Archives for March 2004

As a first-day-of-spring baby, I can assure everyone that this week’s weather is far from exceptional. The day I was born, there was a massive snowstorm, seeming to herald no good. I have vivid memories of sharp disappointment one year when the power got knocked out and we had to cancel my kiddie party, even though this left all the prizes and cake for me (which only seemed just; I always did regard birthdays as one of the great excuses for petty tyranny). When I lived in New York I hosted a joint birthday party with a friend on a night in early spring when you could just about measure the snow in feet and the wind mph in scores. All day long, making hors d’oeuvres and sugar syrup, we listened to the alarmists on the radio urging everyone to STAY IN YOUR HOUSE and tried to think of countermeasures. In the end, twenty hardy or foolhardy souls made their way to the Bowery, and most of them stayed for breakfast.

Aw, this is nothin’.

As of this moment, we’re being read in ten time zones around the world.

(Now, what about those other fourteen?)

It seems that A Terry Teachout Reader has already started to show up in bookstores, at least on the West Coast. I’ve gotten two e-mails in the past two days from readers who’ve bought copies over the counter. Considering that I just got my copy yesterday, this is pretty amazing. (The official date of publication is May 6.)

Drop me an e-mail if you should happen to see the Teachout Reader in a bookstore, would you? And if you think of it, let me know where and how it was shelved.

Many thanks.

I went to see Paul Taylor again, wrote two pieces (a book review for the Baltimore Sun and a record review for the Wall Street Journal), and had a Portuguese brunch with Chicha, who is visiting New York this weekend and turns out to be v. cool. I showed her a photo of Our Girl but didn’t disclose my shockingly beautiful co-blogger’s name, meaning that the Chicha lives to blog another day.

I thought that would do me, but the urge to blog proved irresistible, so here I am. Briefly. Tomorrow I’ll be spending the entire day and evening working on You-Know-What.

In the meantime, here are some interesting letters I’ve been meaning to post:

– “A note on subtitles: I recently purchased the DVD of Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, a beloved favorite film (curious, because I really don’t like any of his other films–my other personal favorites–Ikiru, Vertigo, Rules of the Game, Citizen Kane, Double Indemnity–are by directors that have many films to their credit that I like). While viewing the other night, I noticed that there was a new translation in the subtitles. Some dialog and interior monologues, untranslated in the VHS, were now translated. And some translations had been altered–sometimes for the better–sometimes not, I thought. But what really got me was that some lines, including one of the great lines, are now untranslated in the new version. Marian, the trapeze artist, is musing at a rock club and Bruno Ganz, the angel infatuated with her, is nearby. She thinks about how good she feels and speculates that (this is from my rough memory of the VHS) that

The New York Times has a story
about Hollywood’s response to The Passion of the Christ. Some of the quotes are (ahem) revealing, but this sentence was what jumped out and caught my eye:

Last week a Gallup poll found that 11 percent of Americans had seen the movie and that 34 percent more said they planned to see it in theaters.

Is anyone else astonished by those numbers? And can any of you remember similar polling about any other film? I’d love to see comparable numbers for, say, Titanic, or for such middlebrow blockbusters of the past as Ben-Hur or Gone With the Wind.

“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”

W.H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand

A reader writes:

Had a thought this eve while viewing “Cinema Paradiso” for first tiime
since theatre run some 14 years ago and with horror of Madrid in mind as
I lived there two years some many years ago but thanks to the Web, could
find online the two major Madrid dailies: Pais (irony there) and ABC.
and have first-hand account from them. And have so strong love for
Spanish people and their civilized way of life.

Back to “Cinema Paradiso”, in world of film, we often ask of you, the
experts, what are your favorite 10 or 50 , “best” or “favorites” but
never: “what is the sweetest film in your experience”.
In this time of Spanish tragedy, I ask you the question of what is
your sweetest film–LOL just as if you pose that question on your blog,
we could all join in happy shared thoughts in a time of sadness.

I realize that I presume.

Not at all, and I can answer your question right off the top of my head. The sweetest movie I know is Michael Caton-Jones’ Doc Hollywood, a lovely little fantasy about life in a small southern town. Michael J. Fox never gave a better performance, and Julie Warner (I wonder what happened to her?), Woody Harrelson, David Ogden Stiers, Frances Sternhagen, George Hamilton, and Bridget Fonda are all just right. No, small towns aren’t really like that, but some of them occasionally come close, and Doc Hollywood reminds me quite strongly of the one from which I came. I can’t promise that it’ll put a smile on your face, but it’s never failed to put one on mine.

(Incidentally, it seems that Reflections in D Minor
is another fan of W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.)

– I was channel-surfing this evening and ran across Unfaithfully Yours, Preston Sturges’ 1948 comedy in which Rex Harrison plays the part of a conductor. It’s a funny movie, and Harrison obviously went to some trouble to learn how to simulate conducting–but it didn’t help. Yes, he knew the beating patterns, but his movements were weirdly rigid, sort of like an excitable robot that hadn’t been oiled from the waist up recently.

This reminded me of how impressed I was by Richard Thomas’ “conducting” in Terrence McNally’s play The Stendhal Syndrome, in which he convincingly “conducts” a complete performance of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde–facing the audience. Given all the cruel jokes that instrumentalists tell about conductors (Carl Flesch once called conducting “the only musical activity in which a dash of charlatanism is not only harmless, but positively necessary”), you’d think it’d be easier to fake convincingly. In fact, it’s just about impossible.

– In the past few days I’ve seen nine different Paul Taylor dances, several of which begin with a prelude–i.e., the lights go down, the music plays for a minute or two, then the curtain goes up. During each of these preludes, at least a half-dozen people sitting in my immediate vicinity kept on talking, often quite loudly, until the curtain rose. I wanted to tap them on the shoulder, preferably with a hammer, and tell them, “The dance starts when the music starts, dummy. Shut the hell up.”

(O.K., I’ll be honest. Having recently seen John Malkovich at work in Ripley’s Game, what I really wanted to do was drop a garrote over their heads and pull hard, but I didn’t think to bring one with me. A critic’s work is never done.)