Archives for 2004

A reader writes:

Could you please name five jazz CDs the beginning listener should own?

Another reader writes:

I have loved watching dance over the years, but have almost no idea of what goes where and why. Could you please recommend four or five books that might give me a formal and historical introduction to the art?

I love e-mail like this, and I never get tired of answering it.

To Reader No. 1, here are five CDs containing music that I listen to often, all of it jazz but otherwise extremely varied in style:

– The Essential Louis Armstrong (Sony). A brand-new two-CD set by the greatest of all jazz musicians, not perfectly chosen but full of good things and easy to find.

– Duke Ellington, Masterpieces 1926-1949 (Proper). An unusually low-priced four-CD imported box set that contains most of Ellington’s best pre-LP recordings.

– Ken Burns Jazz Collection: The Definitive Charlie Parker (Sony). An exceptionally good single-disc introduction to bebop’s key figure.

– Miles Davis, Kind of Blue (Sony). The most popular and influential jazz album of the Fifties.

– Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life (ECM). One of the earliest and most successful attempts to “fuse” jazz and rock. It still sounds fresh.

If you don’t like any of these recordings, you probably won’t like jazz.

Reader No. 2 should read these books, in this order:

– Robert Greskovic, Ballet 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving the Ballet (Hyperion). The best introductory book about ballet ever written, by the much-admired dance critic of The Wall Street Journal.

– Nancy Reynolds and Malcolm McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (Yale). A comprehensive, well-written, impeccably reliable history of ballet and modern dance.

– Edwin Denby, Dance Writings and Poetry (Yale). The only available collection of writings by the most important dance critic of the century.

– Writing in the Dark, Dancing in The New Yorker: An Arlene Croce Reader (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). A superbly edited one-volume collection of reviews by the outstanding dance critic of the postwar era.

And, if I do say so myself:

– Terry Teachout, All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine (Harcourt). A short book about the greatest of all choreographers, written specifically for those who have either just discovered Balanchine’s ballets or are eager to do so. It’s out in November.

Speaking of All in the Dances, I just wrote and e-mailed to Harcourt, my publisher, a draft of the “flap copy,” publisher-speak for the description of the book and its author that will appear on the dust jacket. Here’s what I wrote:

Martha Graham said that watching George Balanchine choreograph a ballet was like “watching light pass through a prism. The music passes through him, and in the same natural yet marvelous way that a prism refracts light, he refracts music into dance.” Twenty years after his death, the ruthless, enigmatic founder of New York City Ballet still dominates the world of dance. He worked with Serge Diaghilev–and Sam Goldwyn. He made ballets to the music of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky–and to “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” A Russian

From the New York Times:

After Mr. Bush’s Davenport speech, his motorcade zoomed toward the nearby town of Bettendorf, where it stopped at a small farmers’ market. The president hopped out of his limousine, strode over to Ken Thomsen’s corn stand and bought some half-dozen ears with cash from his pocket. Then he peeled back one of the husks and bit into a raw ear….

Less than 24 hours later, the roadshow was in Ohio as the talk show host encouraged his listeners to speak up with queries for “Ask President Bush.”

“Go ahead, yell it out,” the president said. “If I don’t like the question, I’ll reinvent it.”

“Journalist Murray Sayle reputedly said there were only three kinds of pieces: 1) ‘We name the guilty man’; 2) ‘Arrow points to defective part’; and 3) ‘Everything you knew about X is wrong.'”

Mickey Kaus, Kausfiles (Aug. 9, 2004)

Are bloggers legally responsible for the postings that appear in their comments sections? So far as I know, this question has yet to go to court, but I won’t be at all surprised if it ends up there sooner rather than later, and when it does, you’ll feel the earth move.

I’ve said it before, but I want to say it again, this time with a slightly different spin: if you blog, educate yourself about libel law. Blogging is no longer a hobby for wonks. It’s a full-fledged form of electronic journalism. We’ve made the big time, much faster than most of us ever expected…and that’s when the lawyers come calling.

I hope blogging will always remain spontaneous and unpredictable. But it’s perfectly possible to be spontaneous and unpredictable without making yourself vulnerable to a libel suit by a litigious jerk with money to burn. Believe me, you don’t want to go down in history as a test case.

That’s my word to the wise for the day. I now resume radio silence.

I have what in Vicwardian times was quaintly known as “a weak chest,” meaning not that my figure is less than Greek (though it is, it is!) but that respiratory ailments are harder on me than on most people. When I get a cold, it has a way of sticking around, and it didn’t help that I hit the road for Massachusetts and Washington a few days after coming down with my most recent one. As a result, it didn’t go away, and soon I was laid low again. So I did something I normally find almost impossible to do: I took last Wednesday off. I didn’t write, didn’t blog, didn’t set foot out of my apartment, not even to go downstairs and pick up the mail. Surrounded by the temptation to work, I succeeded in putting it behind me for a whole day, and the better part of two more besides.

What do you do when you’re too sick to go out but not sick enough to sleep around the clock? Me, I like to reread familiar biographies, and this time around I opted for Peter Heyworth’s Otto Klemperer, His Life and Times: 1933-1973, the second volume of one of the few really first-rate biographies of an orchestral conductor. I’m sure it won’t strike most of you as promising sickroom fare, but Klemperer’s life was unusually interesting. In addition to being a great conductor (as this 1955 recording of Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony makes surpassingly clear), he was a full-blown manic depressive who converted from Judaism to Catholicism and back again, which makes for quite a tale. On top of all that, Klemperer is also the answer to one of the all-time great trivia questions, for his son Werner grew up to become an actor who carved his name into the tablets of history by playing the part of Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes. A refugee from Nazism who had a well-developed sense of irony, Otto lived long enough to see Hogan’s Heroes and find it amusing.

Rereading Heyworth’s book, I ran across this wonderful letter sent to Klemperer by Arnold Schoenberg, who may well have been the most arrogant person who ever lived. “After Klemperer had failed to accept an invitation to visit him,” Heyworth writes, “Schoenberg wrote a letter of rebuke.” Here it is:

I find it inappropriate that the extent or our meetrings should be determined by you…Anyone should consider it a pleasure as well as an honour if I enjoy seeing him often…Do not suppose that I am not aware of the gratitude I owe you for your many successful efforts concerning my material affairs. I am very conscious of that, do not and shall not forget it, and will seize every available opportunity to express my thanks practically. But my sense of order tells me..that every Kulturmensch [that is, “civilized person”] owes me tribute for my cultural achievements.

Isn’t that a hoot?

When I feel really lousy, so much so that I’m not even up to the challenge of letting my eyes glide passively over the pages of a thrice-read book, I stick to movies. Last Wednesday night, for instance, I watched Howard Hawks’ Red River, which I know well and love, and Only Angels Have Wings, which I’d never seen. Both of them hit the spot. I suspect there’s something about Hawks’ combination of exquisite cinematic craft and charmingly adolescent pseudo-stoicism that appeals strongly to a middle-aged man with a runny nose.

My day of rest was blissful, and it put me back on the slow road to recovery. But I knew well–too well–that so long as I stayed at home, my obsessive attitude toward work would sooner or later trip me up. Instead, I decided to do something even smarter and get out of town. I’d had such a good time on my first trip to Cold Spring that I figured I might as well do it again, so I called the Hudson House Inn and made a reservation. As soon as I sign off on this week’s Wall Street Journal theater column, I’ll be catching the next train north from Grand Central Station, and I won’t be back until Thursday afternoon. A two-day break may not sound like much to you, but it’s a big deal to me, so wish me luck at relaxing.

And so…goodbye. I have a rendezvous with a park bench by the Hudson River. See you around.

Here’s some of what I picked up in the course of the past week’s Web surfing:

– I’m a Stephen Sondheim fan, but not a buff or cultist (there’s a difference). Something Old, Nothing New is very funny on the latter:

The term “Sondheim-Firster” was a term I invented to describe the sort of person who likes Stephen Sondheim but doesn’t really like musicals. Some of the qualifications for Sondheim-Firster status were:

– Loves SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE and PASSION above all other musicals. Lukewarm about COMPANY and MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG. Thinks INTO THE WOODS is kind of a sellout. Hasn’t seen A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM….

– Approvingly calls any Sondheim song “dissonant,” whether it is or not….

– Ends a discussion of any Sondheim musical with the phrase “audiences weren’t ready for it.”…

– Evaluates *any* pre-1970 musical, including Sondheim’s, by saying that it has “hints of what was to come later.”

– Kind of bored by FOLLIES — too many show tunes in it — but knows it must be good because it makes middle-aged people uncomfortable.

I know the type.

– Says
…something slant:

I am always suspicious of writers who are able to compose finely honed reflections on their first days somewhere new and far away — in elaborate travelogs or journals or carefully crafted daybooks. Not that I’m a great stickler for accuracy, but the minute accounts of the strange, the fabulous, the new so often smack of disingenuous forms of writerly wish fulfillment. If there was any truth in their descriptions, their journals would more likely read:

Day 1 — Tired.

Day 2 — Still tired.

Day 3 — Overwhelmed.

Or is that just me?

Nope.

– Alex took thoughtful note of my posting on the orange alert:

Terry Teachout asks some heavy questions about the point or pointlessness of writing about art in a dangerous time, and answers them movingly. What would I do if only a day remained? It doesn’t do my mood much good to contemplate such questions, but at some point or another I would reach for Brahms’ Intermezzos Opus 117, and in particular the first, which since age seventeen or so has been the music closest to my heart. Some years ago Radu Lupu made an irreplaceable recording of Brahms’ late piano music. It offers something more than beauty — it gives sympathy, compassion, companionship. Other than that, I’d want to get out of the house and leave art behind. When, on September 11, I left the building from which I’d watched the terror unfold and joined the endless crowd of people walking up Seventh Avenue, I felt one of the most powerful emotions of my life, which was the feeling of belonging to a mass. Strange how seldom our so-called mass culture provides such a feeling. Even the rowdiest entertainments return us to the suburbs of solitude, our disconnectedness rushing back in.

– Similarly thoughtful reflections on TV talk from Shades of Gray (Umbrae Canarum):

What are we to expect from timed, limited, and narrow discussions on the television? Can we expect a serious, and deep, dialogue on any issue that will serendipitously end when a commercial break is required? Or is it more like what one anticipates in a WWE match – a choreographed conflict, with its ups-and-downs, its upsets and sure-things, always completed just in time for this message from “Old Spice”?

Perhaps it is no big thing. And yet, these are the types of shows that are (supposedly) “smart” television. Get away from O’Reilly – think of any other roundtable style program. If it does not degenerate into a shouting match, filled with the quick soundbite tidbits, the sheer lack of time prevents anything more than a superficial consideration of the ideas on the table. Can deep thinking, can true understanding, come from this sort of thing?…

Is there an avenue for the type of conversation that truly is enlightening? I don’t know. Especially now, it seems often more the result of dumb luck (or divine providence, depending on your view) that a discussion can come about among the learned, concerned for the good, the true, the beautiful. In previous centuries, where literacy was lacking for many, perhaps these types of dialogues came about more easily, since the number actually able to discuss in an educated way was smaller. Now, we are almost all to a person half-educated, trying to speak the same way, or have chattering pundits speak for us.

But therein lies the problem. What appears to be the avenue for true intellectual discussion seems destroyed by increased literacy and education. There is no way to go back to before. Indeed, I doubt few if any of us would want to go back to such a time. So what now? Perhaps, as time goes on, those who are in love with the Intellect (as Barzun would define it) will find ways. What those ways would be, my imagination is lacking.

One word: radio. It’s not perfect, but in the past couple of years I’ve taken part in a number of radio interviews and conversations that were both pleasurable and stimulating. Especially in this new age of streaming audio, I have a good feeling about the future of radio as a creative medium.

– Thanks to Gnostical Turpitude, I learned that the Guardian ran an interesting profile of Paul Fussell, one that confirmed my longstanding impression of him as a person whom I’d rather read than meet (his vanity is forever peeping through). Nevertheless, Fussell tossed off any number of observant remarks to his interlocutor, as when he observed that H.L. Mencken, once his favorite satirist, was “deficient in the tragic sense.” Into those five words are packed much of what it took me a whole book
to explain.

– Caroline, or Change, which I loathed and panned (much to its dyspeptic author’s displeasure), is closing on Broadway after an unexpectedly short run. One of the show’s money men explains why:

Rocco Landesman, the president of Jujamcyn Theaters and a producer of “Caroline,” said the show’s advance sales took a precipitous drop at the end of August.

“The week of the convention would be absolutely disastrous for us to keep open,” he said. “The Republicans are going to be occupied with the convention, and anyone who’s not a Republican is going to be out of town.”

Ah, yes, the celebrated Mr. Anyone, first cousin to Ms. Everyone I Know. In fact, a recent poll indicated that only 10% of New Yorkers plan to be out of town during the Republican convention. To Mr. Landesman, the rest of us peasants are presumably chopped liver–which may help to explain why Caroline, or Change is closing.

– Finally, Lileks pays a visit to Starbucks:

I was behind a fellow who had ten years on me; he was schooled in the old ways of joe. He placed his order thus:

“A cup of coffee, black.”

“Room for cream?”

Pause.

“No.”

I was next. What would I like?

“I’d like a medium coffee,” I said, since I’ll be gol-durned if I ever say “venti” to these people. I’ll give them Beijing for Peking, Hindu for Hindoo, but medium will be Medium until the day I die. “Black.”

“Room for cream?”

Kids today. They don’t know. They’ve lost the lingo. When you’ve established that the nature of your coffee is BLACK, cream no longer enters into the picture. Ever. But you could walk up and say “Blorg chulavista spaz mocha” and she’d ask “Room for cream?” It’s the script. Hidden cameras record her every word. They beat her with burlap sacks stuffed with beans if she doesn’t say the words.

I’m perfectly willing to admit (albeit through clenched teeth) that the self-conscious avoidance of affectation is itself an affectation. In any case, I’ve never been much of a coffee drinker, and you’re not likely to see me stroll into a Starbucks save for the purpose of ordering a mocha frappucino, a drink the mere uttering of whose name makes me cringe with embarrassment. Nevertheless, I know the Old Ways of Joe from black-and-white movies, and if you should ever hear me use Italian to specify the size of a drink in any country other than Italy, you’ll know the pod people have paid me a visit.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Dark Streets and Vast Horizons: The American Vision of Anthony Mann” opens Wednesday at the Walter Reade Theater and runs through Aug. 29. If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool film buff, that’s all I’ll need to tell you (in fact, you’ll already know about it). If not, here’s part of what the Film Society’s Web site has to say about Mann:

Anthony Mann, born Emil Anton Bundesmann, began his career in show business on the New York stage, first as a child actor, then as a production manager, and finally as a director. He was brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, and he shot many of the screen tests for Gone with the Wind and Rebecca. He left Selznick in the mid-40s and began his movie-directing career making a series of visually distinctive B pictures, each one more inventive than the next. Of his film noirs of the late 40s, most of them made with the great cameraman John Alton, Manny Farber wrote: “The films of this tin-can de Sade have a Germanic rigor, a caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body.” You can lose yourself in the velvety shadows of those films, and in their beautifully, almost geometrically precise action. Then, in the early 50s, Mann went outdoors with James Stewart and quietly altered the Western genre. Until they quarrelled during the production of Night Passage in 1957, Mann and Stewart made eight marvelous films together, the last seven in a row. The best of them introduced a new frankness to American cinema, thanks to the boldness of Stewart’s often dangerously neurotic characterizations, and to the almost supernatural acuity of Mann’s eye for the great outdoors….

To which I’d add only that it was Mann, not Alfred Hitchcock, who first put Jimmy Stewart in touch with the dark side of the force, making it possible for him to draw on the near-paralyzing fear he had known as a pilot in World War II and thereby adding a dangerous, disturbing edge to his already accomplished acting. The Stewart you see in Winchester ’73 (and, to a lesser extent, in the last reel of Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life) is the Stewart of whom Hitchcock would later make such fruitful use in Vertigo.

Mann’s Westerns are seen quite regularly on cable TV, but not such earlier exercises in film noir at its hardest and toughest as Raw Deal, which have to be sought out on DVD, usually in blurred, flimsy prints. In any case, you have no idea what you’ve been missing if you’ve never seen a classic Western in a theater. Now that the Film Society of Lincoln Center is finally screening all of Mann’s major work, I plan to go as often as my schedule permits. I’ve never seen any of these films on a large screen, nor have I ever seen a decent print of any of Mann’s pre-Stewart films. I can’t wait.

Highlights:

– The Naked Spur (1955, with Stewart and Robert Ryan), Aug. 11 and 13

– Bend of the River (1952, with Stewart), Aug. 11 and 12

– The Man from Laramie (1955, with Stewart), Aug. 12, 14, and 16

– Winchester ’73 (1950, with Stewart and Dan Duryea), Aug. 14

– T-Men (1947, with Dennis O’Keefe), Aug. 21 and 24

– Raw Deal (1948, with O’Keefe and Raymond Burr), Aug. 22 and 24

– Man of the West (1959, with Gary Cooper), Aug. 27 and 29

– Men in War (1957, with Ryan), Aug. 27

For more information, go here.