Archives for June 2004

“The scene in Mrs. Smythe Leigh’s living room, Charles sometimes thought afterwards, was one which must have repeated itself continuously in other places. Mrs. Smythe Leigh’s living room was an intellectual fortress and it stood for the larger world. As Mrs. Smythe Leigh told him later, there was no reason to get in a rut because one lived in Clyde. Clyde was a dear, poky place, full of dear people, but one could always open one’s windows to the world. One could bring something new to Clyde, and this was what she always tried to do…a few reproductions of modern pictures, a bit of Chinese brocade, a few records of Kreisler and Caruso, and the American Mercury and the New Republic and of course Harper’s and the Atlantic, and the New Statesman and L’Illustration. All one had to do was open one’s windows to the outer world–and the surprising thing was the number of congenial spirits who gathered if you did it. Sometimes, frankly, she had thought of giving up the Clyde Players. There was always the inertia, but the old guard, Dr. Bush and Katie Rowell, always rallied around her and would not let her give up. Once you had the smell of grease paint in your nostrils, you could never get away from it, and there was always that joy of getting out of oneself by interpreting character on the stage. Charles was a newcomer, but someday he might be the old guard, too.”

John P. Marquand, Point of No Return

From Something Old, Nothing New:

Roger Rabbit was the first movie to acknowledge the nostalgia element in cartoon fandom. What I mean by that is that cartoons had usually been thought of as “timeless”; the repackaging of Warner Brothers cartoons–for television and in compilation films–usually presented the cartoons as belonging to no particular time or place, endlessly recyclable entertainment aimed mostly at kids. Roger Rabbit, with its ’40s setting, presented classic cartoon characters as belonging specifically to that period, part of a genre that had vanished just like the film noir genre to which Bob Hoskins’ Eddie Valiant belongs. It acknowledged that cartoon fans weren’t necessarily kids, and that what made the old cartoons great were the elements that had been sucked out of them by TV broadcasting (the violence, the political incorrectness)….

I’ve never seen this put better, which is probably another way of saying that it tallies precisely with my own experience.

Prior to the release in 1988 of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I no longer watched animated cartoons save on the rare occasions when I found myself in a hotel room on a Saturday morning with nothing to do. Seeing Roger Rabbit reminded me–forcibly, immediately–of how much I’d loved those old cartoons, and also got me thinking for the first time about why I loved them. Never before had it occurred to me that they might possibly be a serious form of cinematic art, stylistically continuous with the great live-action screen comedies of the classic period of American filmmaking. Until then I’d simply thought of them as charming commodities, even though my memories of One Froggy Evening or Bully for Bugs were at least as vivid and accessible as my memories of, say, His Girl Friday (more so, in fact, since they were a part of my youth in the way that live-action screwball comedy was not). What Roger Rabbit did was put a frame around those memories and make them available for critical reconsideration.

The next step was up to me, and I took it with a vengeance: I started reading such books about non-Disney animation as were then available, and seeking out the uncensored collections of Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons that had only just started to appear on videocassette. So did a lot of other people, which is one reason why the various all-animation cable networks now make a point of telecasting classic cartoons seven days a week. Sixteen years later, I know at least as much about animation as I do about any other branch of filmmaking, and take it every bit as seriously. I even own a cel set-up from The Cat Concerto, which hangs on my kitchen wall right around the corner from my Neil Welliver woodcut.

As for Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I recently watched it on DVD, and found it as smart and funny as I did when it was released. It’s more than just a staggeringly well-executed series of special-effects gimmicks driven by nostalgia: it’s aesthetically compelling in its own right. If it hadn’t been so good, I don’t think it would have rekindled my love of cartoons, or anyone else’s. And if you haven’t seen it recently, or at all, I suggest you do so. Of all the films released in 1988, I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up being the one that’s best remembered in 2038.

I’ve been doing some long-needed repairs on “Sites to See” (knocking off dead blogs, updating links, etc.). I decided that a few sites were in the wrong sections, and moved them to the right ones. In the course of doing all this, it occurred to me that it might be time once again to explain how the blogs and sites listed in “Sites to See” are arranged:

– The first section of “Sites to See” contains blogs that are wholly or mostly about the arts (like “About Last Night”).

– The second section contains non-blog Web sites that supply useful art-related information.

– The third section directs you to the arts-related pages of major newspaper and magazine Web sites (including the on-line archives of certain critics). It also contains a few Web sites maintained by individual writers which are not blogs but nonetheless are art-relevant.

– The fourth section contains blogs not about the arts that Our Girl and/or I visit regularly or semi-regularly.

In case you don’t know, “About Last Night” is hosted by artsjournal.com, the daily digest of English-language news stories and commentary about the arts. To visit artsjournal.com (which you should do each morning without fail), click on the logo in the upper left-hand corner of this page. In addition to “About Last Night,” artsjournal.com hosts several other art and culture blogs, all of which are listed separately in the bottom module of the right-hand column. They’re worth visiting, too.

All of which reminds me: please drop us a line if there’s a blog or Web site not listed in “Sites to See” that you think ought to be there. We promise to take a look, sooner or later.

“The genuine music-lover may accept the
carnal husk of opera to get at the kernel of
actual music within, but that is no sign that
he approves the carnal husk or enjoys gnawing
through it. Most musicians, indeed, prefer to
hear operatic music outside the opera house;
that is why one so often hears such lowly
things, say, as ‘The Ride of the Valkyrie’ in
the concert hall. ‘The Ride of the Valkyrie’
has a certain intrinsic value as pure music;
played by a competent orchestra it may give
civilized pleasure. But as it is commonly
performed in an opera house, with a posse of
fat beldames throwing themselves about the
stage, it can only produce the effect of a
dose of ipecacuanha. The sort of person who
actually delights in such spectacles is the
sort of person who delights in gas-pipe
furniture. Such half-wits are in a majority
in every opera house west of the Rhine. They
go to the opera, not to hear music, not even
to hear bad music, but merely to see a more
or less obscene circus. A few, perhaps, have
a further purpose; they desire to assist in
that circus, to show themselves in the
capacity of fashionables, to enchant the
yokelry with their splendor. But the majority
must be content with the more modest aim.
What they get for the outrageous prices they
pay for seats is a chance to feast their eyes
upon glittering members of the superior
demi-monde, and to abase their groveling souls before magnificoes on their own side of
the footlights. They esteem a performance,
not in proportion as true music is on tap,
but in proportion as the display of notorious
characters on the stage is copious, and the
exhibition of wealth in the boxes is lavish.
A soprano who can gargle her way up to F
sharp in alt is more to such simple souls
than a whole drove of Johann Sebastian Bachs;
her one real rival in the entire domain of
art is the contralto who has a pension from a
former grand duke and is reported to be
enceinte by several stockbrokers.”

H.L. Mencken, “Opera,” Prejudices: Second Series

This is a writing day for me, and what I’m writing is “Second City,” my Washington Post column on the arts in New York, which appears in the Post on the first Sunday of each month. I knocked off this Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama review yesterday morning. So I’ll simply tell you where I’ve been lately, since you’ll probably be reading about most of it, somewhere or other, shortly after the ink dries:

– No sooner did I get home from my secure, formerly undisclosed location
than I took myself to the Duplex
to hear cabaret singer Joanne Tatham.

– On Friday morning I went to the Metropolitan Museum
to look at “Childe Hassam, American Impressionist,” about which I included brief remarks (plus a very interesting link) in the “Top Five” module of the right-hand column.

– On Friday evening I went to Carnegie Hall to hear the JVC Jazz Festival
concert by Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland, and Brian Blade.

– Over the weekend I took in Jean Cocteau Repertory’s production of the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera, playing through Aug. 15 at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre on the Lower East Side.

Now kindly excuse me while I go write up all these aesthetic experiences for hard cash money….

Int. Cheap Rooming House

Ext. Police Station

Int. Hotel Washroom

Ext. Park Bench

Int. Hamburger Joint

Int. Movie House Balcony

Int. Bar

Int. Ginny’s Bedroom

Ext. Street of Cheap Rooming Houses

John Paxton, list of settings for screenplay of Crossfire (1947)

I’ve been piling up interesting links for the past month, but was too busy to spin them into a posting until now:

– As I expected, The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross‘ Web site, has evolved with startling rapidity into a must-read blog. See, for example, this characteristically smart comment about the use of Anton Webern’s Piano Variations on the soundtrack of a Sopranos episode. To me, of course, Alex’s posting merely offers further proof of my own unswerving conviction that atonal music, be it twelve-tone or freelance, requires the superimposition of some exterior form of logic in order to add up to something more than just a nonsensical succession of non-random sounds. (I’ve never forgotten the day that my old piano teacher David Kraehenbuehl, a Hindemith pupil, announced to me midway through a lesson that Webern wrote “cocktail music.”)

I once went so far as to suggest in print that it would someday be proved scientifically that atonality contradicts the natural law of music–or, to put it another way, that the human brain is hard-wired to comprehend and appreciate tonal music–and sure enough, studies suggesting as much are now starting to turn up in the scientific literature. Courtesy of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, here’s a summary of the latest evidence.

– Another of my favorite new blogs, Jaime Weinman‘s Something Old, Nothing New, reports on the contents of the next Looney Tunes Golden Collection. Alas, it won’t be out until November, but at least you can start drooling. (By the way, Jaime is Sarah‘s brother, which speaks well for their shared gene pool.)

– Erin O’Connor, who blogs at Critical Mass, recently posted a list of “history books, historical novels, and biographies that meet two essential criteria: they are well written, and one does not need to have a lot of prior background in order to enjoy them.” I approve wholeheartedly, as that’s the kind of book I like to read and try to write. The list–together with comments by Erin’s readers–is here. No less intriguing is another list of “words I sincerely dislike, in no particular order,” which happens to include a half-dozen words that also figure prominently on my list.

– The unnervingly well-read Gwenda Bond thoughtfully responded to my pair of postings
about my new Max Beerbohm caricature by linking to a delicious 1997 Atlantic essay about Beerbohm, written by none other than Teller (of Penn &). Her post will steer you to the essay in question.

– I never knew that Ed was a John P. Marquand fan. I wrote an admiring critical essay about Marquand’s novels for Commentary back in 1987, but wasn’t quite satisfied enough with the final product to include it in the Teachout Reader, though I did make brief mention of Marquand in “Seven Hundred Pretty Good Books,” my essay on the Book-of-the-Month Club, calling him “a sharp-eyed observer of American manners…unquestionably ripe for revival.” Maybe I’ll try again someday.

In the meantime, the Marquand novel I usually recommend to curious first-timers is Point of No Return, an elegiac study of suburban alienation whose opening chapters Walker Percy once compared in all seriousness to Kafka.

Incidentally, you’ll also find an unexpected reference to Marquand in this February posting about the jazz saxophonist Paul Desmond, to whose exquisitely melancholy music I’ve been listening ever since my reluctant return (nudge, nudge, Ed) from Cold Spring. Right now, for example, my iBook is playing “Audrey,” the delicate minor-key blues dedicated to Audrey Hepburn that Desmond recorded in 1954 with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. (It’s on Brubeck Time.) Very Marquandian, that.

While I’m at it, I should also note that one of the best pieces in the Library of America’s endlessly rereadable Reporting World War II: American Journalism 1944-1946 is Marquand’s “Iwo Jima Before H-Hour,” a piece of on-scene reportage at least as good as anything that A.J. Liebling or Ernie Pyle ever filed (which is really saying something).

– Felix Salmon dined at La Caravelle a week before it closed, subsequently posting this thoughtful mini-essay about changing fashions in cuisine–and art:

The patrons of La Caravelle were definitely of a certain age: I’d say there were more facelifts than there were people under 40. And it’s hard to see how the restaurant could attract a younger crowd without betraying all its finest principles of proper French haute cuisine. So it is destined to close, along with Lut

Supermaud‘s back! Not that her stand-ins weren’t excellent, but the blogosphere is never quite the same when the Real Right Thing is absent therefrom.

Lunch?

Lileks is rocking today. First on the bossa nova:

I’m listening to Bossa Nova these days, as if it will somehow bring back the summer we’ve lost so far. Most of what I’m listening to is ersatz Bossa Nova, I fear. The Americanized version. but a friend of my wife gave her some real Brazilian BN the other day, and it was some of the most narcoleptic music I’d ever heard. The singers all sounded as though they could barely keep their chins off their sternums, and they couldn’t sing very well, either. They sounded out of breath, like beautiful hungover waify fashion models propped up in front of a microphone after a night of dancing and smoking unfiltered cigarettes….

Next on the Marx Brothers:

“Airplane,” a very funny movie, would have completely baffled people in 1917. it’s all so subjective that it’s hard to believe anything can be established empirically as FUNNY, in the sense that it’s amusing to most people in most places in most times. Some day, eventually, the Marx Brothers will be NOT FUNNY, just a strange manic artifact full of allusions to conventions we’ve lost and forgotten….

Groucho

Ellen Winner, a professor of psychology at Boston College, has written a thought-provoking piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Art History Can Trade Insights With the Sciences.” No link, alas, but here are some excerpts:

As a
psychologist previously trained in the humanities and in studio art, I
have spent my career applying the science of cognitive psychology (and
recently cognitive neuroscience) to studying the creation of and
response to art.

To be sure, we scientists who wander into the art museum have to guard
against many pitfalls: blind empiricism, testing hypotheses that are
not theoretically grounded; unconsciously finding data to fit our
theories; waiting for others to try to falsify our theories. We need
to avoid reductionism: A scientific explanation of an artistic
phenomenon — say, why we are moved more by some paintings than others
— is not superior to a humanistic one, nor does it replace an
explanation at the humanistic level….

To decide whether or not to accept a scientific
explanation of an artistic phenomenon, one must evaluate the evidence.
One has to determine whether the evidence supports the claim, and if
not, how the claim could be subjected to further, decisive test. One
has to think scientifically. And therein lies the problem. Humanists
are not trained to think in terms of propositions testable via
systematic empirical evidence. A scientific finding about the arts may
therefore be unfairly rejected without a careful evaluation of the
evidence….

Today neuroscience is moving into the study of the arts. Brain imaging
allows us to track how the brain processes works of art, what parts of
the brain are involved as artists develop a work of art, and how
training in an art form stimulates brain growth. Scientists who do
that kind of work will need a deep understanding of the art form they
are studying. Humanists and cognitive scientists are, therefore, most
likely going to be teaming up more to study humanistic phenomena from
a scientific perspective.

It’s interesting that I ran across this essay the same day I posted a link to a piece of scientific research with powerfully humanistic implications. As a card-carrying aesthete, you’d think I’d be resistant to that kind of thinking, but it happens that I once spent two years preparing to pursue a graduate degree in psychology, in the course of which I studied statistics, cognitive psychology, and experimental design (as well as spending more than a few sleepless nights trying to talk crisis-line callers out of killing themselves). Hence I’m more open than most critics to the kind of research-driven scrutiny of the arts about which Dr. Winner writes in her essay. At its best, it can be both provocative and illuminating–so long as the practitioners never lose sight of the ultimate end of art, which is beauty.

No doubt it’s significant in this connection that I started out as a musician. Music is non-verbal and thus radically ambiguous, meaning that it doesn’t lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis. Yet it is possible to talk about what makes a piece of music beautiful–or, at the very least, what makes it beautiful to you. Since I’m both a musician and an intellectual, I’ve scrutinized my tastes closely and analytically enough to have isolated certain musical “tricks” that I find especially appealing. I know exactly what it is that I like about, say, Gabriel Faur