Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
My birthday present to myself (see below) is that I’m taking the weekend off. From blogging, that is: I do plan to hack away at the Balanchine book. But I shall post no more, forever, meaning until Monday, and if I do, don’t read it.
No promises either way about Our Girl. She’s severely preoccupied. She’ll blog if she blogs, and if she does, it’ll be worth waiting for. But don’t bug her.
From Shaken and Stirred:
There may be those that say we are an uncivilized people, that humanity tinkers on the brink of something just awful — but those people don’t get good Chinese food by delivery often enough. Good Chinese food delivery even in Lexington, Kentucky. That is civilization.
The earth hangs down
to the lake, full of yellow
pears and wild roses.
Lovely swans, drunk with
kisses you dip your heads
into the holy, sobering waters.
Friedrich H
A reader (who personally vouches for the authenticity of this anecdote) writes:
Saul Bellow once said, in a seminar room at the University of Chicago where he was expounding Rousseau’s Confessions along with Allan Bloom, “The great thing about Chicago is that by the time advanced ideas get here, they’re worn so thin you can see right though them.”
I’m, like, 48. Don’t rub it in, though. Our Girl is being as tactful as possible, but I’m sure she must be embarrassed to be seen in cyberspace with the Oldest Known Arts Blogger in Captivity.
It’s interesting, by the way, to find myself using so radically new a medium as blogging to reflect on growing older. In the past, I sought creative renewal by immersing myself in unfamiliar art forms–ballet and modern dance in my thirties, the visual arts in my early forties. Now I’m finding it in a technology, which surprises me, especially given the fact that the technology in question seems to be used mainly by much younger people. Some of the best bloggers listed in “Sites to See” are roughly half my age.
Truth to tell, most of my best friends are younger than I am, a circumstance on which I recently had occasion to reflect in print:
I have a good many friends who are a good deal younger than I, and 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.
As I grow older, I find myself thinking more and more about the problem of striking a proper balance between present and past. I’m no great fan of my self-centered generation and its increasingly pitiful vanities (which is why I have become an enthusiastic reader of Boomer Deathwatch). Besides, it’s always been important to me to know what’s happening–the journalist’s reflex–and my younger friends do their best to keep me posted. It was Our Girl, for example, who first alerted me to such disparate phenomena as Conan O’Brian, Buffy, and Cat Power. (Daria I found on my own.) I’m happy to know what’s going on out in the world, and I hope I always am.
Or do I? Must there come a moment when it’s wiser to stick to the cards in your hand, to deepen your understanding of what you already know? My hair stood up when I stumbled on the following sentence in Jack Richardson’s Memoir of a Gambler: “As we moved along in the police wagon, I had the slightly unclean feeling of the man who keeps company with those much younger than himself.” Might I have reached that terrible time without knowing it–the time when middle-aged people embarrass themselves by pretending to be that which they are not, forgetting that they shall never be again as they were? That’s a scary thought.
I don’t think I have. One of my much younger friends likes to tease me about my liking for Liz Phair, but there’s nothing malicious in her kidding (I hope). In any case, I pass most of my time in age-appropriate ways. What could be better suited to a dignified gent of 48 than writing a book about George Balanchine, or collecting modern art prints? Not that I can honestly claim to have sailed all the way through the Fearful Forties without scraping the shoals a time or two, but at least I didn’t buy a red sports car or start dressing in black, and with only two years to go, I’m probably in the clear (I hope).
Perhaps the abandon with which I’ve hurled myself into “About Last Night” is a form of age-inappropriate behavior–but once again, I don’t think so. Rather, I see this blog as a way of bridging the perilous gap between yesterday and today. No invention is inherently bad (or good), and surely it is a sign of grace when one can find a way to use the newest technologies to revive and refresh our appreciation of the permanent things. That’s the whole point of art blogging, and it’s awe-inspiring to see the innumerable ways in which amateurs and professionals alike are bending this medium to their myriad passions. For me, as I say, it’s been a completely unexpected booster rocket. Like Hokusai, I long someday to be an old man mad about art. For the moment, blogging is fanning my middle-aged flames.
And so…happy birthday to me!
UPDATE: A reader writes:
Something to remember, two years hence: 40 is the old age of youth. 50 is the youth of old age.
Happy birthday, protogeezer!
I feel better already.
I was dark last week (as we theatrical types say), but pick up this morning’s Wall Street Journal and you’ll find my reviews of an off-Broadway show, Paul Rudnick’s Valhalla, and an off-off-Broadway show, Melissa James Gibson’s Suitcase, or, those that resemble flies from a distance.
I liked Valhalla, with some reservations:
As I watched the hijinks ensue, I tried to figure out whom Mr. Rudnick reminds me of, and Neil Simon came to mind. Mr. Rudnick is another one of those jokesmiths who keeps throwing punchlines against the wall to see if they stick, and his jokes, like Mr. Simon’s, all have the same one-two rhythm, only with a campy twist in the tail. (“What’s an orgy?” “It’s when vicious, depraved philistines have sex in a group.” “Is it heavenly?” “Yes.”) But Neil Simon in his heyday would never have put so ill-carpentered a play as “Valhalla” on stage, and before long I realized that Mr. Rudnick is more like a gay Mel Brooks, a Catskills comic who packs his scripts with good lines but doesn’t know how to tie them into a nice, neat plot-driven package. “Valhalla” goes off the rails in the same how-the-hell-do-I-end-this way as “Blazing Saddles,” having built up just enough momentum to keep you chortling through the chaos….
Ditto Suitcase:
Any playwright who pinches her subtitle from the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges (no capital letters, please!), or whose last play was called “[sic],” really needs to consider spending a few weeks in residence at the David Ives School of User-Friendly Smart Comedy, or possibly entering a 12-step program for recovering postmodernists.
Even so, this eggheady comedy about two neurotic graduate students (Christina Kirk and Colleen Werthmann) trapped in dissertation hell and the boyfriends (Thomas Jay Ryan and Jeremy Shamos) whom they hold at arm’s length is funny, clever, and worth a trip downtown to Soho Rep, where it has just been extended through Feb. 28. The closer you listen, the more clearly you grasp that the highbrow badinage in which Ms. Gibson’s characters indulge is not so much self-regarding as self-mocking….
Would that you could read the whole thing here, but the Journal rarely provides free links to its arts coverage, so if your interest is piqued, trundle on down to the nearest newsstand or honor box, insert one (1) dollar, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and regale yourself with all sorts of cool stuff, me (I hope) included.
So I already wished Terry a happy birthday over the telephone. I hereby wish him a happy birthday publicly. I’m also going to send an e-mail, mail his birthday card, and bring him a gift when I visit New York. At that time I’ll also sing something (fair warning). It may seem like overkill, but as he points out, he’s not just any old person: he’s the Oldest Known Arts Blogger in Captivity.
In sum: HB, OKABIC!
Another good comment has arrived in the mailbox on cultural centers and peripheries:
The New York state of mind gets in the way of a great many other viewpoints and cultural takes. Popular culture (pop music, television, genre fiction, graphics and arts that are out of favor among professional, mostly NY, critics) has long been ignored by the mavens of “high culture.” But thousands of practitioners of those popular or folk arts have worked and lived and died outside of Manhattan’s sphere. Not only that, but they have created wondrous and satisfying works. There are dozens of cultures in the country, the world, and trying to put them into an arbitrary hierarchy does all artists and thinkers a real disservice….The Web and the Blog encourage the shattering of hegemonies, for better and for worse.
And this one on anonymous blogging:
Of course it’s proper to blog anonymously. Computer network users have been posting and emailing under handles and nicknames since there’ve been computer networks. As in the then-current world of CB radio, people were doing something fun, with kindred spirits, which didn’t require them to present affidavits and IDs.
Obviously these gloomy Gusses never would’ve had much fun on the BBS’s of the 80’s and 90’s. *Annoyed look*
Now, I almost always post under my own name. For me, it’s simpler. But I have always enjoyed the creativity manifested in handles. People who don’t…they worry me. People are often more themselves when they’re choosing their own names. People who see that only as an opportunity for dishonesty and juvenile behavior are obviously projecting.
Apropos of this, Terry pointed out that in my post on anonymity the other day, I neglected to say anything about why I’m undercover. My reasons are simple. Some of them are professional, but it’s not as though I’d be in danger of losing my job or anything so dire if I revealed. More important than the potential negatives are the actual positives. A new persona has all the inviting open expanse of a fresh sheet of paper. It’s interesting to engineer OGIC, endowing her with some of my interests and tics, but keeping others to myself. I also see this as a fun, educational experiment for myself as a writer. I don’t expect to stay under wraps forever, but for the time being I enjoy both the liberation and the challenge of being someone sort of else. It frees me up to write on certain topics about which I’d be more circumspect writing under my name. But it requires more discipline, too: for instance, to leave certain things out of my posts and generally cultivate a strategic vagueness about my life. Sometimes it’s hard to refrain from linking to or discussing the work I’m doing under my real name. I often feel as if I’m robbing myself of good blogging topics in these books and ideas that I’ve invested a lot of thought in, but that are already spoken for by her. Sometimes, of course, I steal her stuff anyway.
I don’t keep this a secret from anyone I know, I readily tell new people I meet (not all of them), and there are potential leaks: friends of friends of other bloggers or media people. Like I said above, it’s inevitable that I’ll out or be outed. But my guess is that it will happen gradually, and in any case it will be very much a non-event (unless I become NYTBR editor or May Queen in the meantime). For now, I’m just having fun being mistaken for Mr. Epstein. Studs Terkel, anyone?