Archives for January 18, 2005

I recently noticed in our referral log that somebody had been sent to “About Last Night” as a result of searching Google for “terry + teachout + gay.” Curious as to what else this anonymous investigator succeeded in turning up, I clicked through to the search results and saw…well, not much. Outside of my review of Mystic River (in which I mentioned Marcia Gay Harden) and a passing reference to Cole Porter’s The Gay Divorce, I found only coincidental juxtapositions of those three words that happened to pop up on the same URL. If someone out there in cyberspace was longing for the lowdown on my private life, I fear the party in question came up empty-handed.

I can’t help but wonder what prompted this mysterious electronic inquiry. Might it have been an uncomfortable reader who, puzzled by my consistent failure to conform to his firmly settled politico-aesthetic preconceptions, longed to stuff me into a more reassuring pigeonhole? Or was he merely looking to add an item or two to a file somewhere or other? In either case, my suggestion is simple: ask Our Girl. She knows all my secrets. (So do the FBI and the White House, but they’re not telling.)

Alas, anyone who knows me more than casually would be likely to dissolve into helpless giggles if asked such a question. My sexual preferences are laughably self-evident, not to mention single-minded, though I doubt you could figure them out by administering a cultural questionnaire via e-mail. I mean, what kind of weirdo likes Rio Bravo and Pacific Overtures? Or Mark Morris and the Louvin Brothers? (Well, Mark does, but then he’s really weird.)

The point being, of course, that it simply doesn’t matter, nor should it (unless you’re going out on a date with me, in which case it’s highly relevant). I don’t put all of myself on this blog, or into my published writings, but the part I exhibit in public is absolutely, unequivocally the real right thing. I am, in short, what I seem to be, and if you don’t think it adds up, let that be a lesson to you: the only way to stuff a human being into a pigeonhole is to cut off pieces until he fits.

UPDATE: I came back from lunch to find a new search in the referral log: “terry + teachout + claims + he + isn’t + gay.” Oh, puh-leeze.

Overheard:

HE: I want somebody to love me.

SHE: I want somebody to pay me.

On Saturday morning I sat down at my desk and started writing my Louis Armstrong biography. By mid-afternoon I’d finished drafting the 850-word preface. I think it’s good, and so did several friends to whom I sent the paragraph I liked best. Then I broke down the main events and transition points of Armstrong’s life story into an eight-chapter outline, using fragments from Armstrong’s own writings for chapter titles (just as I did with The Skeptic).

Feeling that I’d done enough for one day, I shut up my iBook and took a cab to the opening of the Jane Freilicher retrospective currently on view at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. I was joined by a friend who knows his way around the art world, and when we arrived he said to me, “Would you like to meet Jane?” She’s one of my favorite painters–one of her prints is in the Teachout Museum–so naturally I said yes. My friend took me up to Freilicher and made the introduction, and she shook my hand and said, “Oh, yes, I know who you are–I really liked your Balanchine book.” Had there been an open window handy, I would have jumped out of it and floated all the way down to Park Avenue.

Instead, I descended to the street via conventional means, had fondue with friends at La Bonne Soupe, then strolled over to Zankel Hall, the small auditorium beneath Carnegie Hall, where Chris Thile, the stupefyingly virtuosic mandolin player of Nickel Creek, was giving a duet recital in the company of Edgar Meyer, the best bass player of any kind in the known universe. The music
they played together was by turns complex, direct, funky, pensive, and ecstatic, and the two of them were in such touchingly high spirits that I was forcibly reminded of why it is that we speak of playing music.

After the second number, Chris looked at the audience, his mouth a perfect O of bliss, and shouted, “Carnegie…freaking…Hall!” The crowd exploded in laughter and cheers.

I went straight home from there but couldn’t sleep for sheer happiness, so I stayed up and wrote until two in the morning. It was an amazing day, but in a way the most amazing thing about it was that it wasn’t an especially unusual day. I have days like that all the time–maybe not quite that showstoppingly fine, but often pretty damn close.

How lucky am I? You don’t have to tell me. I soooo know.

– Mr. Alicublog goes to the movies:

Also revisited Kubrick’s Lolita. Like Wilder in Kiss Me, Stupid, Kubrick was doggedly exploring the terrain of 60s sex comedy; unlike Wilder, he has no skill at sex comedy of any sort — the best male sex-comedians dance at the edge of misogyny, whereas Kubrick had long since progressed from misogyny to misanthropy. I can see why he was attracted to Humbert’s obsession, but having to deal with the female half of the equation appears to have baffled him: The moments of sympathy for Charlotte Haze seem tacked on like guilty afterthoughts and Sue Lyon is practically exterminated as Lolita — only her body and brash tone survive….

Yes, totally. (I don’t like Stanley Kubrick at all, by the way. I, too, watched Lolita on cable the other night, but only to wallow in James Mason’s dark-brown, Yorkshire-tinged accent. I can’t think of a Hollywood voice I like better, male or female.)

– The ever-satisfying Ms. Household Opera goes to the annual Modern Language Association convention and breathes a sigh of relief at having resumed her civilian status:

But well before the end of it, I was thanking multiple deities that I will never again have to write in the machete mode of criticism. By this I mean the kind of literature scholarship that frames all its main points as a demolition of everyone else’s main points, like mowing down those around you by swinging a machete around. In graduate school it didn’t take me long to tire of academic writing in which the argument was preceded by hatchet-jobs on the prior work of Professors X, Y, and Z; I hated writing like that even more. Hearing it again from the lips of senior scholars, some of whom posed their entire talks as point-by-point refutations of someone else’s article, reminded me of everything that put me off the idea of writing the sorts of things one gets tenure for. At one point, I had the odd feeling that I was watching a large group of people standing on a tiny patch of ground, elbowing and jostling each other for more space, all trying to outshout each other.

No wonder I so often used to feel like no matter how hard I worked, I could never be good enough. Blargh. I don’t miss it one little bit….

Blargh. Is that better or worse than arrgh?

– Comes now The Little Professor, that mysterious but nonetheless self-evidently cool non-civilian Victorianist, with a link to an almanac-worthy remark by Colin Burrow, followed by reflections thereon. The quote:

“Shakespeare may or may not have been Catholic, but generally if a document that sounds too good to be true is found exactly where you’d hope to find it and then goes missing in mysterious circumstances it is indeed too good to be true.”

Sad but true, as any halfway decent biographer (or journalist! or journalist!) can tell you.

– An unknown visitor to the new MoMA recently damaged Anne Truitt’s “Catawba,” which is no longer on display. Tyler has the scoop, plus links. (Scroll up and down for more.)

– Mr. Decline and Fall, an American living in Iraq, keeps his ears open:

What do they listen to? Let’s just say that there’s very little sense of “cool” or “trendy” in their listening habits. One can’t expect people who have spent their lives living under Saddam’s thumb to have any real sense of hipster do’s and don’t’s, but even those who have lived in America for a while and have come back here to work as linguists can almost be relied upon to be fans of Celine Dion. It’s actually gotten to the point where as soon as a discussion of music begins, I say to the nearest Arab, “You like Celine Dion, don’t you?” They always reply in the affirmative.

On some level this completely un-self-conscious appreciation of melody and the human voice is refreshing in a world where you are sometimes identified by your music preference. When someone says they like Billy Ray Cyrus or DMX or Franz Ferdinand or Marilyn Manson, we assume that tells us something about them. Unaware of the pitfalls of music-as-identity, these folks just listen to what they enjoy. On the other hand, I can’t shake the thought that Western Music consists in their eyes of nothing but insipid crap….

Yesterday I was getting an Arabic lesson from a local national friend when he looked across my desk and saw the new Nirvana box set. I explained, through words and gestures, about Nirvana’s music and Kurt Cobain’s untimely demise and concluded very quickly that he would not be able to appreciate what an earth-shattering event “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was, so I showed him my iPod. I dialed up Ella Fitgerald singing “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” but he didn’t like the fact that he couldn’t understand the words. So I let him listed to Edith Piaf singing “La Vie en Rose” with the thought that if neither of us knew what was going on lyrically we’d be on the same page. No dice: “Too old,” he said.

Then I decided to try an instrumental selection: one of J.S. Bach’s Violin Concertos, played by Hilary Hahn. He had never heard anything like it before. For a moment I pondered the stark implications of a culture that had heard Yanni but not Mozart, Celine Dion but not Ella Fitgerald, Country but not Blues. “This is a much bigger clash of cultures than I had ever imagined,” I heard myself say. But the look on his face as he struggled to turn the volume up on that exquisite music made it all better….

I sure hope somebody out there tells Hilary Hahn about this posting. (You may need to scroll down a bit to find it, by the way.)

– Speaking of great moments in Western culture, Mr. From the Floor recently paid a visit to the “Mona Lisa”:

The point of seeing the piece, for almost all visitors, is to say that they have seen it. Tourists don’t really go to the Louvre to look at the Mona Lisa. They go so that when they return home they can tell friends that they saw the painting.

Those of us who spend time looking at and writing about art tend to be condescending toward the masses that gather in front of da Vinci’s painting–looking, as they do, to the work to provide validation for their trip to Paris.

Unfortunately, though, many of us do the same. Reading through top ten list after top ten list this month in both the print media and around the blogosphere has made me realize that too many art writers neglect seeing exhibitions in their haste to prepare for saying that they have seen them….

Oh, yes. Yes-and-a-half.

– Lastly, Lileks reflects on some non-political aspects of the great red-blue divide:

I love some bustle. I prefer to commute to the bustle, however, not be embustled 24-7. Myriad options are nice, but I suspect that 84% of these options consist of “ethnic food, readily available,” and the other 12% are made up of museums and concerts most urban dwellers rarely have time to attend.

But at least they’re there if you want them! In any case, it’s somehow flattering to know you live in a place where someone, right now, is setting up an art installation that forces us to rethink the way we think about something. Anything. Except the historical failure of art installations to make anyone rethink about anything, ever….

Or you get exhilarated, depending on your mood and temperament, or depending on something as simple and unique as turning a corner in Manhattan during the blue hour, looking through a store window into a salon, heading up the sidewalk with the traffic streaming the other way, forty stories of lights rising up on either side, and thinking: nowhere else but here, and here I am. Having lived on the East Coast, I can see why some people love it. And I understand why I didn’t, in the end. At some point in your life you may think I’d prefer a little less public urination, if I might. The fact that some prefer the Big City strikes me as utterly unremarkable, and I’d bet that most people in Red states don’t think much about why Blue staters like to live in concentrated urban centers. Why? Because they don’t care. They know that the big cities have advantages the rural areas lack, but they’re not that important to them, and they don’t worry about what they’re missing. If they do, then they move….

Speaking as one who did–but continues to retain his home ties–I’d say this is exactly right.

“‘The so-called conscientiousness of the great majority of painters is nothing but perfection in the art of boring. If it were possible, these fellows would labor with equal care over the backs of their pictures.”

Eug

I just got back from the Algonquin Hotel, where Jessica Molaskey
made her Oak Room debut earlier this evening. She tore the joint up. It was the best debut I’ve seen there since Diana Krall first played the Algonquin eight years ago, and one of the strongest and most polished cabaret sets I’ve ever seen.

Molaskey is a Broadway baby (Crazy for You, Dream) who read the writing on the wall when good parts for old-fashioned musical-comedy actors started drying up in the late Nineties. Instead of cursing the looming darkness, she retrofitted herself as a cabaret singer with the help of her husband, the jazz singer-guitarist John Pizzarelli. She started off by making guest appearances on his New York gigs, and they began to collaborate in the recording studio (they were already writing excellent songs together–she has an enviable knack for witty wordplay). At first she had trouble accustoming herself to the intimate scale of cabaret, a problem she shared with most Broadway performers who’ve tried to make the switch. My guess is that she found it intimidating. But somewhere along the line she figured out how to play to a small, attentive crowd, and the payoff came tonight.

Molaskey’s soft-edged bass-flute voice would be easy on the ears even if she didn’t have such a deft way with words. In fact, she sings like the smart actor she is, making the most of a lyric without ever succumbing to the temptation to make a meal of it. Instead, all is subtlety: a wry smile here, an arched eyebrow there, just enough between-song patter to grease the audience’s wheels, and everywhere an enveloping, inviting warmth that lights up her fetching jolie-laide features and makes them shimmer. As of now, I’d say she’s got the sexy-girl-next-door market sewed up tight. Being the fine songwriter she is, it stands to reason that she really knows how to pick songs, and tonight’s set was a savvy blend of the time-tested (“Make Believe”) and the unexpected (“Stepsisters’ Lament”). Not surprisingly, she likes a good medley: I loved the way she dropped a pinch of “Big Spender” into “Hey, Look Me Over.” As for the duet version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Getting Married Today” and Jon Hendricks’ “Cloudburst” that she sang with husband John, all I can say is…wow. Octuple wow.

For the most part, Pizzarelli stuck to the role of loyal sideman, teaming up with his brother Martin on bass and the superlative Larry Goldings on piano to provide the kind of smooth, swinging, utterly assured support of which most cabaret singers can only dream in vain. A show-stopping entertainer in his own right, he scrupulously refrained from scene-stealing, and it was wonderful to see the pride on his face as he watched his wife sashay through the show without dropping a stitch.

If I sound excited, it’s because the buzz of Molaskey’s debut hasn’t yet worn off. I’m still flying. The good news is that you don’t have to take my word for it, since most of the songs she sang are on her latest CD, Make Believe. Give it a spin. If listening to Make Believe doesn’t make you want to come down to the Oak Room and behold the birth of a new cabaret star, maybe you need to get your batteries charged. Or changed.

* * *

Jessica Molaskey is at the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel through Saturday, Jan. 29. The music starts at nine o’clock, with an 11:30 show added on Fridays and Saturdays.

For more information, go here.

I was here yesterday, even if you weren’t. Keep going after you hit today’s almanac entry and you’ll find something very personal and (I hope) worth reading.