Archives for 2004

I went to six shows presented by the New York International Fringe Festival over the weekend, and they were all good, every last one of them. Alas, I can’t tell you which ones just yet, because I’ll be reviewing them in this Friday’s Wall Street Journal. But I can say that the festival runs through Sunday, and that if you live in or near New York, you’d be well advised to check out at least a few of its offerings.

The New York Times has already reviewed a number of Fringe Festival shows (their selection criteria, by the way, look to be about as random as mine), and two of their favorites will also be figuring prominently in my column on Friday, so you might want to check out their theater page and see if any of the recommendations ring your bell.

For more information on the Fringe Festival, including synopses of and photos from all 200-plus shows, go here and start browsing. I can’t promise that you’ll hit the jackpot, but I did it six times in a row, which ought to count for something.

Just because I haven’t been blogging doesn’t mean I haven’t been reading blogs. Here’s some of what I gleaned in the past couple of weeks:

– David Raksin, Jerry Goldsmith, and Elmer Bernstein, three of the most important film-music composers of the twentieth century, all died recently. I marked their passing by writing a piece that will run in The Wall Street Journal as soon as a hole opens up. In the meantime, Alex Ross posted thoughtful comments on their deaths, which can be found here, here, here, and here. I especially like this one:

“Sounds like a film score” is the put-down of choice for tonal orchestral music. “Serious” composers are supposed to suffer neglect in their lifetimes, with the gratitude of posterity their invisible reward. The my-time-will-come mindset was especially widespread in the twentieth century, with composers believing that if they invented a new sound or came up with a “big idea” they would win their place in history. The result was a great deal of superficially difficult, emotionally disposable music, whose ultimate historical value is now very much in question. By contrast, it seems certain that in a hundred years people will still be talking about Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo, Goldsmith’s Chinatown, Raksin’s Laura. They have gone down in history, because they found a way to make their music matter.

I like what I said, but I wish I’d said that, too.

– Tobi Tobias was at the Mark Morris performance on which I bailed out at intermission
because of exhaustion. In lieu of what I might have written, read what she wrote:

From the start, Morris has gone in for nonconformity when it comes to the bodies he chooses to animate his work. Instead of selecting for uniformity and conventional notions of a physical ideal, he has regularly assembled a miniature motley society of the small, the stocky, the lushly ample, the tall-and-skinny beanpole type, the delicate, the blunt, and, yes, a few whose ballet teachers may have had high hopes of placing in one of those finalists-only classical companies that go by their initials. The flat-footed and those whom the gods of turn-out have not favored have their place with Morris, as do the fresh and frank American girl and the sultry glamour girl (Betty and Veronica, if you will), the beach hero and the fellow into whose face the beach hero kicks the sand. And of course the company has always been multi-ethnic–so thoroughly so that, simply by appearing, it defies tokenism, demonstrating that there are an infinite number of ways to be Caucasian, black, Asian, or a mix thereof….

– Speaking of Mark Morris, guess who has a stalker? Me! If only I knew what she looked like….

– A reader sent me a link to a cool on-line short story which is sort of about one of my
all-time favorite actors:

That night I dream about Robert Mitchum. I’m in the middle of the street. Old Tucson or something. And he’s walking toward me obscured by this swirling sand. He’s also singing. I can make out the words to “Thunder Road.” I can see the black cowboy boots but I can’t quite make out his bohunky face. He’s maybe twenty yards away before the wind begins to die down. And then I see him. It’s Mitchum all right, and he’s still singing. I can’t move. My feet won’t obey my brain. I want to run. Because Mitchum is wearing a dress. One of those Gunsmoke Miss Kitty numbers. Ostrich plumes and fishnets. Ultima II Sexxxy Red lipstick on his thick lips. He stops in front of me. A spaghetti western moment. And then he says, “Pucker up.”…

– Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt on Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, in TLS:

Sometimes it seems as though I can never get away from him: “Tell me, you are a Canadian pianist, known as a Bach specialist, and winner of the international piano competition held in his memory

A serious amateur painter I know sent me this stream-of-consciousness paragraph describing her decision to embark on a new canvas:

God, there’s nothing on TV. I wish I could just do something fun to cheer myself up. I could just walk down to the corner and get some french fries and doughnuts. That’s what I used to do to cheer myself up…but that doesn’t work anymore, remember? Oh yeah, that’s right. Hey, I have an idea. How about painting? That’s it!! But I can’t possibly do that right now, not with my room being so messy–I don’t deserve to paint. Wait a minute, that’s not right! I do deserve to paint, whether my room is clean or not. Hmm…I know…I’ll go wash the dishes and call it even. Okay, good, I feel better having cleaned the dishes. Maybe I should just go ahead and start cleaning my room while I’m at it. No, the idea was to treat myself to something fun. Okay, I’ll do it! But can I really actually just start painting, just like that? Sure, why not? No reason. What’s stopping me? Nothing. Well…okay then…here I go!!!

I don’t mind admitting that I’ve written more than a few pieces in my lifetime that got started in more or less the same way.

Now and then it would vanish for hours from the scene,

But alas, be discovered inside a tureen.

Edward Gorey’s books constitute a micro-genre unto themselves. They don’t belong to any preexisting category, and they contain their own subgenres. One of my favorite of these subgenres is the Crashing Creature story, which to my recollection consists of two works, “The Osbick Bird” and “The Doubtful Guest” (pictures and full text here). The first of these begins:

An osbick bird flew down and sat

On Emblus Fingby’s bowler hat.

It had not done so for a whim

But meant to come and live with him.

Similarly, the antihero of “The Doubtful Guest” appears unannounced one night. It has come to stay.

When they answered the bell on that wild winter night,

There was no one expected–and no one in sight.

Then they saw something standing on top of an urn,

Whose peculiar appearance gave them quite a turn.

All at once it leapt down and ran into the hall,

Where it chose to remain with its nose to the wall.

It was seemingly deaf to whatever they said,

So at last they stopped screaming, and went off to bed.

It joined them at breakfast and presently ate

All the syrup and toast and a part of a plate.

Through the middle of the story we hear of the Guest’s habits, none of them charming (with the possible exception of “peeling the soles of its white canvas shoes”). And the ending reveals that there is no end:

It came seventeen years ago, and to this day

It has shown no intention of going away.

Which is all by way of saying that I’m feeling a bit like the Doubtful Guest around the blog these days: moody, moochy, and mute. But all this is about to change. More blogging imminently. Doubtless.

UPDATE: I know what you’re wondering: any visuals on the Osbick Bird? The best pic I can find, (darkly) hilariously, is on a coffee mug that you can purchase for a measly $7 from the Funeral Consumers Alliance (scroll down). They also offer a Gashlycrumb Tinies mug and a Gorey refrigerator magnet reading “Matters of Life and Death Inside.” Can’t say they don’t have a sense of humor.

Current conditions: I saw two plays on Monday, with another two set for Tuesday and Saturday, plus a film screening and a nightclub set. In addition, I’ve got to hit four deadlines between now and Friday afternoon.

The forecast: minimal blogging until Friday.

The good news: Our Girl is back in Chicago, and has stories to tell. I’m hoping that she’ll return to the blog in force in the next day or two.

Later.

“Obvious symmetry usually closes the episode before it begins.”

Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography

Here’s what I blogged a year and eight days ago:

A funny thing happened on the way to the theater yesterday afternoon. I was sitting at my desk, sending one last e-mail before I departed for a Fringe Festival performance of a musical about Robert Blake, when the lights quivered, dimmed, and died. Figuring the power on my Upper West Side block had gone out, I put my shoes on, walked downstairs in the dark, caught a cab…and realized by the time we’d gone 20 blocks that it wasn’t just my neighborhood. Assuming that there wouldn’t be any shows to see that day, I told the cabby to turn around.

Eighteen hours later, here I am, very sweaty and insufficiently slept but otherwise none the worse for wear. The power’s back on in my neighborhood, some of the restaurants are open, and I’m in the process of figuring out what to do next….

I never did get around to seeing that musical about Robert Blake. Instead, I took refuge in a neighbor’s apartment, not caring to be alone, and spent the night listening to a wind-up radio and sweating. Had it not been so hot, it would have been fun. Like most New Yorkers trapped in the blackout of 2003, I’d briefly feared that 9/11 was repeating itself, and once I knew it wasn’t, I was so relieved that nothing else mattered.

A year later, I find myself doing much the same thing, minus the flashlights and candles. I’m sitting at the same desk, clicking away at my iBook and putting into order my first impressions of the five plays I just finished seeing at the New York International Fringe Festival. I’ll be reviewing those plays, and three others, in this Friday’s Wall Street Journal, so I mustn’t jump the gun, but I can say that I got quite a bit of pleasure out of my weekend of nonstop playgoing. Unlike last year, the weather in Manhattan has been intermittently temperate, though I did come close to smothering once or twice, few places in the world being less pleasant than a black-box theater without air conditioning on a humid August day. I got caught in a cloudburst on Saturday afternoon–but I don’t mind getting wet. I had to trudge up six flights of steep, slippery stairs to see one show–but I didn’t fall, and in any case I needed the exercise. Most of the seats in which I sat were variously uncomfortable–but there’s nothing like a good show to make you forget a bad seat.

Truth to tell, I love the Fringe Festival, even when it’s not so good. Seeing live actors in a small theater performing a new play by a writer about whom you know nothing can be one of the most exhilarating experiences imaginable. It can also be unutterably tedious, but my batting average so far has been excellent. Either I’m just lucky, or I’m starting to get the hang of picking Fringe shows (I endured a couple of stinkers last year).

I’ve been doing more than perching myself on folding chairs in black-box theaters. Last night, for instance, I went to the Jazz Standard, my favorite New York nightclub, to hear Gene Bertoncini and Michael Moore, who for many years were the best working guitar-bass duo in jazz. Back in the Eighties, they were all but joined at the hip. You could hear them most Sundays at a now-defunct, much-lamented Italian restaurant called Zinno, and they cut a number of first-rate CDs as well. Alas, Bertoncini and Moore called it quits in 1989–Whitney Balliett wrote a lovely New Yorker essay about their decision to part–and though the separation was perfectly friendly, it’s been years since they last played together in a New York club.

Not surprisingly, the Jazz Standard was crawling with musicians all weekend long, it being that kind of place, comfortable and welcoming. (Among those present on Sunday were Peter Washington, Bill Charlap‘s indispensable bassist, and Luciana Souza, who needs no introduction to regular readers of “About Last Night.”) Musicians usually play especially well for their peers, and Bertoncini and Moore obliged with a vengeance, kicking off the first set with a medium-tempo version of Neal Hefti’s “Li’l Darlin'” that swung like the whole Count Basie band rolled into two.

After the set was over, I climbed the stairs to the street and walked a few blocks before hailing a cab, accompanied by two musician friends in no more of a hurry to get home than I was. We headed up Fifth Avenue, refreshed by the unexpectedly cool night air, and gazed with delight at the Empire State Building, whose upper stories were brilliantly lit in green and white in honor of the independence of Pakistan, those being the colors of the Pakistani flag. As we strolled past the shuttered storefronts, looking for all the world like the three happy sailors of On the Town, I remembered a conversation I’d had earlier in the day with another friend. We’d seen a Fringe matinee, then taken high tea at Tea and Sympathy and done some window shopping in Greenwich Village.

“This is absolutely the only place to live,” I told her. “Nowhere else.”

“Oh, I guess it’s all right to visit other places,” she replied. “And you could live somewhere else for six months, if you had to. Or maybe even a year.”

“But only if you don’t give up your lease,” I said firmly.

We giggled, knowing perfectly well that neither one of us had the slightest intention of going anywhere else for more than a week or two.

Were we being heedless? As I thought of our exchange, a familiar stanza that acquired ominous new overtones not so long ago popped unbidden into my head:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

But I shook it off, knowing that I was neither unhappy nor afraid of the cool, clear night. Instead, I was glad to be exactly where I was, living my life instead of waiting for it to begin. I still am. So long as the lights stay on and the music keeps playing, this–right here, right now–is home.

“You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”

P.G. Wodehouse, “Jeeves Takes Charge”