Archives for January 2005

“Those who go from the bedazzlement and vertigo of Leaves of Grass to the laborious perusal of any of the pious biographies of its author always feel cheated. In the greyish, mediocre pages of those works, they hunt for the vagabond demigod revealed in the poetry and are astonished not to find him.”

Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions (courtesy of Doug Ramsey)

As far as I’m concerned, the whole poker craze has been milked way past dry and needs to go away. Love the game, love McManus, but fake celebrities playing with fake money on Bravo? No game is interesting enough to prop that up.

However, the media milking has had at least one solid-gold benefit: ushering back into print A. Alvarez’s 1983 book on the World Series of Poker, The Biggest Game in Town. Originally published as a two-part essay in The New Yorker, Alvarez’s book first came to my attention in 1992. The book had gone out of print, and I had to order the New Yorker back issues in order to read it. Sadly, these got lost somewhere between Manhattan and Chicago when I moved the following year.

How thrilled I was, then, to learn that Chronicle Books has brought back The Biggest Game in book form. They also happen to have done so, as is their wont, in great style–the new trade paper edition is lovingly and bewitchingly designed, from the stylized tumbling poker chips on the front cover to the pretty club-heart, spade-diamond patterns gracing the endpapers. It’s so nice to see a book this good get the really head-turning production it deserves.

Alvarez, best known for his literary criticism and his friendship with Sylvia Plath, ranges as widely in his interests as any writer I can think of, and writes better than most of them. In addition to poetry, fiction, and criticism, he has books on suicide, divorce, sleep, and North Sea oil rigs. His indelible portrait of the WSOP and its setting, Benny Binion’s Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas, is a historical portrait now that the casino (and the tournament) have new corporate owners. The Horseshoe will never again be as Alvarez described it: “down-home,” family-owned, “shabby, ill-lit, and crowded at all hours,” with patriarch Benny holding court in a restaurant upstairs and one of his sons always visible down on the floor, running things while chatting up the dealers and players all the while. Now that the Horseshoe’s body has been snatched by Harrah’s, Alvarez’s book has documentary as well as literary value. It also pioneered a literary sub-sub-genre that has turned out to have surprising legs. It observes a critical distance from its subject, however, that most poker narratives are helpless to maintain in the face of the game’s seductiveness. This is what makes it essential, and what makes it of interest even to readers who couldn’t care less about poker but would walk a mile for a perfect sentence.

Representative quotation: “The casinos lie out there on the baked earth like extravagant toys discarded on a beach, their signs looping, beckoning, spiraling, and fizzing recklessly, as in that moment of glory just before the batteries run down.”

Another poker book that fell out of print for several years is back in circulation: Anthony Holden’s comparatively workmanlike but compulsively readable Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player. Big Deal is sort of the competent but comparatively dull older brother to Jim McManus’s flashily virtuosic Positively Fifth Street, which steals its predecessor’s concept but buffs it to such a high gloss that nobody much remembers the original. Like McManus, Holden is a professional writer and amateur player who finagled his way into the granddaddy game and then chronicled the experience. Alvarez appears in these pages as a character, the dean of the nominally friendly Tuesday night game in London where Holden cuts his teeth before storming Las Vegas. This is a book for people who have gobbled up Alvarez and McManus and still hunger for more of the same. If not as artful as Biggest Game nor as gripping as Fifth Street, Holden’s book is a fun ramble.

Representative quotation: “This event is the only one in the poker calendar which has the pros visibly on edge, anxious about their reputations, wondering if this could at last be their year. At Table Eight, Seat One, sat the most apprehensive of the lot–a lone, pallid Briton whose life had been building towards this moment for as long as he could remember. At this moment all his long and careful months of psychological preparation flew straight out the air-conditioning vents. He was a hopeless bundle of nerves, unsure of his tactics, confused about odds and outs, wondering what had possessed him to put himself through this ordeal.”

If Alvarez’s and Holden’s books never would have been reprinted without ESPN airing the WSOP in prime time and Positively Fifth Street taking off the way it did, Katy Lederer’s Poker Face: A Girlhood among Gamblers is a book that might never have been written at all. Lederer is little sister to two of the best and best-known poker players in the world. She dabbled in the game herself after college and probably had the native talent to go pro, but became a poet instead of a player. Her life story shuttles from the fusty private school in New Hampshire where her father taught English to poetry seminars at Berkeley to the gleaming McMansion on the outskirts of Vegas where her brother and mother ran a sports book in between poker nights. These are the raw materials of an amazing book. Poker Face, unfortunately, is not that book.

That’s not to say it isn’t worth reading. Lederer is a good writer and a brave one; it can’t have been easy to portray her family as unflatteringly as she sometimes does. But the book is full of promising moments and beginnings of insights that pass into the ether, maddeningly underexplored. A tough editor clearly could have done wonders for the book simply by pressing Lederer to say more–more about everything–and to work harder to unearth the connections between, for instance, the board games her family constantly played for fun and the casino games they later played for profit. Or between the allure of Vegas and the pull of writing. Or, to get at the heart of the matter, between these people’s gambling talent, their gambling compulsion, and their failure as a family.

I won’t tell you not to read Poker Face, even though it disappointed me medium-deeply. Its ingredients are fascinating even if sadly undercooked. I think I’d actually have enjoyed it enormously if I hadn’t felt haunted by the greatish book it might have been.

Representative quotation: “My brother kept asking me what I thought, how I liked [Las Vegas], and I beamed. Polished and proud, he was unafraid of anything. I was unafraid of anything. I stood at the brink of the casino floor, the lights and dings of the slot machines ringing in my ears, the cranks of roulette wheels spinning and spinning. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t feel lied to.”

Sometime in the middle of Saturday night, I figured out how I wanted to start my Louis Armstrong biography. I’ve been more or less ready to write for the past month or two, but inspiration refused to flow, which in my case usually means that I haven’t yet answered some fundamental question of form. I had roughly the same problem (as you may recall) when I started writing All in the Dances a year ago, and no sooner did I correct my false start than I was off and sprinting. I’m hoping for the same results this year: I’d like to wrap up the prologue and complete a working draft of the first chapter by April 1 at the latest.

I thought about telling you the specific details of my early-morning inspiration, but I’m afraid to jinx myself, so I won’t, at least not yet. We’ll see how it takes shape over the next few weeks. I’ll know I’m on the right track if the opening section of the prologue falls into place easily and uneventfully, and should that happen I might open the bag and give you a peek inside.

Somebody asked me the other day if I’ve ever suffered from writer’s block. It’s a subject that interests me greatly, so much so that I actually gave thought a number of years ago to writing a book about it. My answer was that long years of writing to inflexible deadlines had knocked most of the psychological self-indulgence out of me, making it possible for me to compose on command, but that I still experienced on occasion many of the anxieties associated with writer’s block, only sped up. It’s sort of like David Ives’ one-act play about fruit flies: I’m perfectly capable of going through all the usual pre-compositional horrors, but they rarely last for more than a day. For me, the big problem is when I simply don’t want to sit down and write, which is usually. Writing a first draft isn’t pleasurable to me (as opposed to editing, which I enjoy).

Be that as it may, I’m ready to get going in earnest. Igor Stravinsky, who wrote most of his music to commission, once said that when he knew how long a piece was supposed to be, he got excited. I know what he meant. I’ve been thinking about Louis for months, waiting patiently for the coin to drop in my head, and now it seems to have happened. The first sentence hasn’t come to me yet (that’s the next step), but at least I know the approximate shape of the container into which I plan to pour the story of his eventful life. At last, I’m excited.

“Be at the northwest corner of Madison and 38th at eight o’clock sharp,” the voice on the answering machine said. “Wear black.” I wouldn’t normally go out of my way to respond to so peremptory a summons, but the voice was familiar and the occasion was an appointment, so I donned my Black Outfit, jumped in a cab, and proceeded as instructed to the rendezvous point.

Time out for a little backstory: I’m a passionate fan of the Lascivious Biddies, the New York-based jazz-pop combo for whose recently released debut CD, Get Lucky, I wrote the liner notes. (They’re also pioneer podcasters–go here to hear.) They’d been wanting to take me to dinner to celebrate the release of Get Lucky, so they told me to keep Monday night open and wait for further instructions. The instructions arrived by phone this afternoon, and at eight o’clock sharp I was met on the aforementioned corner by a black-clad Biddie who whispered the secret word in my ear, took me by the arm, and led me a half-block west to…a karaoke bar.

Unlikely as it may sound, seeing as how I’m a New York artblogger and all, I’d never been to a karaoke bar. The closest I’d come was reading Maud’s blog and seeing Lost in Translation. So not only was I being thrust into a new milieu, but my guides were a quartet of professional musicians who all happened to be karaoke buffs. The results were, to put it mildly, a hoot and a half, though it took me a little while to catch on. As I watched the lyrics to “Bette Davis Eyes” flash on the screen, I asked, “But…where’s the music?” (I was the best sight-singer in my freshman music-theory class.) Once the hysterical laughter died down, the Biddies agreed unanimously that this was the geekiest remark ever made in a karaoke bar, and we started flipping through the songbook, looking for songs to sing. The book itself was a monument to kitsch–an encyclopedia-sized list of every cheesy top-40 song released in the past quarter-century–and as for the videos, all I can say is that I was spellbound by their surrealistic awfulness.

The Biddies, it turns out, are way serious about karaoke (they even have girl-group dance routines worked out for their favorite songs), and their savoir-faire inevitably attracted the attention of the other patrons, none of whom appeared to suspect that there were ringers in their midst. One cheerful fellow sloshed up to our table and said, “You guys are really good–didja know that?” My companions smiled demurely.

It was made known to me in due course that I wouldn’t be allowed to go home without at least participating in a group sing, so when Lee Ann Westover called for “Moon River,” I chimed in with a discreet harmony line. As if by prearrangement, the rest of the band abruptly fell silent, and as I switched hastily to the lead, it hit me that the song was playing in C major, Andy Williams’ key, suitable only for very high baritones. Middle age having turned me into a low bass, alarming things started to happen as I sang We’re after the same rainbow’s end. Fortunately, I’d had sake with my sushi, and I joined in the chorus of catcalls that greeted my bloodcurdling attempt at a high D. This loosened me up no end, and I even went so far as to join in the chorus to “Do You Know the Way to San José.”

Will I ever do it again? Possibly. Did I have a good time? Definitely.

“Subtlety chases the obvious in a never-ending spiral and never quite catches it.”

Rex Stout, The Silent Speaker

Maccers and I went to hear Audra McDonald on Friday at the Rose Theater, the gorgeous fifth-floor centerpiece of Lincoln Center’s new Columbus Circle performing-arts complex. No sooner did we get off the elevator than I spotted a pair of musician friends in the lobby, who hastened to tell us that McDonald had canceled Thursday’s concert, which was supposed to have been the official opening night of this year’s American Songbook series. Sure enough, McDonald came on stage, perched herself gingerly on a high stool, and told the audience that her daughter gave her a case of intestinal flu that had knocked her flat the night before.

To our amazement and relief, she got through the whole program, and though she mostly sang sitting down, sipping gingerly from a bottle of Gatorade, she sounded just like herself. The only other apparent sign of distress I could detect was that she sang a bit flat from time to time, which was perfectly forgivable under the circumstances. Otherwise she performed very much in the manner to which she has long since accustomed us, one that I admiringly described a couple of years ago in a New York Times profile:

Ms. McDonald is a true theatrical singer, trained to bounce her voice off the back wall, be it in a Broadway house or a concert hall. Such performers are never at their best in nightclubs, though Ms. McDonald (who listens mostly to jazz in her spare time) can and does function fairly comfortably in cabarets like Joe’s Pub…

Her tangy soprano and powerfully evocative way with words are as effective on record as in concert. (Listen to the way she bites into the most savage quatrain Lorenz Hart ever wrote, from “I Wish I Were in Love Again”: “When love congeals/It soon reveals/The faint aroma of performing seals,/The double-crossing of a pair of heels.”) Happy Songs
(Nonesuch), in fact, is as close to perfect as an album of standards performed by a theatrical singer can possibly be. The only thing it lacks is intimacy. Yes, Ms. McDonald scales down her vocal gestures with self-effacing skill, steering clear of the italicized exaggeration that makes queen-sized personalities such as Betty Buckley all but unlistenable on record. But even in a soft-spoken ballad like “I Must Have That Man,” she sings as though she is on stage, playing to an attentive crowd.

Not surprisingly, that is where she feels most at home. “I had a great time at Joe’s Pub,” she said, “and I don’t want to diminish the importance of that kind of place to me–you can really get into the words there, be completely vulnerable and naked–but you can’t do everything you want to do in that kind of environment.”

I had Saturday off, and how did I spend it? I went to a Broadway show, naturally. To be specific, I went to the Ambassador Theatre to see Chicago, this time as a civilian instead of a critic. I love Chicago, and I adore the current Broadway revival, among the most brilliantly effective productions of a dance-driven musical to have graced the Great White Way. Unfortunately, my previous visit to the Ambassador Theatre had left a bad taste in my mouth, as I duly reported in The Wall Street Journal:

I taxied up to the Ambassador Theatre to see Melanie Griffith play Roxie Hart in “Chicago.” This 1996 revival, smartly directed by Walter Bobbie and flashily choreographed by Ann Reinking in the style of Bob Fosse, the show’s creator, got an added jolt of publicity when Rob Marshall’s lively film version of the most cynical musical ever to open on Broadway became a runaway hit. The insertion of a medium-sized movie star into so long-running a production is doubtless intended to rope in Broadway novices who’ve never heard of Fosse, much less Ms. Reinking. (It can’t hurt that Antonio Banderas, Ms. Griffith’s husband, is appearing just across the street in “Nine.”)

Alas, “Chicago”‘s new star is sucker bait: Ms. Griffith sings like a cat with a cold, dances like a junior-high cheerleader and reads her lines like a cross between Jennifer Tilly and Betty Boop. She was so bad, in fact, that I felt embarrassed for the rest of the otherwise solid cast…If I were Melanie Griffith, I’d blush at the thought of sharing a stage with such consummate professionals. I guess being a movie star means never having to say you’re sorry.

I’d been wanting to go back to Chicago ever since Griffith moved on, but when I tried to include it in a Journal column I wrote last summer about long-running musicals, I ran into an unexpected roadblock:

If I had to guess, I’d say that most vacationing out-of-towners who take in a Broadway show probably do so in the summer. Unfortunately, that can be the worst time of year for playgoing. Actors go on vacations, too, and it’s in the summertime that you’re most likely to get stuck with understudies, second-stringers and temporary substitutes for the stars who lit up the sky on opening night. Nobody tells you that at the box office, though, nor are your hundred-dollar tickets plastered with stickers warning the inexperienced theatergoer that many hits go creaky in the knees after a year or so. That’s why Broadway producers don’t like critics to drop in on routine performances of long-running shows. When I inquired the other day about revisiting “Chicago,” for example, the publicist turned me down flat. “Too many understudies right now,” he told me….

A couple of weeks ago, a reader of “About Last Night” told me that Chicago was looking especially good these days, so I bit the bullet and went, not as the Big Bad Drama Critic of The Wall Street Journal but strictly as a regular guy who felt like catching a Saturday matinee on his day off. This time around, Roxie was being played by Tracy Shayne, an old Broadway hand (she’s had long runs as a replacement in A Chorus Line, Les Miz, and Phantom) who was subbing for the vacationing Charlotte d’Amboise. I’d never heard of her, but my correspondent assured me that she was terrific, so I decided to see for myself, and you know what? She was terrific. Shayne is a tough little pixie, professional to the hilt and a pure pleasure to watch, who knows exactly what Roxie Hart is all about. Not only is she a superb dancer, but she’s also a damned fine singer with a well-placed, vividly tinted voice (I think she ought to try her hand at cabaret). Good singing is a commodity that can no longer be taken for granted on Broadway, least of all now that slightly faded Hollywood stars are in demand to take over the lead roles of hit shows in need of a box-office boost. Lauren Hutton, for example, is excellent in Wonderful Town, but her singing is no better than good enough. I can think of worse things–starting with Melanie Griffith–but I can’t tell you what a relief it was to hear a major musical-comedy role sung really, really well, from the first note to the last.

Chicago would have been worth seeing (and hearing) just for Tracy Shayne, but I was no less happily surprised by the overall quality of the show, all the more so because the role of Velma Kelly was played by an understudy, Donna Marie Asbury, another dancer-who-can-really-sing who got her bumpy start as one of the fresh-faced kids in the ill-fated original cast of Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. Asbury gave a strong performance, as did the rest of the cast, and I went home as happy as I could be, even though I hadn’t seen a single star all afternoon.

One of my favorite pieces in the Teachout Museum is “Composition,” a 1962 color serigraph by Stuart Davis. Most of Davis’ prints are way too rich for my blood, but I was able to afford “Composition” because it was published in a large edition of 500 copies, and because Davis died before he could sign any of them. Now one of those unsigned prints hangs over my bookshelves, crisp and jazzy and deeply satisfying to behold. Am I any less delighted to own it because it isn’t signed? I don’t think so. Of course I’d be pleased if it were, but I buy prints because I want to look at them, not for their investment value.

I thought of “Composition” as I rode the subway home last Saturday afternoon. Why is it that so many people need the imprimatur of a big name in order to enjoy a Broadway show? No doubt it has a lot to do with the staggeringly high price of theater tickets, which has a way of corrupting our aesthetic responses: if you’re paying $100 for an orchestra seat, you want to see somebody famous up there, even if she isn’t any good. You want, so to speak, to see the signature.

I won’t pretend that I’m entirely immune to this temptation. Whenever I show off my copy of John Marin’s “Downtown. The El,” I always point out that it’s pencil-signed in the margin, the same way I’ve been known to brag about having seen certain big-name performers in the flesh. Nevertheless, I’m fairly pure-hearted when it comes to art, and just as I treasure my unsigned copy of Stuart Davis’ “Composition,” so, too, did I have the time of my life seeing Tracy Shayne in Chicago, even though I didn’t know who she was before I got to the Ambassador Theatre. Whoever she is, she’s a trouper, like Audra McDonald, and that’s what theater is all about. The world is full of wonderful artists who never become rich or famous, who do what they do simply because they love it with all their hearts. God bless them, every one.

These questions have been bouncing around the blogosphere (I got them from Household Opera).
Here goes nothing:

1. What did you do in 2004 that you’d never done before? (A) I took a spontaneous vacation. (B) I let the White House sic the FBI on me.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I’ve never been one to make New Year’s resolutions–my mind doesn’t work that way.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? Yes, and now I’m a sometime babysitter as a result (I guess that belongs under #1, too).

4. Did anyone close to you die? No.

5. What countries did you visit? None–I was too busy.

6. What would you like to have in 2005 that you lacked in 2004? (A) A romance. (B) A Morandi etching. (I’d gladly settle for either, but I’m not hanging by my thumbs.)

7. What date from 2004 will remain etched upon your memory? None. I’ve never been good at remembering dates–I always have to look them up. The last one I remember is the one we all remember.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? The publication of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine and A Terry Teachout Reader. I haven’t had many two-book years!

9. What was your biggest failure? I promised myself that I’d try my hand at watercolor in 2004. I bought a starter set in September, but I have yet to moisten a brush.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury? Just the flu.

11. What was the best thing you bought? Max Beerbohm’s 1913 caricature of Percy Grainger.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Answering that question is what I do for a living. Spend an hour trolling through the “About Last Night” archives and you can answer it for yourself.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Ditto.

14. Where did most of your money go? Art and taxes (which beats death and taxes).

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? I can’t even begin to list all the things that fill the bill–I seem to spend my life in a perpetual state of arousal.

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2004? (A) Song: Diana Krall’s version of Joni Mitchell’s “Black Crow.” (B) Album: Luciana Souza’s Neruda.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

– Happier or sadder? Somewhat happier.

– Thinner or fatter? About the same.

– Richer or poorer? Definitely poorer, but mainly because of the Teachout Museum, so I’m not complaining.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of? Taking the night off.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of? Sitting through plays by…oh, never mind, I gave him a hard enough time last year.

20. How will you be spending Christmas? Go here for retrospective details.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with? Our Girl in Chicago.

22. Did you fall in love in 2004? No (sigh).

23. How many one-night stands in this last year? None. That’s soooo not my thing.

24. What was your favorite TV program? I don’t see enough TV to answer this question (unless you count the What’s My Line? kinescopes I watch every night on the Game Show Network).

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year? So far as I know, I don’t really hate anyone (that’s also not my thing).

26. What was the best book(s) you read? The Library of America’s Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? Erin McKeown.

28. What did you want and get? A new friend.

29. What did you want and not get? None of your business.

30. What were your favorite films of this year? Sideways, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Triplets of Belleville, and Garden State (sorry to be so obvious).

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I had dinner at Caf

“We must look and look and look till we live in the painting and for a fleeting moment become identified with it. If we do not succeed in loving what through the ages has been loved, it is useless to lie ourselves into believing that we do. A good rough test is whether we feel that it is reconciling us with life.”

Bernard Berenson (quoted in Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art)