Archives for 2004

For a while now I’ve been meaning to post here about whichever too-smart-for-their-own-good schedule makers at Fox and HBO are responsible for placing the two most gleefully misanthropic sitcoms on television directly opposite each other (Sunday nights, 8:30 CST): “Arrested Development” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I missed the boat, though, and now that “The Sopranos” has returned in the same slot, my dilemma is intensified, but lacking the neat symmetry of Larry David v. David Cross.

When the Sunday night showdown was “Curb” versus “Arrested,” it was closely contested but the latter always won out. Dana Stevens’ Slate appreciation nicely invokes the set-up and some of the charm of “Arrested,” in case you haven’t watched it. The only thing I would add is my impression that, despite their epic character flaws, there is something weirdly lovable about the characters in “Arrested Development,” a deer-in-the-headlights helplessness that makes my heart swell even as I snicker and sigh at them. They wear their dysfunctions on their sleeves and have all the vulnerability–not just the brattiness–of children.

Colby Cosh’s smart reflections on Larry David this week set me to thinking more about the two shows together. At a glance it would seem that they are perfect negative images of one another. Larry David is an impossible jerk plunked down amid people like you and me to wreak social havoc; Michael Bluth is a person like you or me plunked down amid a bunch of jerks and crazies to try to impose some order. But Colby plays devil’s advocate on “Curb”:

In the world of Curb Your Enthusiasm you can’t shake the suspicion that perhaps Larry David, whatever his self-deprecating protestations, regards “Larry David” as the hero of the show, a quasi-intellectual, creative-professional Christ figure adrift amidst a sea of grasping, pleading, whining nutballs. And, in fact, if you’re inclined to view the show that way, the logic holds up remarkably well. Normally “Larry” is either being terrorized quite randomly, thanks to some farcical explosion of circumstances, or is getting into trouble by pursuing some item of his private and arbitrary social credo too far. I don’t know if the term “comedy of manners” has ever been applied here, but that’s what Curb Your Enthusiasm is; a humorous meditation about the unwritten codes governing the roadway, the dinner party, the driving range, the memorial service. I’d hate to come off as one of those prats who tries to co-opt everything for conservatism, and David’s electoral politics seem to lie left of the Clintonian, but the unstated theme of every CYE episode is the longing for a world–by implication, a lost world–of clear social expectations. Perhaps without knowing it, David has crammed some of the concerns of the 19th-century novel into the small screen.

This is compelling, and I wholeheartedly buy the comparison with 19th-century novels, but I still find it hard to squint just the right way so that Larry David appears as the hero of the show. If one could, though, he would look a lot like Michael Bluth, the one normal guy in a family tree of nitwits and screw-ups. Since I find said nitwits and screw-ups so appealing, though, maybe I have been looking at each of the show’s heroes precisely wrong, and need to own my sneaking affection for the bad Bluths. Then Michael Bluth would look like the Larry David of “Arrested Development” and Larry David like the Michael Bluth of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Hmm…any other “Arrested” fans out there? Do you love these creeps too, or is it just me?

In a terrible week for the game, hockey finds a bit of unlikely good press. Well, decent press, anyway. The New Yorker runs three short pieces on the game in Talk of the Town: a loopy one on Rangers icon Mark Messier and the state of the game generally (this one the subject of some mystification at TMFTML yesterday); one on John Kerry’s rink days; and my favorite: a look at the movie Miracle from the perspective of a great Russian player who was on the rise in the Soviet system in 1980, but just green enough to have missed being part of the defeated Olympic team. That man is now the oldest player in the NHL and one of my personal all-stars, a crafty strategist with unreal vision and a feather touch.

A few weeks ago, Igor Larionov, the New Jersey Devil and former Soviet star, who has been called the Russian Gretzky, decided that he needed to see the film. He went to a multiplex near his house, in Short Hills, with his wife and his young son, but they wanted to see something else. “So I went by myself,” Larionov said the other day, in the Devils’ locker room after practice. “I think I was the last guy to come into the theatre. The place was full. It was already dark.” Nobody in the theatre seemed to recognize him, in part because he is just a hockey player, and also because he hardly looks like a professional athlete: he is short and compact, with a thoughtful, boyish expression that, along with a proficiency at chess and an occasional quoting of Pushkin and the wire-rimmed glasses that he wears away from the rink, has earned him another nickname–the Professor.

Following the brutality in Vancouver this week, this reminder of some of the game’s better elements is a small but welcome palliative.

In lieu of new stuff from me, here’s another of the forgotten columns I published in 1998 in Fi, the now-defunct record magazine. It’s still relevant–for the most part, anyway–though there isn’t much left of the classical recording industry to complain about these days….

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One hundred and twenty-one years ago, Thomas Edison yelled “Mary had a little lamb” into a strange little hand-cranked machine, which promptly yelled his own words back at him. Twelve years later, Johannes Brahms yelled “I am Dr. Brahms, Johannes Brahms” into the tiny horn of a slightly improved version of Edison’s little machine, then sat down at a piano and banged out the last part of his G Minor Hungarian Dance. The present whereabouts of the wax cylinder Brahms recorded in 1889 are unknown, but its low-fi contents were subsequently dubbed onto a scratchy acetate disc, and can now be heard on a CD called About a Hundred Years: A History of Sound Recording.

About a Hundred Years contains 38 selections, ranging in time from the Brahms cylinder to a 1943 V-Disc by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony. Unlike most currently available anthologies of early sound recordings, it is fairly evenly divided between classical and popular music–Scott Joplin and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band are heard side by side with Adelina Patti and Jascha Heifetz–and also includes an assortment of spoken-word recordings, including commercially issued 78s that preserve for posterity the speaking voices of Tolstoy, Lenin, Churchill, Gandhi, Sarah Bernhardt, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Anthologies are easy targets for the know-it-all with an axe to grind, and I can think of at least a couple of dozen other items that would have fit quite neatly into this family album of snapshots from the dawn of sound recording. It would have been nice, for example, to hear once again the 1888 cylinder on which Sir Arthur Sullivan can be heard confessing that the invention of the phonograph has left him “terrified at the thought that so much bad music may be put on record forever” (a prescient thought indeed), but no recordings by important composers other than Brahms have been included on About a Hundred Years. Folk music has been similarly ignored–I expect to go to my grave without hearing any of the seven ultra-rare 78 sides recorded for the Gramophone Company in 1908 by Joseph Taylor, the Lincolnshire singer from whom Percy Grainger collected “Brigg Fair”–as have the many distinguished poets who made commercial records.

Scarcely less frustrating is the failure of the producers of About a Hundred Years to draw on the large body of spoken-word recordings made in the United States during the acoustic era. In the days before network radio, many American politicians used the phonograph as a means of “broadcasting” their speeches: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson all made commercial 78s as part of their 1912 presidential campaigns, and William Jennings Bryan recorded in 1923 the famous “Cross of Gold” speech that he originally delivered at the Democratic presidential convention of 1896. (It is one of history’s more amusing coincidences that Bryan cut this record in the same Indiana studio where Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke made their first recordings.)

But enough complaining. Though About a Hundred Years may not be perfect, it is still a richly evocative piece of work, and the spoken-word selections are in certain ways the most evocative of all. Especially haunting is the field recording made in France on October 9, 1918, one month before the end of World War I, in which the Royal Garrison Artillery can be heard firing poison gas shells at German troops. This joltingly vivid recording (you can actually hear the shells whizzing off to their targets) was made so that the sounds of war could be heard by generations yet unborn, it then being widely believed that “the Great War” would be the last one ever fought. I wonder how many of those who purchased HMV 09308 were blown up two decades later in the Battle of Britain, or how many of the Bolsheviks who heard Lenin preach the gospel of Soviet power on their hand-cranked phonographs were slaughtered in Stalin’s prison camps.

Most of the musical selections included on About a Hundred Years will be familiar to experienced collectors of historical reissues, but no amount of familiarity can breed contempt for them. Here is Francesco Tamagno singing the “Esultate” from Verdi’s Otello in 1903, just sixteen years after he created the role on stage at La Scala; here is Joseph Joachim, the man who premiered the Brahms Violin Concerto, scraping soberly away at a movement of Bach’s B Minor Partita; here is Sousa’s Band playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever” in 1902, just five years after it was composed. To hear these ancient records, flawed though they are, is an intensely moving experience. The battered shellac sputters and crackles angrily, and you wonder for a moment what all the fuss could possibly be about–but then the curtain parts and the nineteenth century comes into view for a minute or two, sometimes through a glass darkly, sometimes with the near-hallucinatory sharpness of a Mathew Brady photograph.

Whenever I listen to performances such as these, I’m struck by the palpable idealism of the men and women who recorded them. Yes, the pioneers of the phonograph were in it for the money, but they never lost sight of the larger goal of bringing great music to the masses, and while one can gnash one’s teeth at the mistakes they made, it is surely more useful to reflect on how many things they did right. Though we cannot hear Sergei Rachmaninoff playing Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata (Charles O’Connell passed up the opportunity to record it, a decision that I like to think he is discussing at this very moment with a committee of devils equipped with sharp pitchforks), we can hear him in the Chopin B-Flat Minor Sonata, Schumann’s Carnaval, and dozens of other characteristic performances, thanks solely and only to the money-hungry executives of the Victor Talking Machine Company. Nor is Rachmaninoff’s sizable catalogue of 78s unique. Right from the start, the major record labels all made plenty of room for seriousness, which is why we can also hear Grieg, Saint-Sa

I received this piece of e-mail apropos of my various postings on Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game:

I took your word, paid $30 for the film, and was utterly disgusted. What a boring piece of offal. This is your inspiration? I’ll bet you like Last Year At Marienbad.

I’ve sworn off critics for life.

To which I made the following reply, which I thought worth sharing:

As a matter of fact, I don’t like Last Year at Marienbad at all. And I really think you ought to at least consider the possibility that you might be wrong. I can think of a lot of things one might call The Rules of the Game, but “boring piece of offal” is not on my list, or anyone else’s save, I suspect, yours.

When I was a college student, I told a teacher that I didn’t like the music of Schumann, and he replied, very politely, “That may say more about you than it does about Schumann.” Most people who take film seriously consider The Rules of the Game to be a very great work of art. Of course we could all be wrong, but why not give us, and Jean Renoir, a chance? You might just surprise yourself.

As Hans Keller once said in an almanac posting I should probably reprint monthly, “As soon as I detest something I ask myself why I like it.”

That’s worth pondering.

“Yet, if we except this serious criticism for the moment, and measure Scott in the light of the full noon of life, we see that he belongs to that very small group of our novelists–Fielding and Jane Austen are the chief of them–who face life squarely. They are grown up. They do not cry for the moon. I do not mean that to be grown up is the first requirement of genius. To be grown up may be fatal to it. But short of the great illuminating madness, there is a power to sustain, assure and enlarge us in those novelists who are not driven back by life, who are not shattered by the discovery that it is a thing bounded by unsought limits, by interests as well as by hopes, and that it ripens under restriction. Such writers accept. They think that acceptance is the duty of a man.”

V.S. Pritchett, The Living Novel

I’m headed out the door to give a speech, but I did want to add my two cents’ worth about Sam Tanenhaus, the newly appointed editor of the New York Times Book Review, whom I’ve known for years (and whose Whittaker Chambers biography I reviewed in an essay reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader). He’s absolutely first-rate, smart as a whip and as generous a colleague as you could hope to find. The Times couldn’t have made a better or more serious choice.

Said Bill Keller in the official announcement: “To anyone who might have fallen for the notion that we were looking to dumb down this precious franchise: take that!” I think he’s earned the right to crow a bit, and maybe even a bit more.

That whoosh you just felt was the collective exhalation of litbloggers everywhere, who will now need some new cause for speculation. By way of Maud, we’ve learned that Sam Tanenhaus has been named editor of the New York Times Book Review. Here’s just one recent testament to his literary bona fides, a sharp review of John Updike. Good luck to Tanenhaus in the most difficult job of its kind.

“Caro, who usually came that way, showed the inscriptions. Here lieth all that could die of Oliver Wade. The earthly enchantments of Tryphena Cope are here subdued. On later stones, merely the name, and the years–of birth and death–connected by a little etched hyphen representing life. Eroded tablets tilted like torn kites. On the oldest the lettering was indecipherable: inaudible last words.”

Shirley Hazzard, Transit of Venus