Archives for March 2004

It’s Friday–do you know where I am? In The Wall Street Journal, of course, holding forth on Lincoln Center’s new production of King Lear, directed by Jonathan Miller and starring Christopher Plummer, plus an off-Broadway show, Tristine Skyler’s highly touted The Moonlight Room.

Lear didn’t do much for me:

I confess to not being much of a fan of Jonathan Miller, who has always struck me as rather too smart for his own theatrical good. That’s more or less how I’d sum up this well-bred, largely uninvolving “Lear,” which runs through April 18 on a limited schedule of performances. Shakespeare was no intellectual, and his plays don’t benefit from “thoughtful” stagings. Mr. Miller may think he’s given us a Shakespearean-style soap opera, but in his hands “King Lear” comes off more like a slide show on the perils of bad estate planning.

I had sharply mixed feelings about The Moonlight Room, but not about its young star:

As for Laura Breckenridge, she’s definitely worth watching. Like Linda Cardellini in “Freaks and Geeks,” the TV series that perfectly captured the same youthful anxieties Ms. Skyler has sought to put on stage, Ms. Breckenridge is a dark-eyed, tense-looking young woman whose very pores ooze adolescent angst. If she can play other parts as well as she plays this one, we’ll be seeing more of her. Totally.

No link. Buy the damn paper, O.K.?

Would you go see any of these plays, based on the way they’re described in their press releases?

– “A stylized, irreverent romantic comedy about loneliness and isolation

“Closing the Times was the end of his religious observance for the day. He wished real religion wasn’t quite so damn impossible. There was a need for it that the Times didn’t really fill.”

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

As of mid-afternoon Friday, the activities of “About Last Night” will be temporarily centralized. Our Girl in Chicago is en route for a three-day visit to see the Teachout Museum and other cultural goodies. She’ll be doing a bit of blogging from here, and–brace yourself–her secret identity will be revealed to Supermaud in a ritual ceremony from which some participants may not return.

Me, I’ll be hacking away all weekend at the you-know-what, just like always, though I plan to pry myself away from the iBook long enough to take OGIC to a couple of cool performances. You’ll hear about it all in good time.

For now, here are some links to whisk you into the weekend:

– This one’s spreading across the Web like kudzu, with (alas) good reason. From L.A. Observed:

Here’s why reporters want newspaper corrections to make clear that an editor is at fault for an error introduced to their copy. Last week, the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed filed a review of the opera “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Music Center. He wrote that the Richard Strauss epic is “an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean…” But when it ran in the paper, pro-life had been changed to anti-abortion.

Swed was reportedly mortified, since the opera is not remotely about abortion….

There’s more–and believe it or not, it gets worse. Read the whole thing here.

In case you were wondering why I blog–and why the blogosphere is rapidly becoming a major center of serious arts writing–there’s your answer.

– Says Reflections in D Minor:

I was fascinated with Bolero for a short time when I was just beginning to explore classical music but it quickly became boring and then seriously annoying. Now it is one of the few pieces of classical music that I truly hate….

Actually, Bolero is kind of cool, at least in theory. But I had to play the bass part in a college performance–the same two notes, over and over again, for about six weeks, or maybe ten–and since then I’ve been unable to listen to it.

– Courtesy of Cinetrix, a chunk of Alistair Macaulay’s recent Times Literary Supplement piece about Fred and Ginger:

It’s dismaying to see how often, even when a ballet is being broadcast live, camerawork chops up the dancing. Fred and Ginger, by contrast, really do dance several of their duets in a single take, some of them almost three minutes in length. In the annals of cinema, these takes should stand beside the finest feats of D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles….

Is that perhaps coming it a bit high? Um…no.

Sorry, but I won’t be blogging again until well into Thursday, if then. I wore myself out on Wednesday working on the Balanchine book and writing my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, and instead of staying up late to work on “About Last Night,” I’ve decided to play it smart and crash.

I do, however, want to briefly mention the Wednesday-night artsjournal.com get-together at the Landmark Tavern. Doug McLennan, the mastermind and boss of artsjournal.com, “About Last Night”‘s blessed host, was in New York for a couple of days (he runs the site from Seattle), so he took the opportunity to convene all those New York-based AJ bloggers who had a couple of hours free to go drinking, plus any readers who cared to show up. We didn’t expect a crowd, but we got one anyway, and I met a lot of very nice people, the same folks who send OGIC and me all that cool e-mail.

As I was getting ready to hit the road, one reader said to me, “You know, artsjournal.com will probably be a Big Institution in a couple of years, and all of us here tonight will probably look back on this get-together and say, ‘Ah, yes, those were the days.'” We laughed. But he was right: these are the days, the dawn of a new medium, and all of you reading these words are a part of it. You’re the postmodern counterparts of those prescient people who bought their first TV sets in 1948 and watched Toscanini and Milton Berle and Harry Truman and said to themselves, “I wonder what will come of this?”

And now…to bed. I have to finish Chapter Three. I have to get this place straightened up in time for Our Girl’s arrival on Friday. I have to call my mother. I have to get some sleep. I have to pick an almanac entry. In lieu of me, go visit all those cool blogs in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column. Do it yourself.

Later.

“The Lyric Suite was my triumph–Constance’s triumph, that is. I had liked Wozzeck at first hearing and Berg’s violin concerto at the third or fourth: there was no reason I shouldn’t like the Lyric Suite, as Constance said, and she had made up her mind that I was going to. Whenever she had dinner with us, whenever she came by in the evening, she held in her hand a long-playing record of the Lyric Suite, and once each time she played it to us. I would sit and read, sit and talk, sit and dream–at first. I have to admit, I’d sit and suffer; my wife suffered but did not sit–she would say with a vague sidelong smile, ‘All that darning…Call me when it’s over, Constance.’

“After four or five playings I was getting used to it, my wife did not get up and leave any longer: there were parts we liked very much better than other parts; three or four more times and we liked the other parts–we were, we found, crazy about the Lyric Suite: how could any of it ever have seemed hard to us? Constance was very polite, and didn’t once say, ‘When I was young I was the same way about it.’ So far as the Lyric Suite is concerned, we had been foolish and young and Constance old and clever; and we were grateful to her for that best of gifts, a change in one’s own self.”

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Today’s Wall Street Journal contains a memorable sketch of the late William Shawn, longtime editor of The New Yorker. In 1966, Lucette Lagnado reports, New York Times reporter Murray Schumach turned out a long profile of Shawn and his magazine:

It was 5,500 words–far longer than the typical newspaper story. It contained some generous praise of Shawn, noting, for instance, the “perfection” of his editing. But there were also pointed criticisms: Some articles were much too long; the Talk of the Town section lacked its old bite; and there was a sense that even the renowned fiction was no longer cutting-edge. It was what a good newspaper piece is supposed to be–neither black nor white, neither a hatchet job nor a puff piece.

But Arthur Gelb, then deputy metropolitan editor of the Times, had, under pressure, agreed to give Shawn right of approval.

Shawn hated it. Though hate doesn’t begin to capture the maelstrom of emotions that poured into the 11-page memo he sent to the Times in November 1966 after seeing the draft. He opens by damning the piece with faint praise, calling it “well-intentioned,” possessing “merits of its own.” He then he proceeds to demolish it–idea by idea, paragraph by paragraph, almost sentence by sentence. The article is “misleading,” he declares. It “misses the point.” It isn’t so much what the reporter has written as what he has “not written.” He has “missed the magazine,” described “parts of its body (an arm and a leg perhaps)” but “left out the mind and the soul.” And that represents only the first few lines of an opening paragraph that runs 2-1/2 pages.

But Shawn was just getting started. He devotes a page to summarizing the contents of his four most recent issues, listing the names of his renowned writers–Hannah Arendt, Janet Flanner, Alistair Cooke, Calvin Trillin. Then, the man described as timid and self-effacing asserts that these four issues surpass what is being done “in any other magazine in the world” and adds, parenthetically, “And they did not come about by accident.”

The rest of the memo is a catalog of 37 alleged errors, delicately referred to as “some points of fact.” They are more revealing of Mr. Shawn’s obsessive, controlling persona than of any significant flaws in the Times piece. The weighty issue of The New Yorker’s “philosophy” is at the top of his agenda. Mr. Schumach wrote benignly that the magazine “has a clear idea of its philosophy on editorial matters,” and he goes on to quote Shawn’s own succinct explanation of its essence: “We do not go beyond consulting our own judgment and tastes and what interests and pleases us,” Shawn stated, adding that “The word ‘reader’ does not come up.

Although negotiations between Gelb and Shawn (nicknamed “The Iron Mouse” by staffers) dragged on for months, the Times was licked before it started. Arguing with Shawn, Gelb recalls, “was like arguing with butter.” The story never made it into print. Surrender your dollar and read the whole saga.

Yep, still writing about Balanchine, though I took time out this afternoon to write my Washington Post Sunday column–watch this space for linkage–and go see Frankenthaler: The Woodcuts, which was even cooler than I expected. I’ll tell you all about it the first chance I get.

For now:

– Modern Art Notes skewers a clich