Archives for July 2004

“I was moderately happy. At least at the moment I was happy, but not for the reasons given above. The reason I was happy was that I was reading for perhaps the fourth or fifth time a Raymond Chandler novel. It gave me pleasure (no, I’ll put it more strongly: it didn’t just give me pleasure, it was the only way I could stand my life) to sit there in old goldgreen Louisiana under the levee and read, not about General Beauregard, but about Philip Marlowe taking a bottle out of his desk drawer in his crummy office in seedy Los Angeles in 1933 and drinking alone and all those from-nowhere people living in stucco bungalows perched in Laurel Canyon. The only way I could stand my life in Louisiana, where I had everything, was to read about crummy lonesome Los Angeles in the 1930’s. Maybe that should have told me something. If I was happy, it was an odd sort of happiness.”

Walker Percy, Lancelot (courtesy of Eve Tushnet)

A reader asks:

Have you written about the state of music criticism in major daily newspapers? The realization becomes stronger with every review that I read, especially of those specific concerts that I attend, that the “music critics” [of my local newspaper] are not critics, but occasional reviewers and mainly typists. One in particular writes like an adolescent. How does he get away with it? He writes as if he has no editor. He is condescending, limited, contradictory and flatulent with zircon-encrusted notions about relative value/new music/warhorse programming and other phony issues. He does not know much and it seems that whatever editor he has knows even less.

Is this the case in most cities? I mainly read the New York Times and do find individual writer bias. But the quality of writing is much higher than in —–. Please review the reviewers some time. Maybe I am out of touch and what I read in —– is as good as it gets. But I am disappointed that the newspapers get away with pretending that their coverage is real or useful. If you have a comment, please relay it.

I edited out the name of the city in question because I’ve never read the work of the critics to whom my correspondent refers. In any case, much the same thing could easily be said of countless other provincial arts critics. It’s a chronic problem, one that will never be cured, though it can be ameliorated to some extent, at least for a time.

My correspondent puts his finger on one part of the problem when he remarks of a particular critic that “whatever editor he has knows even less.” Of course there are any number of honorable exceptions–I wouldn’t care to tell you how often my own editors have saved me from dumb blunders–but given the way newspapers operate, it’s inevitable that many, perhaps most of their arts critics will usually be hired and supervised by editors who simply don’t know what they’re writing about.

What to do? I blogged
about the problem of incompetent critics a year ago, and offered this partial solution:

It’s not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics–not all, but most–have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don’t know that–and I mean really know it–you shouldn’t be a critic. And you’re more likely to know it when you’ve lived and worked in a city small enough that there’s a better-than-even chance of your meeting the people you write about at intermission.

Unfortunately, such critics are rarely content to stay in the middle-sized cities where they’re so desperately needed. Instead, they get pulled up the food chain to big-city papers, leaving their former readers bereft.

So is there an alternative to bad newspaper criticism? Of course–and you’re looking at it. Those who know better than the maladroit critics of their hometown papers should put their money where their mouths are and start arts blogs. I’ll tell you a little secret: newspaper editors and publishers are incredibly thin-skinned, so much so that they’ll do anything to avoid answering their detractors, at least in public. But the recent experience of media-savvy political blogs suggests that an alert, aggressive, well-informed blogger with patience and determination can make a difference, and I think that’s no less true when it comes to the arts. Even if you don’t persuade the local paper to hire a better critic, you’ll have created an alternative voice, one that might in time become important and influential. Believe me, stranger things have happened in the blogosphere.

I was reading Anthony Powell’s At Lady Molly’s as I ate lunch at a neighborhood restaurant the other afternoon. A waitress approached the table and asked, “Hey, whatcha reading?” Long experience has taught me never to answer this question other than noncommittally, so I showed her the spine of the book and said, in a fairly friendly tone of voice, “Oh, just a novel.” She lit up like a sunbeam and replied, “Wow, that’s cool!”

The week before, I’d had a less satisfying encounter with a waitress who took an interest in my bound galley of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions. She asked what I was reading. “A book of short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer,” I replied. She looked at me blankly, so I added, “He wrote in Yiddish,” to which she responded, “Yiddish? What’s that?”

In Manhattan, encounters like these are the price you pay for reading in restaurants, and they usually make me squirm. I think the origins of my discomfort must go all the way back to my small-town youth, when I was rarely to be seen without a book in hand. Even as a child, my reading habits were fairly advanced, and I got kidded mercilessly for toting around such triple-decker novels as Moby-Dick and Les Misérables. The teasing of my peers had an aggressive edge (“Hey, man, Teachout reads the encyclopedia!”), whereas my elders were merely puzzled, but the net result was to make me self-conscious whenever anyone asked what I was reading. Nearly four decades later, that question still makes me tighten up a bit, fully expecting to be razzed, and though it rarely happens nowadays, the resulting exchanges nonetheless tend to leave me feeling like a lifetime member of the awkward squad.

From childhood onward, I was acutely aware of the gap that separated me from my classmates. It’s not that I was treated badly, because I wasn’t. Most of the residents of Smalltown, U.S.A., treated me quite nicely, rather like a cute little dog who could extract square roots with his paw. The problem was that they treated me differently, and once it was clear that I was also musically talented, my situation became impossible. By then, everybody in town knew who I was—Bert and Evelyn’s boy, the smart one—and there was no hiding from my citywide reputation as Smalltown’s number-one egghead.

What saved me, paradoxically, was that I was physically clumsy. Even if I’d wanted to be a rebel, there wasn’t a whole lot I could do other than read, write, and play music, a state of affairs that forced me to accept myself as I was. What’s more, I was always sensitive to beauty—first in words, then in music—and so I derived boundless pleasure from my strange appetites. In any case, I was never wholly without friends, and I even managed to find myself a girlfriend midway through high school, a development that made my father breathe easier, he having been deathly afraid that his oldest son would grow up…well, peculiar. (That was never in the cards, but it wasn’t something I could have discussed with him, even reassuringly.)

Once I left Smalltown for the big city, I started to make friends whose interests resembled mine more closely, and in time learned to suppress the self-consciousness of my childhood. Yet it can still be inflamed by a certain kind of kidding, some of which has lately been occasioned by the blogosphere-wide spread of the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. You’d be surprised–or not–by how many bloggers have posted comments about the TCCI that basically boil down to “Dude, this thing’s soooo highbrow!” Such talk rarely fails to trigger the same squirmy sensation I experience whenever a well-meaning stranger asks what I’m reading. Even now, there’s a part of me that wishes I knew all about baseball instead of ballet.

I’m sure this is part of why I later fell in love with westerns and film noir, and it probably also has something to do with my youthful decision to concentrate on playing jazz instead of classical music. I don’t mean to denigrate those pop-culture pursuits—far from it—but for me, they were as close as I could come to being a regular guy, and I was distressed to discover that they didn’t do much to narrow the gap. Being a John Wayne fan (which I am) helps a little, maybe even more than a little, but being a Raymond Chandler fan does nothing to disarm those who don’t read any books at all.

If I sound neurotic about my interests, I’m not. I like being a drama critic who collects American prints, hangs out with jazz musicians, and writes books about people like George Balanchine and H.L. Mencken. I wouldn’t have me any other way. But you never get completely over your childhood, and my guess is that I’ll spend the rest of my life being evasive whenever a waitress asks what I’m reading–at least until one glances at my copy of The Locusts Have No King and says, “Cool, but I like A Time to Be Born better.” As the Duke might have said, that’ll be the day.

I’ve been preoccupied (my mother broke her arm yesterday) and only just read about the widely reported skirmish in which Stanley Crouch took a slap at Dale Peck.

I’m no admirer of Dale Peck, so this is presumably where I should toss off some witty plague-on-both-your-houses crack. Unfortunately, I don’t think what Crouch did is even slightly amusing. I think it’s disgusting–though not exactly surprising. As owners of A Terry Teachout Reader are well aware, I think Crouch is a musical ignoramus with an embarrassingly purple prose style. Among other repellent things, he flirts avidly with reverse racism in his jazz criticism. He’s more than happy to play the race card whenever it suits his interests (as he has done with me), though he writes contemptuously of others who do the same thing. Some, I’m told, find him a charming rascal, but I’m not nearly enough of a hypocrite to be charmed by people who make nicey-nice in private after they insult you in public. I didn’t think my opinion of him could sink much lower. I was mistaken.

I decided some time ago to have nothing more to do with Stanley Crouch. Since then, I’ve declined invitations to appear with him in public and on radio, nor will I knowingly participate in any published symposium in which he takes part. As far as I’m concerned, he’s an unperson. And instead of tittering over his latest escapade, I think the rest of the literary world would now do well to do likewise.

Stunned is the word for the way I feel as a result of the continuing flood of links to the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. I’m not even trying to keep up with the responses anymore, but it seems that everybody and his cat is taking the TCCI and commenting on it. (For the final tally of scored responses by “Sites to See” artbloggers–the last one I’m going to post, anyway–go here.) It’s a mystery to me that a quiz I threw together to amuse and edify my readers ended up being the Shot Heard ‘Round The Blogosphere. “About Last Night” has never pulled so much traffic in a single week, and my hope is that at least a few of the strangers who came here to take the TCCI will become regular readers.

Conversely, the response to Friday’s late-afternoon announcement that President Bush will be nominating me to sit on the
National Council on the Arts, about which more here, is only just starting to trickle in. So far, it’s equally gratifying, albeit in a different way. Pre-confirmation etiquette forbids my responding other than in generalities, but I thank all those who’ve written and posted–well, nearly all–for their kind and supportive words. (As for the exception, you know who you are, but believe me, I’m still laughing.)

I’m ramping up to a couple of fairly intense weeks of writing and performance-going, meaning that blogging may get a bit thin at times. Fortunately, Our Girl is back in Chicago, and I’ve no doubt that she’ll take up the slack with her customary verve and charm.

For the moment, be sure to watch this space on Wednesday for a very special group of postings about which I’ll say nothing in advance other than that they mark a great occasion….

UPDATE: The National Endowment for the Arts has just issued a press release about my nomination. To read it, go here.

Classic film noir (the black-and-white kind) has been inexcusably slow to make its way onto DVD, but a whole freshet of noir titles was released the other day, the greatest of which is Out of the Past. Most buffs regard this 1947 Jacques Tourneur picture as the quintessential film noir, and it definitely has all the expected accoutrements: Robert Mitchum as a hapless anti-hero dragged out of his nine-to-five life by the hand of fate, Jane Greer as the most fatale of all possible femmes, a Daniel Mainwaring script full of convincingly counterfeited Chandlerisms, malevolently dark cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca, an age-of-anxiety score by Roy Webb…what’s not to like? As for Tourneur’s direction, it’s full of atmosphere and self-effacing ingenuity from the opening credits onward. With the possible exception of Canyon Passage, he never made a better film.

Takers of the TCCI will recall that I preferred Out of the Past to Double Indemnity, though not by much. Even if you beg to differ, I can’t imagine failing to find it on the top-five classic noir list of any serious moviegoer, along with In a Lonely Place, Detour, and either Gun Crazy (also newly reissued), Scarlet Street (whose current DVD version was ineptly transferred from a bad print), or Touch of Evil (which is less a film noir than a commentary on the genre, though marvelously overripe and excellent of its kind). Some other favorites of mine are The Big Combo, Raw Deal, Pickup on South Street, The Narrow Margin, On Dangerous Ground, Night and the City, and Pitfall, the last four of which have yet to make it to DVD, though you can often find used VHS copies if you look hard enough.

If Out of the Past tops the list, it’s because Tourneur and his collaborators struck just the right balance between action and fatalism, a combination nicely caught in this crisp exchange between Mitchum and Greer. They’re ostensibly talking about roulette, but of course they mean something completely different:

“That’s not the way to win.”

“Is there a way to win?”

“There’s a way to lose more slowly.”

The DVD is nothing fancy, a clean, well-lighted print and not much else–no trailer, for instance, and James Ursini’s commentary sounds too off-the-cuff to suit me. Still, it’ll do. Film noir, I’m told, is a largely masculine taste, though I had no difficulty in hooking Our Girl (one look at In a Lonely Place and she was a goner). I once called it “the porn of pessimists,” and certainly some folks just aren’t on its bleak wavelength. But if you’re even slightly convertible, Out of the Past will get you there with bullets to spare.

Time once again (well, this is only the second time, but I’m trying to turn it into a trend) for the Monday-morning Web surf. Here are some things that caught my eye:

– Though minimalism has never appealed to me even slightly–not in music, not in the visual arts–the always acute Tyler Green of artsjournal.com’s Modern Art Notes puts his finger on why others beg to differ:

For many years now museums have been where secular America goes to church. In an era where most mainstream entertainment is designed to be as baroquely overblown as possible (what else could possibly explain The Rock?), museums provide rich visual quiet.

The current run of minimalism shows makes clearer than ever that museums are the new churches. Some minimalist art is hard, flat and repelling (think Judd, early Stella, Andre). It provides the viewer with something wonderful to look at, but it doesn’t give the viewer a place to go within the work (like Matisse does). Instead, it forces the viewer to examine his own response to the work as much as the work itself….

The conventional wisdom in the art world had long been that minimalism is difficult, but strong attendance for minimalism shows exposes that theory as elitist bunk. Museum boards, the folks who fund these shows, apparently love minimalism too. That’s no surprise: Museum boards are now what main-line Protestant church boards used to be: the bastion of the moneyed establishment. Museums are the new churches. The sudden prevalence of minimalism makes that clearer than ever.

– Speaking of the other side of the coin, Kyle Gann, another artsjournal.com blogger, writes an epitaph for an unloved corpse:

But I also think that aside from Berio’s Sinfonia, Babbitt’s Philomel, maybe Zimmermann’s Requiem, and a couple of other pieces with textual elements, the entire body of serialist music produced nothing that will ever mean much to anyone beyond composers and new-musicians interested in its technical aspects. There will always be interest in serialist music – it’s always fascinating when people pour tremendous creative energy into something that doesn’t appear to mean anything. Write some apparent nonsense, and people will study it for centuries! – look at the endurance of Finnegans Wake. It’s fascinating that people once wrote music that tried to alienate people. But again, once you reach a certain age it becomes less fascinating, and one can start to feel a certain urgency for connecting with that which can be understood. I think….

– Sarah has a nice post on the relative importance (or unimportance) of first lines in literature. Like most people who’ve worked for newspapers for any length of time, I’m acutely lead-conscious. I can’t continue writing a piece until I have the first sentence locked in (though I don’t always write the rest of the piece in beginning-to-end order). Books, I think, are different–you usually don’t pick a book up unless you already have a reason to read it–and I never judge them by their first lines. Instead, I use what I call the “core-sampling” method, opening the book at random to two or three different spots to get a feel for how well it’s written. If I’m disappointed every time (or if I run across one or more obvious untruths in a work of nonfiction), chances are I won’t go on with it.

Having said this, I’ll add that my electronic commonplace book does contain a section called “Opening Lines, Great.” Here’s my favorite one: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” How could you not keep reading?

– Others have linked to “Hip, But Inscrutable: Music Reviews at NPR,” a genteel rant against obscurantism by Jeffrey A. Dvorkin, NPR’s ombudsman, but his piece was so boneheaded that I wanted to make sure it reached as many readers as possible:

NPR regularly reviews new music. This is good, since it takes NPR listeners out of what is familiar and exposes them to what is happening in other parts of the culture.

The problem, according to some listeners, is that NPR’s reviews are too hip to be good journalism. In short, some musical commentary, especially on All Things Considered, is incomprehensible to some listeners, and I confess, to me….

Modern music, and especially rock ‘n’ roll, was always about who was “in” and who was not. Nothing is more embarrassing than older people claiming to dig the latest sounds.

This is a quandary for NPR. How does NPR reach out to a younger group of listeners without irritating its older core? If NPR’s music journalism is really meant for that younger audience, then irritating older listeners is a price young radio producers are willing to pay.

NPR needs to do music reviews but they need to be written so all listeners are able to understand the criticism and the music. The reviews should give listeners a glimpse of something new, even if it is hard to understand (or like).

Now, I could easily imagine a parallel universe in which these complaints were valid. But when I read the actual reviews singled out by Dvorkin for criticism, I cringed–and not at the reviewers, either. Here, for instance, is a description of the music of the Magnetic Fields:

The songs themselves are the draw. They’re disciplined little gems of composition, poison-pen letters set in the first person and caustic, coffee-shop observations propelled by not particularly heroic desires. The best of them tell about being deluded in love or not being able to let go of an old flame. And even under Merritt’s dour storm clouds, they gleam.

If NPR’s ombudsman is concerned about the accessibility of a review like that, then NPR needs a new ombudsman.

– The New York Times ran an important story last week about ArtistShare, the new Web-based music-distribution technology that Maria Schneider is using to distribute her latest CD:

In the last decade, Maria Schneider, who regularly wins prizes for best composer and best big-band arranger in jazz, has made three albums on the Enja record label. Each sold about 20,000 copies — very good numbers for jazz. She didn’t make a dime off any of them. On two of them, she lost money.

So recently, she went off the grid. She became the first musician to sign with a company called ArtistShare. Rather than go through labels, distributors and retailers, ArtistShare sells discs over the Web and turns over all the proceeds (minus a small fee) to the artist.

Her new CD, “Concert in the Garden,” went on sale last Thursday exclusively through www.mariaschneider.com. If it sells one-quarter as many copies as any of her previous discs, she will do better than break even. If it sells half as many, she will earn tens of thousands of dollars.

“Making an album takes lots of time and effort,” Ms. Schneider said in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. “It takes me two or three years to write the music. Then there are the rehearsals, the studio time, the mixing and mastering. It would be nice to get something back for it. The thought that I could actually make a profit off my records — that’s unbelievable, really.”…

If you want to read more about the future of recorded music, click here and ponder.

– Also of interest is the Times‘ story about the decision of Pilobolus Dance Theater to hire Itamar Kubovy as executive director and give him the authority to overrule any of the four artistic directors, who had hitherto run the company by collective consensus throughout its three-decade-long history. I’ve spent quite a bit of time watching Pilobolus up close (I even appear in Last Dance, Mirra Bank’s 2002 cin

“For I am like a passenger waiting for his ship at a war-time port. I do not know on which day it will sail, but I am ready to embark at a moment’s notice. I leave the sights of the city unvisited. I do not want to see the fine new speedway along which I shall never drive, nor the grand new theatre, with all its modern appliances, in which I shall never sit. I read the papers and flip the pages of a magazine, but when someone offers to lend me a book I refuse because I may not have time to finish it, and in any case with this journey before me I am not of a mind to interest myself in it. I strike up acquaintances at the bar or the card-table, but I do not try to make friends with people from whom I shall so soon be parted. I am on the wing.”