Archives for 2004

I’m out of here for a couple of days. Aside from All the Usual Crap, I’ve got to write a speech, then go give it. I have just about enough time (and energy) to do both.

For now, I leave you in the beautiful and capable hands of Our Girl in Chicago. See you Friday.

“To them, singing is just something that you buy, for whatever you have to pay, and so is acting, and so is writing, and so is music, and anything else they use. That it might be good for its own sake is something that hasn’t occurred to them yet. The only thing they think is good for its own sake is a producer that couldn’t tell Brahms from Irving Berlin on a bet, that wouldn’t know a singer from a crooner until he heard twenty thousand people yelling for him one night, that can’t read a book until the scenario department has had a synopsis made, that can’t even speak English, but that is a self-elected expert on music, singing, literature, dialogue, and photography, and generally has a hit because somebody lent him Clark Gable to play in it.”

James M. Cain, Serenade

A regular reader was stimulated by my recent list
of favorite movies to reflect on her own picks:

I think you’re absolutely right about top 5 vs. top 50 film lists. It’s
a funny thing. Over the years I’ve compiled many a top 10 film list, and
over the years the list has changed many times over. “Rules of the Game” is
certainly one of the greatest movies ever made, and has been on my top 10
list a lot. There are many films that I need to see again to decide whether
they still warrant a spot on the list or even a spot on the top 50. There is
only one film; however, that has been on every top 10 list I have ever made.
It has never, ever been number 1, but it has always been somewhere on the
list. I have seen the film countless times over the years, and I saw it
again a couple of summers ago at the Film Forum, and it stays on the list.
The film is “The Seven Samurai.” I love that movie. It is not the greatest
movie ever made, but it is always, always, always on my top 10 list. I love
that movie every time I see it.

“Chinatown” often makes the list. “The Searchers” has been on the list.
“Vertigo” – as much as I love it – nah! “North by Northwest” – yes. “The
General” is one of the greatest films ever made. I only remember to include
it after I’ve seen it, but every time I see it, I rewrite my list! “His Girl
Friday” is nearly perfect. It used to make the list a lot. I’m not so sure
any more about “Citizen Kane.” It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen
it. It was on the list for years, but I’m not so sure any more. Like I said,
there are a lot of films that I haven’t seen in 20 years. I don’t know what
I’d think of them now.

I watched “Singing in the Rain” at my parents
recently and decided it belonged on the list. I don’t think I ever thought
to put it there before. In college “Dr. Strangelove” or “A Clockwork Orange”
always made the list, as did “The Seventh Seal” and “Persona.” What would I
think of “Persona” now? I suspect it wouldn’t get anywhere near the list,
but “Fanny and Alexander” might. During acting school, at least one of the
following always made the list: “The Awful Truth,” “My Favorite Wife,” “The
Philadelphia Story,” and the aforementioned “His Girl Friday.” I remember
puting Coppola’s “The Conversation” on the list, but I haven’t seen that
film in almost 30 years. Is it as great as I remember it? I loved “8-1/2”
and “La Dolce Vita,” but would I put any film by Fellini on my list now? I
wonder. Same goes for Antonioni.

I probably can’t put “The Shawshank
Redemption” on a list of top 10 greatest films ever made, but it’s one of my
favorites. I love Martin Scorcese as a filmmaker, but which of his movies
would make my top 10 now – “Taxi Driver”? “Goodfellows”? At one time, I put
“New York, New York” on the list. I wonder if I’d still put it there. And
then there’s David Lean. “Lawrence of Arabia” is an awesome movie. It’s been
on my list from time to time. But the sentimental favorite is “Bridge on the
River Kwai.” “Les Enfants du Paradis” is a great film, but it’s never made
my top 10. “Jules and Jim” used to make the list a lot. I love French film,
in general, but how many French movies actually warrant top 10 placement?

I think Robert Altman is a great, great filmmaker. “Nashville” was almost
always on the list, but does it hold up? “Three Women” certainly doesn’t. I
saw that one again recently – boy did it suck! But I saw “M.A.S.H.”
recently, too, and thought it was hysterical. What about “Ugetsu” by
Mitzoguchi? I love that movie. Do you know it? And something by Satyajit Ray
should go on the list, but what? Does “Some Like it Hot” or “The Apartment”
warrant mention? What about a little known Barbara Stanwyk/Fred MacMurray
feature called “Remember the Night”? “Point Blank” is a great movie. John
Boorman is a terrific filmmaker. Someone could convince me that
“Deliverance” belongs on a top 50 list. And these are just the movies that
popped into my head this evening. I’ve probably forgotten at least 50 of my
favorites. Aren’t movies amazing?!

They sure are, and the nice thing about this e-mail is the way in which it points out the dynamic quality of taste. Clement Greenberg once observed that all canons of excellence are provisional. That goes double–maybe triple–for lists of personal favorites of art, be they movies or paintings or symphonies or jazz albums.

Which reminds me that I also got an e-mail from somebody else who didn’t much care for the first sentence of my original post, “My recent Wall Street Journal piece about Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, which I declared to be the greatest movie ever made, has drawn quite a bit of reader mail.” This person said it was “one of the most arrogant” statements he’d ever read. I replied, briefly and perhaps the least little bit testily, “Goodness! Maybe you should get out more.” If I may unpack that retort a bit further, I don’t see that there’s anything remotely arrogant about what I wrote–save to those egalitarians who think it immoral to make value judgments about art. To them I say: this blog is soooo not for you.

Our Girl is back in Chicago (sigh) and I’m back at work on the Balanchine book. I’m also plumb tuckered–we had a busy weekend, without a whole lot of down time, in addition to which I’ve got two pieces and a speech to knock off between now and Friday. For all these reasons, I doubt I’ll have much to offer for the rest of the week, though I’ll poke my head in whenever possible.

In the meantime, here are some interesting links that merit your attention:

– The New York Sun‘s Knickerbocker column visited last week’s artsjournal.com get-together and filed a report:

At the bar at Landmark Tavern in Midtown, Doug McLennan this week greeted a crowd of about 75 who avidly follow his Web site, Artsjournal.com, a weekday digest of arts and cultural journalism. The Seattle resident was in town with plans to meet some of the Web loggers for his site — James Russell, Tobi Tobias, Kyle Gann, Jan Herman, Greg Sandow, and Terry Teachout — and decided to invite general readers as well. An invitation on the home page read,”Wonder what your favorite ArtsJournal blogger looks like on the other side of that computer screen?”

“It’s like a blind date,” said one attendee who was standing at the mahogany bar, originally built in 1839 and cut from a single tree….

– My December posting about the plight of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday-afternoon radio broadcasts kicked up a royal fuss. The fuss has died down, but the company is still on the spot, as
Robin Pogrebin of the New York Times reports:

The Metropolitan Opera plans to ask the public to help save its venerable Saturday afternoon radio broadcasts after losing the support of its longtime sponsor, ChevronTexaco, and being rebuffed by other corporations that had been asked to pick up the slack.

Beverly Sills, chairwoman of the Met, is going on the air today during the intermission of a broadcast of “La Traviata” to, asking listeners worldwide to help the Met raise $150 million over the next five years….

ChevronTexaco announced in May that it would withdraw its $7 million annual support of the broadcasts after the 2003-4 season, ending the longest continuous commercial sponsorship in broadcast history. The company has been the sole sponsor of the program since 1940, presenting operas without commercials except for references to the company in the commentary. (Chevron bought Texaco for $36 billion in 2000.)

Ms. Sills said she was not optimistic about finding another company to replace ChevronTexaco, which had footed the program’s entire bill. “I think in these times it’s unrealistic,” she said.

Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Met, who recently announced that he would retire in two years, said the search for another corporate sponsor had been difficult. “The corporate community looks at the radio broadcasts and doesn’t believe it’s a good media buy, that we don’t reach enough listeners,” Mr. Volpe said yesterday. “They are better off having commercials on big sporting events.”…

– Speaking of the Met, Luciano Pavarotti is singing his farewell performances there, and the Times’ Anthony Tommasini caught the first one. He minces few words:

Physically he has never seemed heavier. Bad knees and bad hips have made him almost immobile. As he lumbered about the stage, sometimes propped up by his Tosca, the soprano Carol Vaness, you wondered why he was subjecting himself to the ordeal of a staged performance.

When Cavaradossi is shot by a firing squad at the end of the opera, poor Mr. Pavarotti had to sink slowly into a pile of beanbags, bracing his fall with his arms outstretched.

Vocally, once in a while there was a flash of that incomparable Pavarotti sound, a supplely shaped legato phrase, a honeyed pianissimo. He roused himself for a couple of ringing cries of “Vittoria! Vittoria!” in Act II. But after sending the sustained high note into the balconies, his voice essentially gave out for the rest of Cavaradossi’s outburst against the villainous Scarpia, the bass Samuel Ramey….

Mr. Pavarotti had already been having vocal troubles when he rallied in 1998 for a gala performance at the Met to celebrate his 30th anniversary. He had lost nearly 70 pounds and had worked hard to get in vocal shape. Though his voice that night was a little underpowered, he essentially sounded great and performed with joy. It would have been an ideal time to take his leave from opera.

No fooling. I spent the last few years of my tenure as the classical music and dance critic of the New York Daily News covering what I thought of as the Pavarotti Deathwatch, attending his increasingly insecure performances just in case something catastrophic went wrong. It didn’t–not quite–but once I left the News, I vowed never again to see Pavarotti in person. My memories of his great days had already been blotted beyond repair. Nothing becomes an artist quite like knowing when to quit.

– O.K., Banana Oil, since when is it April 1?

Mostly unkown today, Mortimer Brewster was a widely read drama critic on the New York scene in the 1920s and 1930s, somewhat analogous to Terry Teachout today: smart, sharp-tongued, with a grander vision of what was possible than most of the producers of his day….

My brother doesn’t look a bit like Boris Karloff.

You’ll excuse me, I hope, for not posting extensively, or nearly at all, during my vacation. But I did want to take a few of my last moments here to blow New York kisses to all. What a long, strange trip it’s been–except for the long and the strange parts. It’s been maddeningly brief, and wonderfully familiar despite the two-and-a-half-year gap since the last time I was in town.

To get here Friday I braved high winds and heavy rain in the fragile carapace of a mini-jet from which four souls had been evicted due to weight concerns. Even more distressing, the book I had intended to read was very, very bad. Excruciating. I can’t be more specific just now, as I’m going to be reviewing it. Suffice it to say that after 25 pages I put the offending volume away–oh so far away, into the very depths of my carry-on–and submitted myself with relief to the potent charms of Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, which I’ve been reading very intermittently for a few months now.

I don’t believe it has ever taken me so long to read a book that I find so pleasurable. Weeks may have passed, but every time I pick it up again, everything snaps back into place and I’m instantly absorbed, the picture of a happy reader. In January, when I was on page 75, I suggested to a friend that he pick up a copy and we read it together. He also loved it, but he zipped right through, and six weeks later I’m still in the middle. We had a drink before dinner tonight and talked about how much we both adored it. But the embarrassing fact remains that I can’t seem to finish it. (See also Cup of Chicha’s inventory of the unfinished books on her floors.) Which leads me to scare up alternatives to the unsettling theory that I am just a hopeless slacker.

Alternative theory #1 cites the quality of Hazzard’s prose. You could never call it dense; there’s nothing the least bit tangled about it, and the sentences in particular are crystalline things. But every second or third sentence seems to contain some startlingly astringent perception about no less sweeping a subject than human nature, or love, or women, or men. I find myself reading almost every sentence a second time successively. It’s the first book I’ve ever read and reread simultaneously. Is it possible to compare something to quicksand and mean it as praise?

Alternative theory #2 is simply that I don’t want to reach the end of the novel.

But I may get a lot closer to that point during the flight home tomorrow (depending, perhaps, on how soon I wrap this up and get to bed). And later this week, beginning late Monday or Tuesday, I’ll be posting a series of Transit of Venus fortune cookies. Also more on the delightful events of this weekend.

Till then.

He who wills great things must gird up his loins;

only in limitation is mastery revealed,

and law alone can give us freedom.

Goethe, “Natur und Kunst” (trans. David Luke)

Felix Salmon, writing at MemeFirst, had an interesting reaction to a recent posting in which, among other things, I discussed the difficulties inherent in drawing up Top Five lists:

Terry Teachout, today, says that “it’s usually not that hard to pick a One Best–absolute excellence is by definition self-evident”. He goes on to give examples: “The greatest opera ever written,” he says, “is The Marriage of Figaro“. To which my immediate reaction is “That’s not the greatest opera ever written

At lunch with Supermaud on Sunday, the talk turned to editors and publishers, and I mentioned a letter Flannery O’Connor sent in 1949 to an editor at Rinehart who wanted her to rewrite Wise Blood. Neither Maud nor Our Girl knew about this letter, so I promised to post it. Here it is:

Thank you for your letter of the 16th. I plan to come down next week and I have asked Elizabeth McKee to make an appointment with you for me on Thursday. I think, however, that before I talk to you my position on the novel and on your criticism in the letter should be made plain.

I can only hope that in the finished novel the direction will be clearer, but I can tell you that I would not like at all to work with you as do other writers on your list. I feel that whatever virtues the novel may have are very much connected with the limitations you mention. I am not writing a conventional novel, and I think that the quality of the novel I writer will derive precisely from the peculiarity or aloneness, if you will, of the experience I write from. I do not think there is any lack of objectivity in the writing, however, if this is what your criticism implies; and also I do not feel that rewriting has obscured the direction. I feel it has given whatever direction is now present.

In short, I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now. The question is: is Rinehart interested in publishing this kind of novel?

Rinehart wasn’t, and Wise Blood was published by Harcourt, Brace three years later. Ignored by most critics, it has long since been recognized as a modern American classic, one of the comparatively few American novels of permanent interest to be written in the Fifties…but who knew? Imagine the self-assurance it must have taken for an unknown, unpublished author to have sent a letter like that to an editor at a major house.

Me, I can’t imagine it–but, then, I didn’t write Wise Blood, either.