Archives for October 26, 2004

I’ll be heading up to the Columbia School of Journalism first thing this morning (too damn early!) to teach what I guess could be called a master class in thumbsucking. I’m spending three hours with eight arts journalists from small and medium-sized cities who’ve come to New York City under the auspices of the National Arts Journalism Program, an NEA-sponsored project whose purpose is to raise the level of arts coverage in American newspapers. They’re attending classes, going to performances, and allowing themsleves to be hectored by a bunch of art-biz personages. For me, their job was to write an eight-hundred-word “critic’s notebook” essay–the kind of opinion piece that newspaper critics typically knock out every Sunday or so. My plan is to spend twenty minutes editing each piece line by line, with the rest of the class instructed to pile on at will. I did the same thing with my criticism classes at Rutgers University, a weekly ritual one of my wittier students dubbed “Human Sacrifice.” It took the kids a couple of weeks to get used to being put on the spot like that, but once they finally loosened up, we had a lot of fun and (I hope) learned a lot, too. I’m hoping the same thing happens today, perhaps a bit more quickly.

At any rate, I’m going straight from Columbia to a couple of midtown galleries, then back to the Upper West Side to knock out the first half of this Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column, then down to Theater Row to see the play I’ll be reviewing in the second half of my drama column, immediately followed by eight hours in the sack. Busy, huh?

For all these reasons and more, don’t expect to hear anything else from me today. If for some reason you do, please send me a stern e-mail asking why the hell I’m blogging when I should be working (or napping!).

Later.

A reader writes:

I can answer Tommasini’s question
about identifying “a gay sensibility in music.” It’s the opposite of Ted Nugent’s sensibility in music.

I dunno–some of my best friends are very butchy. But, then, not all of them are men….

Speaking of naps, a reader writes:

I’ve been catching up on the blog as I
was busy/not plugged in last week. Wonder if I’m the
only reader who actually prints it out to take to bed
to read? Kind of defeats the purpose of a paperless
medium, but it sure feels good to be back in your own
bed with something good to read.

I only know of one other person who prints out “About Last Night” to read, and he does it because (so he says) he’s too old to do serious reading off a video screen. Not me. Like H.L. Mencken, I read better when lying down, but I’d no more print out a blog and read it in bed than I’d read a magazine while driving a car. Bed is for books, most recently Linda Danly’s Hugo Friedhofer: The Best Years of His Life, Gregory Dicum’s Window Seat: Reading the Landscape from the Air,
Michael Dregni’s Django: The Life and Music of a Gypsy Legend, and the forthcoming third volume of Letters from a Life: Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, the last of which I plan to finish before I turn out the light tonight, unless I decide instead to pick up Brian Garfield’s Hopscotch first.

All this notwithstanding, I’m glad to know that my correspondent (who is a West Coast-based cabaret singer) is so dedicated to the everlasting search for cultural illumination that she takes “About Last Night” to bed with her! If anyone else out there indulges in this particular perversity, drop me a line–it’ll make me smile.

“The biography of a great writer is not that of a man of the world, or a pervert or an invalid: it is that of a man who draws his stature from what he writes, because he has sacrificed everything to it, including his lesser qualities.”

Jean-Yves Tadi

Erin O’Connor has a thread going at Critical Mass about memorable first paragraphs. One of my all-time favorites is from an utterly unknown book, Elaine Dundy’s The Old Man and Me. I’ve posted it on the blog before, and do you know what? I’m going to post it again:

There is a sort of coal hole in the heart of Soho that is open every afternoon: a dark, dank, dead-ended subterranean tunnel. It is a drinking club called the Crypt and the only light to penetrate it is the shaft of golden sunlight slipping through the doorway from time to time glancing off someone’s nose or hair or glass of gin, all the more poignant for its sudden revelations, in an atmosphere almost solid with failure, of pure wind-swept nostalgia, of clean airy summer houses, of the beach, of windy reefs; of the sun radiating through the clouds the instant before the clouds race back over it again–leaving the day as sad and desperate as before.

I sort of can’t get over this paragraph. I think it is just about perfect. I hope Ms. Dundy wrote it after she wrote the rest of the novel, because if I were her I would have stopped dead after writing those two sentences, thinking “My work is done here.” (But the rest of the novel is very good too.)

Last week, Terry asked me about my experience watching dance. His question was a timely one; just last night I pilgrimaged west to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company in a one-night-only performance (the kickoff, mind you, of a fifty-state tour) in the suburb of Glen Ellyn, Illinois. Terry’s book, his recent blogging about dance, and the questions he posed to me were on my mind.

If I remember correctly, the first dance I saw was Balanchine’s Jewels, circa 1992, with Terry (natch). We sat in an upper level of the auditorium, which proved useful for my rather anxiously held purposes: to get it, and to be able to prove that I had gotten it by having something thoughtful, or if possible penetrating, to say about it afterward. From our high-altitude vantage point, the dance looked like architecture in motion. It was on that level–not in terms of the dancers’ individual moves and gestures but in terms of the kaleidoscopic formations and patterns they all made together–that I tried to grasp what I was seeing. This was my way of trying to intellectualize it: to make it into something I could read. In keeping with what Terry wrote, I don’t think I got as much out of that initial outing as I did from subsequent dance performances where I was more at ease watching. That first time out, I felt almost as though I was performing. I was intent on having the correct response. But there’s no such thing.

I want to make a brief detour here and talk about live classical music (don’t blink–it won’t last long and it may never happen again!). Terry drew a distinction between narrative and non-narrative art forms, grouping painting, dance, and music as not essentially intellectual. For me, a more operative divide has always been the one between performing and non-performing arts; my grasp of the latter is decent, of the former pathetic. When I came to Chicago, though, I started going to the Symphony semi-regularly–say, half a dozen times a year (a habit that has now, sadly, dropped off). Somewhere in that time, I reached a deeply satisfying understanding of how to enjoy a classical concert, if you happen to be me. I realized that if I let my mind wander a bit, I would actually hear the music better than if I spent the whole concert policing my concentration. At some point I started accepting the meandering thinking I was doing at concerts, however far-flung, as an associative response to the music rather than a philistine, well-nigh punishable distraction from it. At that point I moved from thinking of concert-going as vaguely hard work that just might confer virtue (like church-going) to thinking of it as an authentic sensual luxury.

Because Terry had started this conversation and I had been mulling a response, I was quite conscious of my minute-to-minute reactions to the Paul Taylor dances I saw last night. Speaking generally–though I’ll have more to say later about the individual pieces–I spent most of the evening bouncing between asking myself “What does it mean?” and simply forgetting the question. Forgetting about words and language themselves, really, as something especially stunning or delicate unfolded on the stage. For me, anyway, this shuttling mode in which I seem to watch dance offers the best of both worlds. As a dance begins I inevitably find myself pushing lightly toward an interpretation, but when the work does something that exceeds or confounds the interpretation–as it continually does, if it is any good–I happily give up thinking and, as Terry says, eat it up. I love this ebb and flow of thought, the thinking and the being drawn away from thinking by fresh experience.