Archives for 2004

I haven’t taken part in many weddings in my life, and none at all in recent years, so when my friend Laura asked me to read the Eighty-Fourth Psalm at her wedding last Saturday, I juggled my holiday plans and found a way to get myself to the church on time.

It wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Laura is a writer who’s been living in Washington, D.C., for the past few years, but like me, she was born and raised in a small Missouri town, and when it came time for her to marry, she chose to tie the knot at home. It’s a four-hour drive from her town to mine, a bit too long to be casually undertaken in winter weather. Fortunately, she scheduled her wedding on the same day I was planning to go home for Christmas, so instead of driving straight from St. Louis to Smalltown, U.S.A., as I normally do, I picked up a rental car at the airport, drove to the church, got Laura married off, turned around, and headed for home.

A small-town church wedding is a thing unto itself, especially if you were to compare it to the last wedding I attended, a catered affair held in the banquet room of a fancy Westchester County restaurant and presided over by a wisecracking rabbi. Small-town men of the cloth are rarely heard to crack wise at weddings, nor does the food served at the wedding dinners over which they preside typically run to the overelaborate. Laura’s menu, for instance, consisted of baked ham and hashbrown casserole, served up piping hot in the fellowship hall of the First Christian Church of Columbia, Missouri. I can’t tell you how many meals I’ve eaten in such halls over the years, none of them fancy and all of them good, though this would be the first one I’d been served while listening to the sounds of a local DJ who specialized in such Fifties standards as Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” Not exactly the sort of thing you expect to hear in a fellowship hall, I thought with a smile as I sipped my non-alcoholic punch.

The sanctuary of the church was bedecked with poinsettas and lit by candles, and every pew as far as my dazzled eye could see was jammed full of people who acted as though they knew one another, which they probably did. Having changed hurriedly into my travel-crumpled suit in the men’s room, I waited for my cue in the vestibule, eavesdropping on the family and friends of the bride and groom and delighting in snatches of the kind of talk you rarely hear at a Westchester County wedding (“So how do you like my new suit, honey? Didn’t I tell you I was gonna buy me a suit for the wedding?”). Then I took my place by the pulpit and watched Laura walk down the aisle, and at the appointed moment I stood and spoke the ancient words she had asked me to read, not daring to catch her eye for fear of choking up:

How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty!

My soul yearns, even faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may have her young–a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.

I sat down again to watch my beloved friend embark on her new life. She looked flushed and radiant and determined, and I, perhaps not surprisingly, found myself tugged between hope for her future and curiosity about my own. The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is uncomfortable for me at best, and I’d been at loose emotional ends for the past couple of weeks. (You know your emotions are up in the air when every piece of music you hear, good and bad alike, makes you cry.) Now I was sitting in a place redolent of my long-ago youth, at once utterly alien and utterly familiar, feeling not unlike the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, who wandered through her palace at midnight, stopping all the clocks, trying to turn her back on time.

I will…I will…you may kiss the bride. A kilted bagpiper stationed in the balcony struck up the Ode to Joy, Laura and her Ben marched back down the aisle, and a few minutes later I was dishing up hashbrown casserole and wondering whether I’d be able to make it all the way to Smalltown, U.S.A., before bedtime. I’d warned my mother that I’d probably spend the night in a motel just south of St. Louis, but the clock on the wall of the fellowship hall told me that I could be home by midnight, weather and coincidence permitting, so I kissed the bride and her sisters, got in my car, and drove around town until I found an exit to the highway, alone with my double-edged memories.

To the solitary stranger, the highways of Missouri are flat and harsh-looking in wintertime. Only the traveler for whom they point toward home can find anything like beauty in mile upon mile of leafless trees and drab brown fields. To me they are as lovely as a Corot–but only when the sun lights up the vast blue dome of sky. At night you can see nothing but the thin ribbon of road and the cold silver stars hanging above the plains, and you switch on the radio half from boredom and half from fear of the dark. I skated impatiently across the dial, finding nothing but slick-sounding FM stations whose music seemed untouched by human hands. I pushed a different button, and out of the misty static of the AM band came a sound so recognizable that I stopped breathing for one astonished moment. It was the voice of Porter Wagoner, introducing a commercial for Martha White Flour. I had accidentally tuned in WSM in Nashville, and now I was listening to the Grand Ole Opry, wafted on the frigid night air all the way from Opryland, U.S.A., to the waiting radio of a rental car headed east on I-70 for St. Louis and points beyond.

Next to nothing had changed about the Opry since I’d last heard it: Porter Wagoner soon gave way to Whispering Bill Anderson, who in turn introduced Del McCoury, the dean of bluegrass, who sang “Blue Christmas” in the high, hacksaw tenor he had honed during his years on the road with Bill Monroe and His Bluegrass Boys. I remembered with perfect clarity how it felt to sit in the balcony of the Ryman Auditorium when I was sixteen years old, looking down on the distant stage that all the greats of country music had trod. Once my mother and her father had listened to the Opry every Saturday night, and for a brief moment my teenaged self had actually dreamed of playing there.

Life had carried me far away from that dream, just as the Opry itself had moved from the penny-plain Ryman to an expensive new home on the outskirts of town. Even Martha White Flour, the cheerful-voiced announcer proclaimed, had a Web site now. Change and decay in all around I see? No, not really. Porter Wagoner and Whispering Bill, after all, were still singing of lost love in the weather-whacked voices I had known as a boy, and their mournful laments were somehow transformed into tidings of comfort and joy as I rolled through the night. Thirty years had slipped away since I’d packed my bags and gone forth to find my place in the world, yet I was coming home again to the same house on the same street in the same town in the same corner of Missouri, listening to the same music. Am I, then, the same person? I asked myself. And does it matter if I’m not?

As I pulled off I-70 to steer around St. Louis, I took my cell phone out of my shoulder bag and called my mother. “I’m making pretty good time,” I told her, “so I think I’ll come all the way home tonight. Don’t stay up for me–I won’t get in until half past midnight–but leave the porch light on.”

“I will,” she said. “Pull off if you get sleepy, all right? Do you promise?”

“I will, Mom,” I said. “I promise.”

Two hours later I eased into the driveway of her house, unlocked the back door as quietly as I could, and tiptoed down the hall to my old bedroom, dragging my battered suitcases behind me. Whoever I am, I’m home again, I told myself as I pushed open the door and saw the homemade redwood bookshelf and the faded portrait of Abraham Lincoln that has hung by the door to the bathroom for as long as I can remember. I crawled into bed, pulled the covers up to my chin, listened for the freight-train whistles keening halfway across town, and slowly drifted off to sleep, a worn-out, middle-aged sparrow come home to rest.

It might be a fight like you see on the screen

A swain getting slain for the love of a queen

Some great Shakespearean scene

Where a ghost and a prince meet

And everyone ends in mincemeat.

Howard Dietz, “That’s Entertainment” (music by Arthur Schwartz)

I made it to Smalltown, U.S.A., in one piece. More in due course, but for the moment I’m taking it easy.

Later.

“Class presidents and football heroes, he had finally come to learn, required careful and suspicious watching. They were like the potted hyacinths and daffodils that he sometimes bought for Sylvia in midwinter–spectacular but they often yellowed around the edges once you brought them home. The same was true with bright young men who had come along too fast. They were tired because of premature effort, or else overconfidence had made them arrogant. At best the cards were stacked against someone who made good too young. Willis could see now that he had once been in this same dubious category. He could no longer wonder, as he once had, that Mr. Beakney had made no effort to keep him. In fact Mr. Beakney must have been relieved to let him go–gray suit, trimmed hair, polished Oxfords, sharp mind and everything–because he had come along too fast for the age of twenty-nine.”

John P. Marquand, Sincerely, Willis Wayde

Veteran readers of this blog know that I’m a great fan of old-time radio, and I like nothing better than to spend an otherwise uneventful morning leafing through some detail-packed book whose subject is the shows of the Thirties and Forties in which my parents delighted. Today I’ve been amusing myself with Gerald Nachman’s Raised on Radio, which bears the extensively informative subtitle “In Quest of The Lone Ranger, Jack Benny, Amos ‘n’ Andy, The Shadow, Mary Noble, The Great Gildersleeve, Fibber McGee and Molly, Bill Stern, Our Miss Brooks, Henry Aldrich, The Quiz Kids, Mr. First Nighter, Fred Allen, Vic and Sade, Jack Armstrong, Arthur Godfrey, Bob and Ray, The Barbour Family, Henry Morgan, Our Gal Sunday, Joe Friday, and Other Lost Heroes from Radio’s Heyday.” (If none of these names rings a bell, go here and start nosing around. You can listen for free to one show from each series.)

I just ran across the following paragraph, which is so evocative that I wanted to share it with you. It describes the on-air efforts of radio horrormaster Arch Oboler, best known for the series Lights Out:

Oboler was a speedy writer who, at his own dinner parties, would excuse himself at 11 P.M. and return at 1 A.M. with a finished script. He often got ideas from listening to sound-effects records, and took special delight in devising grotesque effects. His scare tactics included the sound of a man frying in the electric chair (sizzling bacon), bones being snapped (spareribs or Life Savers crushed between teeth), heads being severed (chopped cabbages), a knife slicing through a man’s body (a slab of pork cut in two), and, most grisly of all, somebody eating human flesh (wet noodles squished with a bathroom plunger). Oboler cooked up a delicious pantryful of terror. The series’ most celebrated audio effect–a man being turned inside out–was achieved by turning a watery rubber glove inside out to the accompaniment of crushed berry baskets, to simulate broken bones.

Eeuuww! Foley “artists” be damned: that was the golden age of sound effects.

Says Instapundit:

I don’t think most bloggers are blogging away in the expectation of getting rich. Some will, and some larger (but still small) number will be comfortably well off, or at least make enough money to pay the hosting fees. But people blog so that they can express themselves–to be producers, not consumers–and we see this impulse across the world of new and alternative media. But it’s not really new. Lots of musicians play music in spite of the fact that most of them won’t get rich….They do it because they like to play, and they want their music heard. I think the same kind of thing drives most bloggers, too. It’s certainly what’s driven me. And while some people will drop out after a while (heck, most people will drop out after a while) the blogosphere will remain.

All absolutely true, as far as it goes, and I’d even venture to say that “citizen journalism” in its countless varieties will prove over time to be the most significant part of blogging. But one of the reasons why I started blogging was in the long-range expectation that to do so would ultimately provide me with an additional source of income, one that might someday compensate for the mainstream media’s steadily declining interest in the arts. Note the multiple temporal qualifiers with which that sentence is studded! I’ve discovered (not to my surprise) that I love blogging for its own sake, and I expect to go on doing it for some time to come, regardless of whether or not it ever becomes profitable. Nevertheless, my oft-repeated prophecy about the blogosphere–that it is the place to which serious commentary about the arts is destined to migrate–will not come true until and unless it becomes possible for serious, committed artbloggers to make a reasonable amount of money from their blogs.

One thing that compensates to some degree for the continuing unprofitability of artblogging is the fact that the blogosphere is now “hot,” meaning that some of the best bloggers are starting to attract mainstream media attention simply by virtue of the fact that they’re working in a brand-new medium. This allows them to leverage their small-scale celebrity into print-media gigs of various kinds. I couldn’t be happier about this development, since it means that the blogosphere is now providing talented unknowns with a new and better way to become known. (Not coincidentally, all my blogger friends are writers of whom I’d never heard until they started blogging.)

My own situation is, of course, different, and I think this difference may explain why so comparatively few established professional writers have embraced blogging: they can’t see what’s in it for them. Having done it for a year and a half, I know what’s in it for me. Not only do I relish the direct contact with readers that it makes possible, but my imagination is stimulated by blogging, which lets me try out ideas in public that very often find their way into my print-media pieces. Even when I don’t end up doing anything with these ideas, they quite often set me to thinking in unforeseen ways that lead me in more productive directions. I can already see that this speculative, experimental aspect of blogging, coupled with the immediacy and lack of editorial interference, is what makes the medium so addictive. (It also gives me another way to flog my books.) But be that as it may, I am a professional writer, meaning that I earn my living by selling my words, and I sincerely hope the day comes when I can earn some part of that living by blogging–especially since it’s so much fun.

Don’t worry: Our Girl and I aren’t planning to ask you to subscribe, at least not any time soon! We would, however, be greatly obliged if you’d tell your friends about “About Last Night.” Our readership has been growing, slowly but steadily, ever since we went live in the summer of 2003. The steady part we like, but we wouldn’t mind seeing our numbers grow a bit faster. So if you like what you see here, spread the word.

It’s drama-column time! I reviewed three plays in today’s Wall Street Journal: Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, and Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz.

To my absolute amazement, I really liked Fat Pig:

I’m sure I’m not the only theatergoer who’s had trouble making up his mind about Neil LaBute, whose powerful new play, “Fat Pig,” opened Wednesday at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. No one is better than Mr. LaBute at sketching the outlines of a relationship: A few quick strokes of casual-sounding dialogue and it’s right there in front of you. Nor has he any rivals at the dark art of making an audience anxious: Time and again his characters say and do things so disturbing, and so unexpected, that you all but break out in a sweat of discomfort as you watch them warily circling one another, looking for a chance to shove in the blade. Yet his work is also blighted by a coarse didacticism that too often manifests itself in here’s-what-it-all-means speeches as blatant as an episode of “Dragnet,” and I’ve never felt inclined to write in unmixed praise of anything he’s done–until now.

Why is “Fat Pig” different? Partly, I think, because the point of this hard-edged little fable, produced by MCC Theater and running through Jan. 15, is so self-evident that Mr. LaBute feels no need to harp on it. As the lights go up, we see Helen (Ashlie Atkinson), a bright, funny, seriously overweight young woman, eating to excess in a cafeteria. Tom (Jeremy Piven), a somewhat less bright, reasonably good-looking white-collar gent, sits down at her table. They strike up a conversation, and Tom discovers, to his obvious surprise, that he finds her appealing. No sooner does she give him her phone number (a typically LaButeian touch) than we meet Tom’s friend Carter (Andrew McCarthy), a viciously callous yuppie who regards his interest in Helen with contemptuous pity, and Jeannie (Keri Russell, formerly of TV’s “Felicity”), Tom’s alarmingly thin semi-girlfriend, who is reduced to a frenzy of self-loathing at the thought that he might prefer a “fat bitch” to her. With that, the game’s afoot, and you know somebody’s going to get hurt–badly.

Can love really conquer all? It’s to Mr. LaBute’s credit that he stares down this tough question without blinking, seconded by the performances of his four-person cast and the taut staging of Jo Bonney (“Living Out”). In Ms. Bonney’s knowing hands, each scene is screwed up to the highest possible degree ot tension without slopping over into sadistic excess, and none of the characters is ever permitted to overplay his or her hand….

Not so The Rivals, which I loved and expected to:

It’s been a long time between drinks for Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “The Rivals,” written in 1775 and last seen on Broadway in 1942. Now Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is putting on a sumptuous new production of Sheridan’s classic comedy that isn’t even slightly musty.

Directed at a brisk canter by Mark Lamos (“Big Bill”), this delightfully noisy tale of two young couples and their discontents offers its good-sized cast of scene-stealers plenty of prime opportunities to strut their stuff. Who comes out on top? That’s an impossible call, though Dana Ivey has more than her share of the best lines as the linguistically challenged Mrs. Malaprop (“Female punctuation forbids me to say more!”). You’ll revel in the lewd, gravelly basso of Brian Murray as Sir Lucius O’Trigger; you’ll be touched by the unforced warmth and sincerity of Carrie Preston as Julia Melville; you’ll be thrilled by the infallible comic authority of Richard Easton as Sir Anthony Absolute. As for John Lee Beatty’s too-good-to-be-true set, which depicts a block of townhouses in Bath, it’ll knock you out even before you’ve gotten settled in your seat….

Nor was I much surprised by my strong negative response to The Baltimore Waltz, since Paula Vogel’s been disappointing me for quite some time now:

Paula Vogel’s “The Baltimore Waltz,” playing through Jan. 9 at the Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space, is a nauseatingly coy black comedy about AIDS. Written in 1989, it’s being revived as part of the Signature’s season-long series of productions of Ms. Vogel’s plays. Her brother died of AIDS not long before she started writing the play, and I trust that it helped ease her sorrow, but that doesn’t make the results any more artful.

The only good thing about “The Baltimore Waltz” is the ever-wondrous Kristen Johnston, cast in what I take to be the semi-autobiographical role of a woman who, upon learning that her brother (David Marshall Grant) is dying of AIDS, dreams that she has been infected by a deadly virus caught from unclean toilet seats and known as Acquired Toilet Disease, or ATD (“It seems to be an affliction, so far, of single schoolteachers”). This, I fear, is Ms. Vogel’s sensible-shoes version of Swiftian irony, and it is a tribute to Ms. Johnston’s powers as a comedienne that she actually contrives to squash a few laughs out of it….

No link. To read the whole thing, buy today’s Journal, or go here and follow orders.

I mentioned the other day that Dvorak’s String Sextet was written in “A major, that most divinely innocent of keys.” Now a reader writes to ask:

Is there something intrinsic to the key of A major that makes it more innocent than any other? Is it innocent only when strings are playing in it? What about a piano? If it’s a brass sextet playing, is A major more or less innocent than B-flat major? Does the emotion a key conveys depend partly, mainly or entirely on what instrument(s) is (are) playing? Were you being whimsical?

I heard Billy Joel say once (1985) that he hated E major. I couldn’t imagine having a feeling about a particular key. I still can’t.

Any help in assuaging this bafflement would be welcome.

Wonderful questions all, and fearsomely difficult to answer–impossible, really, though I’ll do what I can.

To begin with, I was being perfectly serious about the key of A major. I think most musicians feel that certain keys have “characters” or “personalities,” though I suspect they feel this way because they have come to associate those keys with specific pieces of music. For instance, I associate A major with a cluster of celebrated compositions whose expressive content I would describe as somehow suggestive of innocence. In addition to the Dvorak Sextet and Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and A Major Rondo for piano duet, Mozart wrote a great many such pieces, most famously the the A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488, and the Clarinet Quintet. D minor, by contrast, is widely thought to be a “demonic” key, threatening and unstable, whereas G major strikes most musicians as warm, friendly, and down to earth. (I once told Nancy LaMott that she was “a real G-major kind of girl,” and I didn’t have to explain to her what I meant.)

All this, of course, begs my reader’s question: are there intrinsic, non-arbitrary reasons why so many composers have tended to choose specific keys in which to make certain kinds of music? Donald Tovey, the great English musicologist, believed that all such key-related associations had to do with the relative “distance” of a given key from C major. (The larger the number of sharps or flats in the key signature, the greater the distance, and the farther the key is removed from the fundamental stability and repose of C major, the “home key” of Western music.) In addition, most musical instruments have perceptibly different tonal qualities when played in particular keys or key families.

Alas, none of this really explains what makes A major sound innocent, so in an attempt to shed more light on the matter, I looked up “key” in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and found this paragraph:

Keys are often said to possess characteristics associated with various extra-musical emotional states. While there has never been a consensus on these associations, the material basis for these attributions was at one time quite real: because of inequalities in actual temperament, each mode acquired a unique intonation and thus its own distinctive “tone,” and the sense that each mode had its own musical characteristics was strong enough to persist even in circumstances in which equal temperament was abstractly assumed. Though highly specific with respect to different repertories and listeners, these expressive qualties fall into two basic categories, which conform to the basic difference–often asserted as an opposition–between major and minor: major is heard to be brighter and more cheerful than minor, which in comparison is darker and sadder.

You have to know quite a bit about music to make sense of the middle part of this “explanation,” but it’s worth noting that according to the author, the “expressive qualities” of given keys are often “highly specific” with respect to individual listeners. Since I experience the expressive qualities of keys as something like a cross between a color and an emotion, “hating” the key of E minor would be like hating, say, dark blue-green, a notion that strikes me as alien but not altogether absurd (one might well speak of “hating” fear, just as you might hate the taste of cauliflower). In any case, other musicians have had prejudices similar to that of Billy Joel: Sviatoslav Richter, the great Russian pianist, mentioned more than once in his diary that he disliked the key of F minor.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I had perfect pitch when I was a working musician, but that I lost it when I stopped playing an instrument regularly and fell out of touch with the physical materials of music-making. I still have perfect relative pitch, but my mental key center has sagged a half-step. Ask me to sing an A and I’ll sing an A-flat (unless I stop to think about it, in which case I’ll remember to transpose the note I hear in my head up a half-step to compensate). Nevertheless, the Dvorak String Sextet still sounds innocent to me.

I sometimes wonder whether lay listeners who lack this kind of perceptual sensitivity might possibly experience music in more or less the same way that an achromatically color-blind person (that is, someone who sees the world in black and white) experiences visual stimuli, at least when compared to someone like me. To be sure, I’m not a synaesthete: I don’t see specific colors when I hear specific sounds. I do, however, experience key signatures and harmonies in a way I take to be analogous to the perception of color, and because I have perfect relative pitch, this also means that I always “know where I am” when listening to a piece of tonal music.

Let me try to explain myself a bit more impressionistically, though I don’t know whether it’ll help. When I listen to a piece of tonal music, be it a symphonic movement or a three-minute song, I feel as though I’m listening to a short story or novel being read aloud rather than looking at a painting. On the other hand, I experience this musical “story” as a kind of perceptual space through which I move at a rate of speed determined by the composer, in rather the same way that one might envision the “world” of a novel in pictorial terms. And though this space is abstract–I don’t “see” anything when I listen–I’m definitely in a “place” where significant events are unfolding in a meaningful order, even though their meaning cannot be expressed in words or represented by colors and shapes.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? No? Well, I’ll try one last comparison: if you’ve ever seen a plotless ballet by George Balanchine, that will give you a very rough idea of what I’m experiencing when I listen to music.

UPDATE: Sarah writes to remind me of those wonderful lines from Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”: “There’s no love song finer/But how strange the change from major to minor/Ev’ry time we say goodbye.” (Here’s the best recording of that perfect song.) She also passes on this great one-liner:

My favorite quote about keys was attributed to the klezmer clarinetist Sid Beckerman, though he probably stole it from someone else: “D minor: it’s not just a key, it’s a living!”

That’s a musician’s joke.