Archives for February 2005

In this week’s Chicago Reader (no link, boo hiss), Erin Hogan has a selling review of Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan’s De Kooning: An American Master. She had a great time reading the book, though she notes that Stevens and Swan had some help from the painter in making it so readable: “De Kooning’s life story is a biographer’s dream, full of tragedy, triumph, and salacious, page-turning detail.”

But I’m more interested in the built-in limitation she points to that afflicts many artists’ biographers:

Writers apparently love to write about writing; they produce volumes about the creative process in general and their practice in particular, and there are countless books devoted to the topic of writers on their craft….Painters, however, rarely talk about their process.

After de Kooning finished the magnificent Excavation (now housed at the Art Institute), it took him three years to complete another painting. That’s not so surprising–all artists fall fallow or need time, after a major creative outburst, to recharge. What is surprising about de Kooning’s three-year disapppearance is that he was working the whole time, with the same obsessive intensity as ever. And he was working, essentially, on one painting: Woman I, the first of the infamous “Woman” series.

For de Kooning, Woman I was an endless nightmare. He grew so angry with the work that, according to Stevens and Swan, at one point he “ripped [it] off the frame and left it in the hallway by his door, with a stack of old cardboard and odds and ends of wood.” But while that might explain what happened to the physical object, bitterly rejected there at the end of the hall, we are no closer to understanding what would compel de Kooning to spend three years on one painting or why he would decide it was a hopeless failure….

Stevens and Swan heroically attempt to describe the creation of Woman I, but those three years remain elusive, as do much of the inner workings of de Kooning’s mind. All of the contextual detail, description, lyrical interpretations, lectures, articles, and chronicles of conversations marshaled by the authors–none of it quite gets to the core. The fortress of fact protects the empty throne.

I haven’t read enough artists’ biographies to have realized this about them, but Hogan’s observation especially interested me since I’m now about 80 pages into Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth, a novel that is narrated by a painter and that has me completely captivated. Half the book’s spell over me is in its persuasive effort to represent the artist’s eye. The narrator, Gulley Jimson, looks at the world–the curve of a woman’s back, a coffee spill on a tablecloth–and reflexively sees possibilities for his painting. He sees so much this way–and misses so much. I’ve read novels about artists before, but never any that made this serious an attempt to minutely portray how a painter looks at the world, what he sees, and what he does with it. This is, I think, just what Hogan finds herself missing in art biographies, and it does seem more suited to the novelist’s art than that of the biographer, who is indeed limited to “the fortress of fact.”

More on the novel when I finish it someday. In the meantime, if you’re in Chicago, pick up a free Reader and check out the rest of Hogan’s review. (If you’re not, keep an eye on this guy.)

Hold the phone–I’ve got DSL! Also $50 worth of new music, a few software updates, and my pajamas still on. Let’s hope the novelty wears off soon!

Andrew Sullivan‘s decision to put andrewsullivan.com on “hiatus” is the talk of the political sector of the blogosphere. Whatever you may think of Andrew’s politics, there’s no doubt that he’s been hugely influential in helping to put blogging on the map. After all, he’s been doing it every day for the past five years, well before most of us even knew what a blog was, and it was from him that a great many people–myself included–first got the idea to start blogs of their own. Well do I remember the morning I looked at andrewsullivan.com and said to myself, I’d like to do something just like this, only about the arts. A couple of years went by before I finally jumped in the pond, but that was how “About Last Night” came to be.

Andrew’s explanation of why he’s decided to give up regular posting is worth reading:

I want to take a breather, to write a long-overdue book, to read some more, travel to Europe and the Middle East, and work on some longer projects. Much as I would like to do everything, I’ve been unable to give the blog my full attention and make any progress on a book (and I’m two years behind). It’s not so much the time as the mindset. The ability to keep on top of almost everything on a daily and hourly basis just isn’t compatible with the time and space to mull over some difficult issues in a leisurely and deliberate manner. Others might be able to do it. But I’ve tried and failed….

I know whereof he speaks, though so far I’ve managed to keep all my journalistic balls in the air (that’ll be enough out of you, Mr. TMFTML). Even though I don’t post as often as Andrew does, “About Last Night” is still updated at least once each weekday, a schedule that has yet to stop me from also turning out a weekly drama column, three monthly essays, and a not-inconsiderable amount of miscellaneous writing. In addition, I’ve published two books since launching this blog, one of which I wrote from scratch (and whose progress I chronicled in this space).

On the other hand, All in the Dances was a brief life, whereas the biography of Louis Armstrong on which I just started work will be at least as long as The Skeptic. It’s going to be interesting, to put it mildly, to see whether working on the Armstrong book is compatible with writing as much as I do for newspapers and magazines. (I sure hope so–I need the money!)

And what about blogging? Believe it or not, I have few doubts about being able to keep that up. Paul Gigot, my boss at The Wall Street Journal, asked me not long ago where I found the energy to blog each day. I replied that writing “About Last Night” was so intellectually stimulating that the energy seemed to generate itself. As I’ve said before, I think of this blog as a kind of sketchbook, a public place in which I can think out loud in front of an audience, playing with ideas that in time may find their way into more elaborate print-media pieces. (H.L. Mencken did much the same thing with his weekly op-ed column in the Baltimore Sun, which is where I got the idea.) It’s a different kind of writing, of course, more immediate and less formal, which makes it easier to turn out. In addition, I’ve noticed that my contributions to “About Last Night” have grown considerably more personal in tone over the past year and a half, and I gather from your e-mail and our statistics that many of you have been pleased with the results.

Be that as it may, I know my compulsive tendencies are a part of what fuels “About Last Night,” which can’t be a good thing. One of the reasons why I asked Our Girl in Chicago to join me was that I thought her presence might free me to post less often. Instead, it’s encouraged me to post more often. About that I have mixed feelings (though definitely not about the contributions of my adored co-blogger). Those of you who’ve been reading “About Last Night” from the beginning are aware that I’ve been trying to teach myself how to take time off, not just from blogging but from work in general. Though it may not be immediately apparent, I’ve had a pretty fair amount of success at this, especially in the past four or five months, and I hope to have still more.

If you’re expecting me to segue deftly into an announcement to the effect that I won’t be posting as regularly in the future as I have in the past, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you. I love “About Last Night,” and I intend to keep on writing it pretty much the way I have all along. But one thing I am going to do (or at least try to do–we’ll see how it goes) is take an occasional impromptu day off without posting my usual I’m-up-to-my-ears-see-you-tomorrow notice. I think that’ll be good for me. Writing this blog is the furthest possible thing from a chore, and I want it to stay that way. So please don’t be alarmed when you come calling one day and find nothing new to read but the daily almanac. Instead, smile knowingly and say, Good boy, Terry! I hope you’re having fun today. And stay cool–I’ll be back.

All that I can hope to make you understand

Is only events: not what has happened.

And people to whom nothing has ever happened

Cannot understand the unimportance of events.

T.S. Eliot, The Family Reunion

– I recently saw a stage actress I know in an episode of a popular TV series. This was a new experience for me. I’ve watched any number of writer friends hold forth on talk shows, and I’ve even tuned into David Letterman to see a band whose members I know quite well. But all those people were being themselves, more or less, whereas my actress friend was pretending to be someone else. Of course she was in one sense wholly herself (I knew her smile in an instant/I knew the curve of her face), and the part she played drew deeply on her familiar energy. Nor was she made up in any deceptive way: she looked like the person I know. Yet some uncanny transformation had nonetheless taken place, and I found myself to be more than a little bit disoriented as I watched her on the screen.

Perhaps it’s the sheer realism of TV itself that disoriented me, the fact that we turn to it in search of information as often as for amusement. Live theater is far more mysterious, for the paradoxical reason that the actors are physically present, in but not of the same space. Watching a play is like looking at a painting in a museum: the painting itself is real, a corporeal object that you could reach out and touch if the guards would be kind enough to look the other way, but it’s not the “objectivity” of the canvas with which you’re concerned. A TV series, by contrast, isn’t mysterious at all. It seems as real as life itself–unless you happen to know one of the actors, in which case the boundaries quickly grow blurry.

By the way, I sent the actress in question an e-mail saying that I’d seen her and was impressed. She wrote back as follows:

There I was, all 15 or 20 seconds worth, in the most unflattering closeup. I wanted to put a paper bag over my head!! At least my acting, what little screen time I had, was truthful. And….I had a pimple right in the middle of my forehead!!!!!! AAAGH!!!!!

Remember that the next time you wish you were a TV actor: all you see are the pimples.

– It rarely fails to surprise people when I tell them that I almost always know how long it’ll take me to write a given piece. (In fact, I think it disillusions them.) The part I forget to mention, though, is that the clock doesn’t start running until I start writing. I rarely get blocked, but I sometimes find the prospect of writing so disagreeable to contemplate that I stall for as long as I possibly can.

I don’t know why I do this. It isn’t as though writing were physically painful, after all. Nor do I do it all the time, or even very often. Most of the time I face the blank page the way Marcus Aurelius might have faced the guillotine: I get up first thing in the morning, climb down from the loft, boot up the iBook, and go straight to work, knowing that there’s no point in forestalling the inevitable. Yesterday, though, my brain switched into Maximum Stall Mode as soon as I started thinking about my “Second City” column for this Sunday’s Washington Post. I haven’t the slightest idea why I kept putting it off. I knew what I was going to write about and I knew what I wanted to say. Yet not only did I wait until the last minute to start writing, but I actually went so far as to blog instead, having previously announced that I was taking the day off from “About Last Night” in order to write my column. Obviously I was in the clutches of Benchley’s Law: “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it is not the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.”

Fortunately, my editor in Washington called at two o’clock and asked, very gently, what time I’d be filing, immediately followed by a friend who reminded me that we were planning to get together to choose a pair of frames for my new glasses, and when did I want to meet her? The combined effects of these calls brought me to my senses, and the column was finished and filed by 4:45. And yes, it took exactly as long to write as all my other “Second City” columns.

Go figure. Please. And after you do, tell me what you figured out.

“A first-person account is, after all, a confession; and the one who has something to confess has something to conceal. And the one who has the word ‘I’ at his or her disposal has the quickest device for concealing himself.”

Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare

I don’t generally enjoy author readings. I love books, but I’d rather be alone with them, moving through them at my own pace, backing up at will and lingering where I want to. I never feel as though I absorb very much at live readings, and I remain stubbornly more interested in books than authors–I don’t go in much for author interviews, either. In special cases, however–magnetic personalities, prodigious talents, odd ducks–I do find it worth twenty or thirty minutes of mild squirming just to find out what sort of creature could have produced a particular work, and what it’s like to be in the same room with them. So on Monday night I went to see David Thomson talk about his new history of Hollywood, The Whole Equation, at the corner bookstore.

For me, this counted as an Event with a capital E. Ever since Terry opened my eyes to Thomson’s (New) Biographical Dictionary of Film several years ago, I’ve been fascinated with Thomson’s mind, with the sheer encyclopedic ambition of the NBDF, and with its truly inexhaustible entertainment value. I use the book in two ways regularly: like a reference work, looking up people and movies that I’ve been thinking about or need to know something about; and, once a year or so, like a narrative, reading straight through from Abbott and Costello to Terry Zwigoff. One of the friends who accompanied me to Monday’s talk bought the Dictionary, but not before raising the question “Why a dictionary and not an encyclopedia?” Without missing a beat, the clerk answered: because it’s supposed to be definitive. Exactly right.

After being introduced, Thomson took a seat and spoke rather than reading, bless him, and I liked the talk even if I never did quite reconcile the genial and engaging raconteur he puts forth in person with the dervish of the NBDF, whirling his feelings about movies into definitions–things almost as solid as facts. And a leitmotif of his talk–which appeared at first to be an extemporaneous, offhand chat but eventually revealed itself to be quite deliberately structured–was not quite feeling vs. fact, but feeling vs. intellectualizing about the movies. His show of ambivalence about this opposition was the one part of the performance that was readily identifiable as performance. He kept playing devil’s advocate with himself, floating the notion that perhaps we shouldn’t analyze our enjoyment of movies any more than we analyze our enjoyment of sex or chocolate, but nobody, I think, was buying it. Not coming from this grand lexicographer, the man blurbed by Guillermo Cabrera Infante as “the Dr. Johnson of film.” I think not.

Thomson began by describing a typical critics’ screening. Reminding me of something Terry once wrote, he proposed that critics should be required to see the movies they review in the company of the general public at least once in a while. His reasons were different, however, from those behind Terry’s similar prescription for art critics. He said that film critics are so concerned not to give away their feelings about a movie to their colleagues/competitors that nobody dares have an observable response at these screenings–no laughing, no gasping, no jumping, and under no circumstances anything bearing the least resemblance to producing tears (I believe his exact words were “I’d rather eat my face”). Sounds grim! And his point, that this constitutes a whole different realm of experience from what his readers are doing when they go to the movies, is a solid one.

But it’s not about feeling vs. thinking, it’s about the infectious unease and egotism of these critics when they get around each other. Though I do fully believe that strait-jacketing their own human responses must warp the critical judgments that get recorded in their reviews. Thomson went on from here to describe the first time he met Pauline Kael, which happened at a New York critics’ screening. She was a small, rapt woman sitting next to him, never pausing in her copious note-taking and yet somehow never giving the screen less than her full attention. After the film he quizzed her about her method, ascertaining that a) she did this at every screening; b) she never watched a movie twice if she could avoid it; and c) this was because she felt the second time would be an imitation of experience (actual experience occurring only the first time one saw a film), and so somehow inimical to what seeing movies should be.

(Digression: years ago I went to Chicago’s much-mourned McClurg Court Cinemas in Streeterville–containing the most colossal auditorium and screen in the area–to see, with guilty pleasure, John Carpenter’s remake of Village of the Damned. Much to my and my companion’s delight, Roger Ebert was in attendance. Our delight did not derive from mere celebrity-sighting, but from the fact that he had already reviewed the movie. And trust me, Citizen Kane it ain’t.)

(Further digression: Ebert appeared to love the attention he got from other people in the audience, who sensed his approachability and took advantage of it. He was the chatty, beaming center of a ring of admirers that only dispersed when the lights went down. His presence gave the screening a social, almost festival atmosphere that I’ve seldom encountered at the movies.)

The opposition between approaching movies sensually and approaching them critically–to my mind a suspect if not simply false opposition–formed the backbone of Thomson’s talk. In this context he spoke about the prehistory of film critics, when what critics there were (James Agee, Manny Farber) were writing for small-circulation journals and when everybody would go see everything, not needing the counsel of reviewers beforehand, not even needing to know the name of the movie. It was going to the movies that counted, not the movie itself. And although he didn’t go so far as to endorse this as a healthier state of affairs, there was definitely a hint of nostalgia for a simpler or happier time. Which seemed odd coming from someone who work matters precisely because it is so finely attuned to the minutiae of individual careers, even performances–even pores, as here on Barbara Stanwyck, who is on my mind lately:

Her image of the hard-boiled girl of easy virtue was kept up in William Keighley’s Ladies They Talk About (33) and in Baby Face (33, Alfred E. Green), in which she maneuvers her way up the length of the business ladder–by every seductive means at her command. It would be difficult to think of an actress so expressive of the early 1930s girl on the make–as intimate, shiny, and flimsy as a discarded slip, but with eyes ever sly and alert. So often with great movie actresses, we have a first thought of skin tone: with Stanwyck it is of tacky paint, too warm for glossy hardness.

It was disappointing when, to wrap things up, Thomson ultimately zagged away from nostalgia and movies-as-bonbons to endorse the critical approach. Disappointing not because he did so–you knew he would in the end, and if you bothered to come out and see him at all, you almost certainly wanted him to–but because of the reasons he gave. His young son, given a game system for Christmas, spent 37 hours of his first week of ownership playing it. Movies have made this and other dangerous forms of not-thinking possible. We must talk about them if we’re to avoid being brainwashed or brain-deadened or sheepified by them.

Huh. And all my hours with the NBDF had persuaded me that it’s good to talk about the movies because it enhances our pleasure at the art and the life in them, not because we need to protect ourselves from them. How very odd. But there has always seemed to be some fissure between the dour essayist in Thomson and the joyful lexicographer. It’s much the same crack that appeared in his talk, separating the drably sociological-political closing remarks from wonderfully vivid details like how Kael, unexpectedly diminutive, wrote her notes in the dark in just the manner someone else might write letters. It’s almost as if the freewheeling observer in Thomson–his best critical self–can only come out to play after doing his math homework or his civic duty.

Apologies, but I’ve got to steer clear of the blog for the rest of the day. I’ve stumbled into a fever swamp of appointments, deadlines (including a couple of new ones that only just got added to my calendar), a mad dash to Washington on Friday morning, and not quite enough time to get everything done before I head for the train. Something’s got to give, and it’s you.

For now, go read some other blog. You’ll find a long list of good ones in the right-hand column. I’ll be back tomorrow.