Archives for March 2005

I’m still out of Chicago, and posting from my corner will continue to be light for the next couple of days. There’s lots of worthwhile reading out there, however, beginning with the debutante blog The Gurgling Cod*, the creation of About Last Night pal the Fesser. If he weren’t already my friend, he would be making serious headway in that direction with this opening installment of musical links in tribute to hockey’s Original Six.

It almost makes up for the time he sent me a Patrick Roy birthday card.

*Wonder whether he’s offering any sort of door prize to the first reader to identify his blog’s namesake?

I’m about to leave for Washington, D.C., where I’ll:

(1) Be sworn in as a member of the National Council on the Arts
and attend my first meeting.

(2) See the Kennedy Center’s production of Mister Roberts.

(3) Take a v. cool friend to the Phillips Collection for the first time.

(4) Follow my brother around. (He’s coming to Washington to represent the family at my swearing-in, but he has a long list of other stuff he wants to do.)

(5) Try to get some work done on Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

I’ll be gone until Saturday, and while I’ll be taking my iBook with me, it isn’t likely that I’ll be doing much blogging, given the demands of my itinerary. I promise to check in with you if time permits, though, and of course I’ll be back at the old stand next Monday, rain or shine. I’m not sure what OGIC will be up to while I’m gone, but I’m sure she’ll be poking her head in from time to time, so be sure to look in on us.

Later. Have a nice week.

P.S. The Top Fives are updated. Take a look!

It happens that I’ve never filled out the celebrated Proust Questionnaire, so when I saw that Searchblog had done so the other day, I thought that doing the same thing might be a nice note on which to hit the road.

Here goes:

– What is your most marked characteristic? Curiosity.

– What is the quality you most like in a man? The ability to argue without becoming angry.

– What is the quality you most like in a woman? A sense of the absurd.

– What do you most value in your friends? Kindness and warmth.

– What is the trait you most deplore in yourself? Impatience.

– What is your favorite occupation? Conversation with a loved one over a good meal.

– What is your idea of perfect happiness? The same, minus the meal and in closer proximity.

– What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? Siegfried.

– In which country would you like to live? This one, in the Fifties.

– Who are your favorite writers? Johnson, Trollope, Dostoevsky, James, Conrad, Fitzgerald, Colette, Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, M.F.K. Fisher.

– Who are your favorite poets? Shakespeare, Dickinson, Hardy, Frost, Yeats, Auden, Larkin.

– Who is your favorite hero of fiction? Father Hugh Kennedy, in Edwin O’Connor’s The Edge of Sadness. Runner-up: Lucky Jim Dixon.

– Who is your favorite heroine of fiction? Vicky Haven, in Dawn Powell’s A Time to Be Born.

– Who are your favorite composers? Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Verdi, Tchaikovsky, Faur

“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way: we this way.”

William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost

I got word while packing of the death this morning of Bobby Short, the great cabaret singer. (Here’s the Associated Press obituary.) I met him on my very first trip to New York City, an encounter I recalled in City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy:

My biggest adventure consisted of going by myself to the early show at the Caf

I’m posting from a very nice Washington hotel room (you’re paying for it, so the least you can do is enjoy it vicariously) after a wild do-this-do-that-no-this morning, followed by a hair-raising cab ride to Penn Station and a tranquil train ride to our nation’s capital. I chewed up NEA-related paperwork all the way from New York to Philadelphia, then took a lovely nap. I’m meeting a friend for dinner shortly, after which I’ll return to the hotel and try to knock out a few more pages of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. The festivities start tomorrow.

For the moment, I’m listening to Pee Wee Russell on my iBook and marveling yet again at the joys of technology. All I had to do to connect to the blogosphere was stick a plug into the side of my computer and click a few keys, and there…I…was! I don’t normally take my computer on trips like this (to do so makes it too tempting to work when I need to be unwinding), but since I had to make an exception, I figured I’d say hello.

Now it’s time for dinner. I might blog tomorrow, and I might not. OGIC might or might not do the same. There’s just no telling what we’ll do!

Later.

To begin with, OGIC and I–as well as artsjournal.com in general, including its associated blogs–have been suffering from a severe case of circumstances beyond our control. For reasons not yet explained to me, and which I probably won’t understand once they’ve been explained, none of us has been able to post anything for the past couple of days. (You already knew this if you looked at the main artsjournal.com page, on which Doug McLennan, our fearless leader and host, was able to inscribe a due-to-technical-difficulties notice just before the electronic ceiling caved in.) Hence our collective silence.

OGIC and I both had unposted items in the pipeline when the lights went out, and they are now available for your delectation, along with my postings for today. Our Girl just left town, and I’m not sure when she’s coming back, but we’re hoping to be in touch by way of that delightfully old-fashioned communications device known as the telephone, and one or the other of us will fill you in thereafter on the details of her impending return to the blogosphere.

As for me, I remain strapped to my desk in New York, but this is the first time since very early Tuesday morning that I’ve been able to write and post anything longer than an almanac entry. The reason for my absence is, if I do say so myself, pretty sensational: I’ve finished the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. It’s an 8,300-word “prologue” in which I begin by jumping boldly into the middle of Armstrong’s life, describing in detail his 1956 debut with the New York Philharmonic, a one-nighter that ended up being a turning point in his career. That story told, I devote the rest of the chapter to a scene-setting sketch of Armstrong’s personality and historic significance. Readers of The Skeptic will recognize this narrative tactic–I did the same thing with H.L. Mencken in the first chapter–and since it seemed to work well there, I decided to start Hotter Than That in a similar manner.

Eighty-three hundred words: that’s not much compared to the hundred-thousand-word whole, but it’s a hell of a lot more than nothing, which is what I started with three weeks ago. To put it in a happier-sounding way, I’ve written one-tenth of Hotter Than That. Either way, I feel incredibly excited, not to mention exhausted, since I wrote and edited most of those 8,300 words very late at night (I was up until five Tuesday morning finishing the first draft). I’m on the scoreboard at last, and I like what I’ve written so far.

I wish I could open a bottle of champagne and take the rest of the week off, but that isn’t going to happen. Not only do I have to go to two more Broadway previews between now and Sunday, but on Monday I board the Acela Express for Washington to attend my first meeting of the National Council on the Arts, and I won’t be back in New York until next Saturday afternoon. I’m going to bring my iBook with me, and I plan to spend as much of my spare time as possible working on the next chapter. I doubt I’ll be able to do anything more than edit what I’ve already written, though, so my hope is to get a preliminary draft of the first half of the chapter down on paper, so to speak, before I hit the road on Monday. For this reason, I haven’t done a whole lot of celebrating, unless you call going to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? a celebration. (Exorcism is more like it.) Instead, I took a shower and treated myself to an unhurried lunch, then returned to my desk and started describing New Orleans in 1901. Like Crash Davis says in Bull Durham, the moment’s over.

Well, not quite over. I e-mailed a copy of the first chapter to my brother in Missouri, and he in turn is printing it out on paper so that my computer-unfriendly mother can read it. In addition, I sent copies to OGIC and a couple of other close friends, and I trust they’ll respond with an inspiring combination of lavish praise and helpful suggestions.

As for you folks out there in the ‘sphere, you’re going to be hearing a lot more about Hotter Than That in the course of the next couple of years, so I won’t hose you down any more today. I will, however, share with you a freshly written snippet of the prologue. I hope you like it:

Louis Armstrong’s pride was ever and always visible in his glowing smile. You can see it, for example, in a photo taken in 1968 when he met Pope Paul VI at the Vatican, in which a glint of delight can be seen on the pope’s tired, worn face. As for Armstrong, he looks blissful. Perhaps he was marveling that a bastard child born in a back alley, one whose mother had mad his school lunches from the pickings of white people’s garbage, should have grown up to meet two popes, chat with Ed Murrow, make movies with Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, share a stage with Leonard Bernstein, and be recognized in every corner of the earth. Music had brought him all these things, and something more: in return for a lifetime of unswerving dedication, he knew true happiness, and shared it with his fellow men. He might well have told them, with Constantin Brancusi, that “it is pure joy that I offer you.” Like other self-made men, it sometimes slipped his mind that his success was due not merely to work and pluck but also to the talent with which he had been born, but he never forgot, not for a moment, that his painstaking mastery of that inchoate talent gave him access to a pleasure so transcendent that all else paled next to it. He said more than once that his music was more important than anything, even his marriages. “When I pick up that horn,” he explained, “that’s all. The world’s behind me, and I don’t concentrate on nothin’ but it….That my livin’ and my life. I love them notes. That why I try to make ’em right. See?”

And now…back to work.

Friday again, and time for my weekly Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. I saw two shows, Monty Python’s Spamalot and Belfast Blues. Unlike most of the rest of the world, I preferred the second to the first–strongly:

“Spamalot” stars Tim Curry (of “Rocky Horror Picture Show” fame) and David Hyde Pierce (of “Frasier” fame) and is directed by Mike Nichols (of universal fame). Furthermore, I don’t doubt that every Monty Python buff in the greater New York area has already bought a ticket. So it is with regret and some surprise that I must report the following bad news: It’s a bore….

So what went wrong? For openers, the new songs are mostly Broadway genre parodies that aren’t knowing enough to be more than mildly amusing. “The Song That Goes Like This,” for example, is a toothless sendup of the faceless first-act ballads with which so many contemporary musicals are afflicted: “A sentimental song/That casts a magic spell/They all will hum along/We’ll overact like hell.” (Memo to Mr. Idle: Meta is so over.) As for the bright-young-collegiate humor of the book, most of which comes straight from the film, it’s both dated and unexpectedly slow-moving. TV-style comedy zips along much faster now than it did when “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” was made, and I found myself squirming in my seat as each bit was dragged out to its well-remembered conclusion, wondering why my 19-year-old self had found the same punch lines so funny….

Belfast Blues, Geraldine Hughes’ one-woman play about growing up amid the Irish Troubles, is a very different story:

It’s a well-written, grippingly acted piece of work. I even liked it despite being severely allergic to Irish whimsy, in which Ms. Hughes sometimes indulges to excess (she needs to ease off on the wide eyes). For the most part, though, she paints a tough-minded portrait of life in a violent land reduced to collective dementia by the evil confluence of religious zealotry and class resentment….

No link. Go buy the paper–you can spare a dollar. Or go here and discover the joys of a subscription to the Journal‘s online edition.