Archives for April 2004

Courtesy of DVD Journal, this long-overdue news:

The good people at Warner are cleaning out the vault with five films noir. John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle will include an introduction by the director and commentary from actor James Whitmore and film scholar Drew Casper. The quintessential 1944 Murder, My Sweet starring Dick Powell and Claire Trevor will offer a track from noir expert Alain Silver. Robert Wise’s 1944 The Set-Up with Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter will sport a track from none other than Wise and some guy named Martin Scorsese. The 1947 Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer will find noir buff Jim Ursini on the mic. And Joseph H. Lewis’s 1949 Gun Crazy with Peggy Cummins and John Dall will offer a track from the one and only Glenn Erickson (better known as our pal DVD Savant). All street on July 27 individually or in a five-disc Film Noir Classic Collection (SRP $49.92).

You know what to do.

A reader writes, quoting the last sentence of “Fiddlers Three,” my recent Commentary essay on Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and Louis Kaufman:

In the realm of art, all things being equal, most people find unhappiness more interesting than joy.

Great insight. But why do you think this is? Is it
something particular to particular cultures, or more
or less universal in art? And putting “interestingness” aside, what about other characteristics–don’t most people somehow also find unhappiness in art more profound or meaningful or important, etc., than happiness?

These are challenging questions for which I don’t have any ready answers. I do think, however, that under the aspect of modernism, we’re taught to distrust happiness, at least as represented in art (and probably also in life as well). I myself don’t feel this way, which is why I gravitate to a great many artists whose view of the world is essentially sunny. On the other hand, that doesn’t stop me from embracing the dark side of art, so long as it isn’t ponderously dark. Even darkness can be “light,” like The Great Gatsby, Mozart in a minor key, or Bonnard at his most obsessive.

I said on Studio 360 the other day that bad reviews are easier to write than good ones, and I wonder whether this might have something to do with the comparative “interestingness” of unhappiness. If you’re really, truly happy, it tends to render you inarticulate, which is why happiness is most easily conveyed in the lyric arts: music, ballet, painting, poetry. The characters in a novel or play, conversely, can start out and even end up happy, but if they don’t become unhappy at some point along the way, the audience will fall asleep. In much the same way, it’s harder (though not impossible!) for me to describe in words what it’s like to experience a wholly satisfying work of art. At least for a time, analysis is pointless–what I want to do is sit there and feel. Only in retrospect am I able to think clearly about why a good play was so good, whereas I start honing the scalpel as soon as the curtain comes down on a bad one.

Needless to say, I’d rather go to good plays than bad ones, just as I’d rather be happy than unhappy–and maybe that explains why I’m a critic instead of a creator. I’ve been desperately unhappy on many occasions in my life, but never did it occur to me that I might profit from my misery, much less write a sonata about it. All I wanted was for it to stop.

This reminds me that Supermaud and I were exchanging e-mails earlier today about the glorious weather in New York. Surely, I said, it was impossible to be too unhappy on a golden day like this, to which she replied that she thought the Romantic poets might have been right about spring. For some reason this reminded me of what Jeeves says somewhere about Nietzsche, whom he regarded as “fundamentally unsound.” I think he probably would have said much the same thing about Keats and Shelley–but when it came to spring, he might have given them a pass. Me, too.

The cleaning lady chased me out of my office this morning, so I decided to get cracking on some chores I’d shoved under the desk. I retired to the back table of Good Enough to Eat, where I ordered waffles and started filling out an inch-thick application (don’t ask) that required me to answer all sorts of questions whose answers I couldn’t recall off the top of my head (in what month did I move to the apartment where I was living seven years ago?).

Temporarily stymied by the long arm of bureaucracy, I finished my breakfast and strolled over to the neighborhood Barnes & Noble to see whether A Terry Teachout Reader was on sale yet. It wasn’t in New Non-Fiction, so I climbed the stairs to the arts section in search of something to read. There I found three copies of the Teachout Reader shelved under Jazz/Blues, meaning that no one at Barnes & Noble had bothered to look at the contents of my book. Only a year ago, I was basking in the red-carpet treatment at that very same store, including an evening reading and deluxe placement for The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. Now I’m relegated to Jazz/Blues (though at least I got what booksellers call “face-out” placement, meaning that the front of the dust jacket is visible). As Robert Mitchum says in The Lusty Men, “Chicken today, feathers tomorrow.”

From there I went to the police station to get myself fingerprinted (I told you it was a long form). I’d never before set foot inside a New York police station, and this one proved to be an oasis of dingy, demoralizing grayness in the middle of a cheery Upper West Side neighborhood. I put myself in the hands of a policeman who reminded me of the chauffeur in My Favorite Year, except that he was the most blas

“Marriage excuses no one the freaks’ roll-call.”

Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw

Another dark night, thank God, since I’m covering three plays this coming week, starting with the Broadway revival of Jumpers, from which I should be returning in 24 hours or so. Even so, it was a sufficiently busy day–I wrote this Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column, among other things–and I’m still run down from finishing the Balanchine book. As a result, I (A) didn’t consume much art yesterday and (B) don’t have much pre-bedtime steam tonight. So I’ll be brief, hoping that Our Girl will take up some of the slack:

– I read part of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff over lunch and am about to take it to bed with me. I hadn’t looked into it for a number of years, and was happy to see how well it holds up.

– Now playing on iTunes: an advance copy of the Trio Solisti‘s recording of Paul Moravec‘s Mood Swings, out this fall from Arabesque Records. The word “great” is commonly misused by critics of my generation (though we deserve some credit for knowing there’s such a thing as greatness), but I have no doubt whatsoever that it applies to this piece. I’d stake my reputation on it. Which reminds me of a favorite saying of an actor whose name escapes me: “You bet your life, fella…and you may have to.”

That’s about all I’m good for. See you tomorrow.

“He had sensed that in educated America, humor was the number 1 language, for criticism, passion, even cooking: and he set about learning it with grim intelligence.”

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

From Edward N. Meyer’s Giant Strides: The Legacy of Dick Wellstood, here’s a list drawn up by Wellstood of the kinds of people who came to hear him play jazz piano at Hanratty’s, the New York saloon where he appeared in the Eighties:

1. The drunken girl who sits on the piano and nuzzles while the boyfriend watches. She plays at you or, as one did once, on the backs of my hands.

2. The singers, about whom the less said the better. It’s always worse after Cardiff has won.

3. They who like it and talk about it at length so that I can’t play.

4. The ones who mumble inaudibly and expect an answer.

5. The shouters from the back of the room.

6. The glowerers who say nothing.

7. The experts, who, after I have just made a success of a Jelly Roll Morton stomp, request a Cy Coleman song with a meaningful glare and a nasty edge to their voice.

8. The critics, who buttonhole me during the intermission and talk of (1) Tony Jackson, J. Russell Robinson, and Cripple Clarence (if I’ve played too modern); or (2) McCoy Tyner, Albert Dailey, and Harold Mabern (if they think I’ve been hopelessly old-fashioned).

9. The know it alls: You’re wonderful, surely you compose–what?

10. The Hotel Carlisle executive types: Must you play like THAT?!!

11. The out & out hostile types: You Stunk.

12. The mistaken nitwit, who chides me for having played “Dark Eyes” badly, when in fact what I played was “Bourbon Street.”

13. The out of place, who wants to sing Irish songs in a room full of jazz lovers and vice versa.

14. The jury: silent, attentive, well versed, determined. It’s important.

15. The jazz lover, who finds shreds of people you never heard of in your playing.

16. The groupie, who just saw Cecil Taylor and knew Peck Kelley well.

17. The total nerds, who compliment me ad infinitum and then ask for the River Seine or the Warsaw Concerto.

If you want to know what manner of music this darkly sardonic wit played when he wasn’t exasperated, get a copy of The Classic Jazz Quartet: Complete Recordings, on which Wellstood figures prominently and beautifully. It’s one of my all-time favorite albums…and not even slightly angry.

– No show Monday. In addition, I spent most of the afternoon and evening playing catch-up–answering accumulated e-mail, working on my calendar, running long-deferred errands–and thus wasn’t able to spend much time consuming art. Fortunately, I did have time to start watching John Huston’s The Misfits, which I’d never seen, and I liked the first half-hour a lot better than I’d expected. (I normally can’t stand Arthur Miller, but his dialogue sounds rather more plausible when spoken by Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.) More as it happens.

UPDATE: It got awful, alas.

– I read most of Sam Staggs’ Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream over lunch and while waiting for an appointment. Alas, it’s too campy and not nearly as detailed as Aljean Harmetz’s Round Up the Usual Suspects, but I liked it well enough.

– Now playing on iTunes: Teddy Wilson’s “Jungle Love,” featuring Bobby Hackett on cornet and Johnny Hodges on alto sax, available on this two-CD set of great Wilson sides from the Thirties and Forties. Talk about suave! Fred Astaire would have approved.