Archives for January 2005

Remember me? I’m the one who was so absurdly happy last Friday afternoon, and I still am. It helped that I didn’t have a huge amount to do over the weekend, though I managed to keep quite sufficiently busy, thank you very much.

Among other things:

– On Saturday afternoon I went to a Broadway matinee, then took the night off (yes!).

– On Sunday morning I wrote the first draft of a 2,000-word essay called “Watching Westerns in Manhattan” for American Cowboy. Bet you didn’t know I wrote for them, did you?

– On Sunday evening I had an early dinner with the Mutant, my singer-painter friend, after which we retired to the Teachout Museum, a/k/a my living room, to watch Kind Hearts and Coronets, which both of us were seeing for the first time (O.K., Cinetrix, try not to look so shocked). No sooner did the Mutant head for home than I called my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., having previously sent a what’s-new e-mail to Our Girl, whose chatty reply awaited me when I hung up….

But I’m burying the lead. Here’s my stop-press bulletin:

– I kept my hand-on-heart oath to Bass Player, broke out my hitherto unopened watercolor set, and covered one whole sheet of cool-looking paper with homemade, gaily colored hieroglyphics. (I even have a witness–I showed the results to the Mutant earlier this evening.) It was, as I’d hoped, completely absorbing fun, and though I fear I have no obvious aptitude for the making of visual art, I still can’t wait to do it again.

What next? Today I get my eyes examined, pay bills, and do a little babysitting. Tomorrow I see my trainer, write my monthly Washington Post column about the arts in New York, and go to a preview of Good Vibrations, the new Beach Boys musical. On Wednesday I write my drama column for Friday’s Wall Street Journal. Thursday is up for grabs. Come Friday I’ll be off to the nation’s capital to lunch with a blogger and watch American Ballet Theatre dance an all-Fokine program at Kennedy Center, followed by two previews back in New York and a birthday (mine).

As always, books will be read (most of them about New Orleans at the turn of the century) and CDs listened to (most of them by Louis Armstrong) in the interstices of all these occurrences.

Such are the ongoing adventures of a New York-based blogger-bon vivant. More as it happens.

“I’m a backslider as a non-believer.”

Penelope Fitzgerald (quoted in Dean Flower, “A Completely Determined Human Being,” Hudson Review, Winter 2005)

One of the ways in which e-mail is transforming our culture is that it is has become the channel by which certain kinds of bad news are increasingly likely to arrive. This morning I opened my mailbox and found a note from an old high-school friend: “I apologize for the impersonal mass e-mail but it is a little quicker….” My heart sank even before I could jump to the next paragraph, which told me that Richard Powell, the man who taught me how to play the violin nearly 40 years ago, died last night. I hadn’t heard from him for a long time, but no sooner did I see his name on the screen of my iBook than my head was full of snapshot-clear memories.

So much of life is a matter of pure coincidence (if that’s what you think it is). I happened to see a televised concert by the Russian violinist David Oistrakh one Sunday afternoon, and the warmth and passion with which he played the Brahms D Minor Sonata, a piece I’d never heard by a composer I knew only for having written a lullaby, made a fateful impression on me. Dick Powell came to Matthews Elementary School a few months later to administer a musical aptitude test to the fifth grade, and I got a perfect score. This, he informed me the following week, qualified me to play a stringed instrument. I went home and told my astonished parents that I wanted them to buy me a violin, and that was that.

Powell was a small-time jazz bassist turned small-town music teacher who ran the string program in the public schools of my home town. (He told me that he’d played in strip joints once upon a time, which seemed to me unimaginably exotic.) He thought I was talented and went out of his way to encourage me, and within a few years I was playing Bach, Vivaldi, and Saint-Saëns’ Danse macabre with the high-school orchestra. It soon became clear to both of us, though, that my musical interests extended well beyond the violin, so he was no less encouraging when I asked to borrow one of the school’s plywood basses for the summer. That was the year I taught myself jazz by plucking along with Dave Brubeck’s Jazz Goes to College in my bedroom every afternoon, and a year or two later I started playing country music and bluegrass with a band called Sour Mash. It wasn’t Bach, but that was all right by him. He had no musical prejudices, and it was in large part because of his openness that I acquired the infinite sense of musical possibility that I carry with me to this day.

I found other mentors as I grew older, but Powell was the first, and there would never be a time when he failed to say whatever encouraging words he thought I needed to hear. He watched me go off to college to major in music, looked on with amusement when I became a part-time music critic for the Kansas City Star, and cheered from the sidelines when I rolled the dice and headed for New York City. By then he’d moved away from Smalltown, U.S.A., but he kept up with my progress, and from time to time his daughter Melodie (a nice name for a musician’s child) would let me know how he was doing.

Now Melodie writes to tell me of her father’s death, and I find myself filled to overflowing with that most beautiful and transfiguring of emotions, gratitude. No one person, not even me, made me what I am, but Dick Powell ranks very high on the short list of those who did the most along the way. He taught me to read music, and reassured me that it was all right to play by ear, too. He introduced me to the vast world of classical music, but never for a moment suggested that no other musical worlds were worth exploring. I suppose I would have found my way into music on my own sooner or later, but I might well have had a lot to unlearn down the line had I not been fortunate enough to fall into the hands of so open-minded and open-hearted a teacher. He pointed me in the right direction, then gave me a push. I can’t think of a better epitaph.

Time again for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This Friday I reviewed Little Women: The Musical and the off-Broadway revival of Hurlyburly, and I seem to have cut sharply against the grain of critical wisdom as regards the former:

Sutton Foster is a gawky, gamine version of the young Judy Garland whom the Great Producer Upstairs clearly intended for a revival of Jerome Robbins’ “Peter Pan.” Until somebody down here gets the message, though, I’ll make do with “Little Women: The Musical,” the immensely likable stage adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s much-loved 1867 novel that just opened at the Virginia Theatre. Ms. Foster, lately of “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” plays Jo, the bookwormy tomboy who “reminded one of a colt,” and gets her just right. She’s not an immaculate singer–her voice is raw on top–but her spunky charm and hell-for-leather energy are impossible to resist. I didn’t even try. Ms. Foster caught my heart on a short string the second the curtain went up, and I twitched at her command all night long.

Apparently I’m one of the few people in America who has neither read “Little Women” nor seen any of the countless stage and screen versions that preceded this one. A quick riffle through the book, though, made it clear that Allan Knee has not only slashed it to ribbons but modernized the dialogue extensively, if not egregiously (the punchlines are all his). In addition, he has turned “Little Women” into a meta-narrative about the writing of “Little Women”: Jo, an aspiring author who launches her literary career by churning out swashbuckling tales for the Weekly Volcano, decides to fictionalize her own family life, and the show reaches its climax when she takes pen in hand to write the first chapter of the story we’ve just seen played out on stage. It’s a clever idea, and if the result is more a filet than a full-fledged fish, it still zips along with confidence and skill….

I also had good things to say about Hurlyburly:

It’s a grimly funny tale of cocaine and its discontents, written and set in Hollywood in the early ’80s and horrifyingly reminiscent in every particular of what I now think of as the Age of Jay McInerney.

I didn’t see Mike Nichols’ 1984 production, which had an awesome cast–William Hurt, Judith Ivey, Harvey Keitel, Cynthia Nixon, Ron Silver, Jerry Stiller and Sigourney Weaver, believe it or not–but I can’t imagine how this one, directed with surgical precision by Scott Elliott, could be bettered. Ethan Hawke, for one, is breathtakingly fine as Eddie, the drug-sodden, woman-hating casting director on whose tortured soul the California sun has set, and Halley Wegryn Gross, Catherine Kellner and Parker Posey are nicely matched as the three women who skitter across his zigzag path….

No link–you’ve got to pay to read the whole thing. Why not shell out for today’s Journal and find out while you’re at it how we cover the other arts? Or go the whole hog by clicking here. Either way, you won’t be sorry….

“‘Good, that,’ he said to himself, while her eyes rested upon him, black and impenetrable like the mental caverns where revolutionary thought should sit plotting the violent way of its dream of changes. As if anything could be changed! In this world of men nothing can be changed–neither happiness nor misery. They can only be displaced at the cost of corrupted consciences and broken lives–a futile game for arrogant philosophers and sanguinary triflers.”

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Last night I took two friends, a music critic and a jazz pianist, to watch New York City Ballet dance what George Balanchine’s admirers refer to as “the Greek program”: Apollo, Orpheus, and Agon, the three great Balanchine-Stravinsky collaborations. The pianist was seeing all three dances for the first time, and the critic had never seen any of Balanchine’s ballets. They reacted pretty much the way I’d expected, and we went our separate ways after the performance looking as though we’d all had one too many. Or maybe two.

I got up at seven-thirty this morning, knocked out the last 850 words of an essay on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and shot the piece off to my editor in Washington via e-mail (the galleys are rolling out of my fax machine as I’m typing this sentence). Then I jumped in a cab and headed crosstown to meet my friend Bass Player at Knoedler & Company, where we spent an hour looking at Milton Avery: Onrushing Waves (the show closes on Saturday, so if you haven’t seen it yet, don’t wait!). From there we went to Tibor de Nagy to see Jane Freilicher: Paintings 1954-2004, she for the first time, I for the second. By then we were booming and zooming, so instead of hitting a third gallery, we decided to grab a bite to eat, after which we talked our heads off. (Bass Player and I are so closely in sync that we don’t really need to tell each other what we’re thinking, but we do it anyway.)

At length she went downtown to pick up her bass and take a lesson, while I returned home to do…nothing. I have no more appointments today, no deadline to hit, no work of any kind that can’t wait, no show to see tonight, and nowhere in particular that I need to be until 1:45 Saturday afternoon. Limitless luxury, in other words, made all the sweeter by the fact that it’s so bitterly cold outside. What do I care? My calendar is blank, my refrigerator full. Josh White is playing on my iBook, The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, and Kind Hearts and Coronets are cued up on the DVR, and a book I’m looking forward to reading awaits me in the loft. The only thing I have to do in the next twenty-three hours is keep the solemn promise I made with hand on heart to Bass Player at lunch today: I’m going to pop open my watercolor set and put brush to paper before I go to bed tonight.

I know exactly how lucky I am today, in part because I also know how it feels to be so busy that you can’t see straight. As a matter of fact, I’ve been feeling outrageously happy for the past couple of days. Whatever troubles the future may hold in store for me are currently being held in abeyance, and instead of worrying about them, or even thinking about them, I’ve been following the advice of the man who made the ballets my friends and I saw last night. “Why are you stingy with yourselves?” Mr. B used to ask his dancers. “Why are you holding back? What are you saving for–for another time? There are no other times. There is only now. Right now.” And that’s where I’ve been all today: in the moment, and glad to be. Ecstatic, really.

I’ll see you Monday.

Nothing new from my corner today. Life insists on my active participation, besides which my modem connection has gone funky again. I’m expecting a big box of DSL sometime late next week or early the week following, but until that miraculous time I have to type with my hands suspended above the keyboard and holding my breath if I want not to disrupt the dial-up.

Should have lots to say next week, including a wrap-up of Edgar Meyer and Chris Thile at Dominican University Saturday night and possibly a report on what’s so great about The Horse’s Mouth.

I went to my framer yesterday afternoon and picked up the presidential commission for my appointment to the National Council on the Arts. It’s a splendidly old-fashioned document, about twice the size of a college diploma, printed in copperplate script on thick cream paper by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It is, of course, a fill-in-the-blank form, starting with a space on top for the current president’s name, with the blanks filled in by a calligrapher.

Here’s what it says:

To all who shall see these presents, Greeting:

Know ye, that reposing special trust and confidence in the Integrity and Ability of Terence Alan Teachout of New York, I have nominated, and, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, do appoint him as a Member of the National Council on the Arts for a term expiring September 3, 2010, and do authorize and empower him to execute and fulfill the duties of that Office according to law, and to have and to hold the said Office, with all the powers, privileges, and emoluments thereunto of right appertaining, unto him the said Terence Alan Teachout, subject to the conditions prescribed by law.

In testimony whereof, I have caused these Letters to be made Patent, and the Seal of the United States to be thereunto affixed.

Done at the city of Washington this twenty-ninth day of November in the year of our Lord two thousand four and of the Independence of the United States of America the two hundred and twenty-ninth.

It’s boldly and illegibly signed at the bottom by the autopens of Secretary of State Rice (whose signature looks like “A.C. Pfft”) and President Bush (his is a dead ringer for “Byurze”).

The part I like best is the first blank. Reposing special trust and confidence in the–what? Are “Integrity and Ability” reserved for low-level appointments like mine? And if so, what do the presidential commissions of cabinet members say? Is the Secretary of the Interior also praised for his Integrity and Ability? Or does his commission contain doubly juicy superlatives reserved for the exclusive use of Washington’s really heavy hitters?

I kind of hate to admit this (well, no, I don’t), but I’m irresistibly reminded of a passage from Michael Collins’ wonderful Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys in which he describes one of the little-known steps a male astronaut must take when putting on his pressure suit in preparation for being shot into outer space:

Then it’s time to don a triangular yellow plastic urine bag by inserting the penis into a rubber receiver built into one corner of it. There are three sizes of receivers (small, medium, large), which are always referred to in more heroic terms: extra large, immense, and unbelievable.

Perhaps the bigger dogs get the equivalent of “extra large” or “immense” on their presidential commissions–though presumably not “unbelievable.”

As for those “emoluments,” there aren’t any. Outside of my traveling expenses whenever I visit Washington on NEA business, this one’s on me, and I’ve been warned that I’ll be paying through the nose for the honor of hanging a presidential commission on my wall: I’ve already filled out enough paperwork to decimate a shady grove, and there’ll be plenty more to come before my six-year term expires. That’s all right by me. Aside from the fact that you don’t say no when the President of the United States asks you to do something for him, I consider it not merely an honor but a privilege to be able to give back something to the arts in America. Art has given special meaning to my life. Now it’s my turn.

All this notwithstanding, I figure I’m entitled to a little more than my train fare and the satisfactions of a job well done. Obviously the White House agrees, which I assume is the reason why presidential appointees are given such handsome-looking documents to hang on their walls. It went without saying that I’d put mine in a first-class frame, one identical to the ones I use in the Teachout Museum–but where to hang the damn thing? It’s too big to fit in any of the remaining empty spots (of which there are no longer very many) on the walls of my minuscule one-bedroom Upper West Side apartment, and when I considered taking down a piece of art to make room for my commission, my heart sank.

I thought and thought, and suddenly it came to me: why not the bathroom? Not only is it tastefully decorated in cornflower blue and yellow, but it’s next to the living room, thus allowing me to show off for my visitors by leaving the door discreetly ajar. But would it be disrespectful to hang a presidential commission there? Though a friend assured me that many actors keep their Oscars in the bathroom, I wasn’t satisfied. Such a gesture smacked of phony humility. (As Thomas Mann allegedly said to a fellow writer who was eating a bit too much humble pie, “You’re not great enough to be that modest.”)

Then it struck me as I was giving a new acquaintance a tour of the Teachout Museum that my bathroom also contains a small lithograph by Pierre Bonnard, Le Soleil. If it’s good enough for Bonnard, I told myself firmly, it’s good enough for a presidential commission. So I took down my Suzanne Farrell poster and hung up my latest acquisition…and you know what? It looks pretty great. Besides, its presence will also help to remind me that no amount of good fortune relieves a man of the inescapable commitments of the flesh. Even a presidential appointee has to spend a certain amount of time in the bathroom each day, just like everyone else.

No doubt I’ll move in time to a somewhat larger apartment, and when I do I’m sure I’ll find a more appropriate spot for my Official Certificate of Integrity and Ability. For now, though, I like it just fine right where it is.

UPDATE: A friend who should know writes:

I do NOT think commissions are auto penned–I am fairly certain they are not–there are not enough of them to do that, and they really are a mark of honor. But I don’t think the president’s signature is real–I think that is printed on the commissions at the beginning of each admin. But Condi’s sig is, I am almost certain, Condi’s sig.

Just so you know.

And another sharp-eyed reader points out that “A.C. Pfft” can’t possibly be Condoleezza Rice, who wasn’t confirmed until after my commission was signed: it must be Colin Powell. Now that’s what I call illegible!