it’s either Arthur Ransome (of “Swallows & Amazons” fame – a must read, must must read! “Grab a chance and you won’t be sorry for a might have been!”) or children’s books I remember fondly.

This is a wonderful question, one nobody has ever asked me, so I’m answering it fresh, straight off the top of my head. I like Saki well enough but have never been able to connect with Benson, and I’ve never read anything by Delderfield. When I feel the need for “total comfort reading” (a nice phrase), I typically turn to

(1) O’Brian, whose Aubrey/Maturin novels I just finished rereading in their entirety

(2) Wodehouse, usually the Jeeves novels (I don’t like the short stories nearly as much)

(3) Anthony Trollope

(4) Raymond Chandler

(5) Rex Stout

(6) Donald E. Westlake’s Dortmunder and Parker crime novels (the latter are written under the pseudonym “Richard Stark”)

(7) William Haggard’s Colonel Russell political thrillers–virtually unknown in this country, alas, but I own them all

(8) Barbara Pym

(9) Jon Hassler

(10) Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time

In addition, I find it relaxing to revisit familiar books about music–preferably biographies. I’ve no idea why.

This is not to say, by the way, that I necessarily view these writers as somehow unserious. Stout and Westlake, yes–they’re pure entertainers, albeit of a high class–but Haggard’s cold-eyed view of the world is anything but frivolous, while the others (including Chandler and Wodehouse) can certainly stand up to close critical scrutiny.

What about you, OGIC? Which books reset your overheated brain to a nice mild simmer?

“Never have men had so many reasons to cease killing one another. Never have they had so many reasons to feel they are joined together in one great enterprise. I do not conclude that the age of universal history will be peaceful. We know that man is a reasonable being. But men?”

Raymond Aron, “The Dawn of Universal History”

If you haven’t yet seen Our Girl in Chicago’s posting about current goings-on at the New York Times Book Review, click here to skip down and read it. In my humble opinion, she hits nail (A) on head (B).

In this morning’s Wall Street Journal I write about Chicago Shakespeare Theater‘s production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music:

In Gary Griffin’s production, “A Little Night Music” is sung by actors, played on an all-but-bare thrust stage in a smallish house, and accompanied by a 14-piece orchestra. Lush it isn’t, but the gain in intimacy almost completely offsets the musical losses. Though some of the cast members have unappealing voices, they can all act, and Kevin Gudahl, who plays Fredrik Egerman (the role created on Broadway by Len Cariou), wears both hats with apparently effortless flair. Jenny Powers is every bit as good as Petra, the sexy maid–I loved the way she sang “The Miller’s Son,” the best song in the show–and Michael Cerveris struts about quite nicely as Count Carl-Magnus, who expects absolute fidelity from his long-suffering wife Charlotte (Samantha Spiro) despite his absolute unwillingness to reciprocate….

I wrote enthusastically in this space two weeks ago about Chicago Shakespeare’s recent production of “Rose Rage,” Edward Hall’s single-evening version of Shakespeare’s “Henry VI.” That one company should have been simultaneously presenting so fine a staging of “A Little Night Music” seems to me just about miraculous. I’d always heard that the Windy City was a class-A theater town, but I didn’t know it was home to so versatile a resident troupe. I hope Stephen Sondheim makes a point of coming to see this “Night Music,” which runs through February 15. I moved to Manhattan a decade after the original Broadway production, but I can’t imagine it having been more effective than this one. Like “Rose Rage,” it’s good enough to play New York without a tweak.

I have equally enthusiastic things to say about the songs and singing of Amanda Green:

Amanda Green has yet to bring a show to Broadway, but it isn’t for lack of trying–or talent. She sang a batch of her songs last Friday at the Ars Nova Theater, assisted by a flying squadron of musical-comedy and cabaret colleagues, and I laughed so hard I thought I’d split a rib.

Ms. Green, who wrote the lyrics for “For the Love of Tiffany,” one of the high points of last summer’s New York International Fringe Festival, specializes in murderously witty songs that crackle with Sondheim-style wordplay, transposed into a postmodern key. (Can you imagine the composer of “Passion” turning out a Bruce Springsteen parody?) Nor is she afraid to stick a red-hot poker into her own heart: “If You Leave Me, Can I Come, Too?” is “funny” like a Dorothy Parker suicide note….

No link, so run–don’t walk–to the nearest newsstand, pony up $1 for a copy of this morning’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and read the rest of what I wrote, plus other good things written by my fellow Journal-ists.