Archives for May 19, 2005

Winston Churchill said somewhere or other that there are few things in life more exhilarating than being shot at without effect. I thought of this utterly characteristic remark a few hours ago as I watched a wizard from Ms Mac Consulting wipe the hard drive of my iBook and reinstall the operating system, an experience which I imagine to be not unlike watching in a mirror as a neurosurgeon pokes around in your head with a scalpel.

This unexpected and unwanted adventure into the unknown began last Saturday when I came home from Washington, D.C., booted up my computer, and discovered to my horror that some gremlin had translated all the words on the e-mail toolbar into Dutch. (I know, it sounds crazy, but they really were in Dutch–I checked.) Other peculiar little anomalies had been bobbing up on my screen from time to time in recent weeks, but this one was serious enough that I knew the time had come to seek professional counsel at once or run the risk of sudden and catastrophic paralysis. I got on the phone to Ms Mac and scheduled a Wednesday-morning house call. At the appointed hour, a flute-playing genius by the name of Nicole appeared on my doorstep, sat down at my desk, and started making magic passes over my prostrate iBook, which turned out to be even sicker than either one of us had suspected. Five nervewracking hours later, it was at least as good as new, and I went right out and downed a stiff drink.

One of the nice things about Nicole’s approach to computer consulting is that she is unfailingly tactful, by which I mean that she never says things like You mean you don’t know what a [fill in the blank] is? Recognizing at once that she was dealing with an innocent, she went out of her way to behave as if my ignorance were perfectly normal. I have no doubt that this is a specifically feminine mode of behavior, having spent far too many hours being stared at in self-evident disbelief by auto mechanics with hairy chests who made no effort whatsoever to disguise their contempt for the kind of guy who doesn’t know a socket wrench from a fanbelt (I exaggerate only slightly). If all auto mechanics were like Nicole, there would be peace on earth.

Thanks to her stalwart efforts, I now resume regular blogging activities–and about time, too. I’m off to Chicago at midday Friday to frolic on the aisle with OGIC, but until then I’m yours.

My Wall Street Journal review of Kate Whoriskey’s Shakespeare Theatre production of The Tempest, in which I suggested that audience members wait to read her program notes until after they’d seen the show, has inspired a couple of very interesting posts elsewhere in the blogosphere. (You’ll find them here and here.)

These postings put me in mind of H.L. Mencken’s saying that criticism is “prejudice made plausible.” He had a point, but some prejudices don’t lend themselves to such treatment, or at least shouldn’t. I don’t like all art, I’m pretty sure I don’t like all good art, and I think it’s the better part of wisdom for me not to pretend that all the art I dislike is bad. Like everyone else, I have my share of aesthetic allergies, which may or may not necessarily correspond to the Truth About Art.

All other things being equal:

• I prefer short plays, films, novels, and pieces of music to long ones. (I also prefer small paintings to large ones, which is not exactly the same preference but probably a second cousin to it.)

• I prefer comedy to tragedy.

• I prefer prose to poetry.

• I prefer simplicity to complexity.

• I prefer realism to fantasy. (This is why I prefer comedy to tragedy, by the way: I think it’s truer to life.)

• I usually have major problems with “documentary” art, or any other kind of idea-driven art. Marcel Duchamp said that he inscribed sentences on his “ready-mades” in order to “carry the mind of the spectator towards other regions more verbal.” That sums up the kind of art I like least.

• I loathe “artiness.”

• I tend not to like camp.

To some extent these prejudices can be made to add up to a rough and ready philosophy of art, but the alert reader will note that they also contain some built-in contradictions. O.K. by me. As I’ve said time and again, art is empirical: first you make it, then you decide whether it works, then you try to figure out why it works. Similarly, criticism starts with the critic’s spontaneous, unmediated response to an aesthetic experience. If it doesn’t, it’s bad criticism–period.

One of the reasons why I trust my taste is that it not infrequently leads me in surprising directions. I’ve reviewed more than a few plays and productions for the Journal that didn’t conform to my list of prejudices, but which I loved anyway. (Among them were Anna in the Tropics, Charlie Victor Romeo, I Am My Own Wife, Intimate Apparel, Jumpers, Nine Parts of Desire, Private Jokes, Public Places, Rose Rage, and Small Tragedy.) A critic who always knows in advance what he’s going to like–or dislike–is writing about the show in his head, not the show in front of him. One sure way to increase the likelihood of surprise is not to look at the printed program at all, and sometimes that’s just what I do: I go in, sit down, and see what happens.

In the case of The Tempest, I knew that Ms. Whoriskey claimed to have interpreted Shakespeare’s text in a highly political way, which is definitely not my thing–but I’d also been told in advance by a person whose taste I trust without reservation that the production was first-rate, so I split the difference, went in cold, and didn’t crack open the program until intermission, by which time I was already head over heels and happy to be. So much the better. It’s not uncommon for me to have clear-cut advance expectations about the shows I review, but I’m always willing to be proved wrong, and delighted to admit it in print.

I’m sure several of you out there are already thinking the same thing, and I’m a half-beat ahead of you: doesn’t it matter that Kate Whoriskey superimposed a political interpretation on The Tempest and came up with a beautiful production? Duh, yeah, of course. To be sure, my experience suggests very strongly that politicizing Shakespeare (or any other great playwright) tends not to yield good results, but if it works for her, it works for her, regardless of whether it works for anyone else.

As for me, all I care about is the end result. Bore me and I’ll fall asleep, even if I agree with every word you say. Astonish me and I’ll sit up and take notice, even if I think you’re dead wrong. In art, the only unforgivable sin is to be dull.

UPDATE: Mr. Superfluities has posted a list of his own prejudices. While they tend not to run in very close sync with my own, he says some things with which I couldn’t agree more enthusiastically. Among them:

Theater’s strengths, in this technological age, are that it’s simple, it can be cheap and it appeals to a very basic need for physical communion….

Campy popular cultural references mire a work in its own time. It’s one thing to offer comment or criticism of the world in which we live; it’s another to unthinkingly exploit the popularity of junk in an effort to make our own shows more accessible….

Artists can’t afford to be without a familiarity with the other art forms in which they don’t work. It also helps when they have a good broad basic understanding of philosophy, psychology, history and science: sometimes to inform their own work, sometimes to be aware of the questions which these disciplines don’t answer.

Hear, hear! (Do I smell a meme coming on?)

“I have only read Proust in translation. I thought he began well but went dotty half way through like J Joyce in Ulysses. No plan. Nancy [Mitford] says it is uproariously funny throughout & only English & Americans treat it as anything superior to P.G. Wodehouse.”

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Margaret FitzHerbert (Aug. 9, 1964)

I’ll be going to Chicago on Friday (sorry that I can’t take you!), but if I weren’t, I’d be going to Alice Tully Hall to hear “Five Lovers,” a recital by soprano Jama Jandrokovic.

Here’s the “official” description of the concert:

Soprano Jama Jandrokovic sings texts from her autobiographical collection of poetry, Five Lovers, featuring settings of the texts by leading American composers Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf and the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Music, Paul Moravec. Special guests include poet Dana Gioia, pianists Soeyon Kim and Andrew Rosenblum, and the North Sky Ensemble, with violinists Jesse Mills and Colin Jacobsen, violist Max Mandel and cellist Rubin Kodheli. Directed by Gina Lapinski.

Now here’s an explanation of the program’s significance by my fellow ArtsJournal.com blogger Greg Sandow, a tireless and trenchant advocate of non-traditional classical-music programming:

On Friday, at Tully Hall in New York, a soprano named Jama Jandrokovic will give a recital, consisting of three new song cycles by three composers, all of them settings of her own autobiographical poetry! This really deserves an exclamation point, because normally–to state the obvious–it’s people in pop music whose music is explicitly about their own lives. So now here’s someone in classical music doing it.

The poems, according to the press release for the concert, “chronicle Ms. Jandrokovic’s romantic journey as a recently divorced, newly single young woman in New York City attempting to reinvent herself.” I haven’t read the poems, and can’t say if they’re good or bad. But! The very idea of a classical singer doing something like this is revolutionary. The composers are Lori Laitman, Luna Pearl Woolf, and Paul Moravec, and the concert–very good move here–has a stage director. This is not your grandmother’s vocal recital.

I know about this concert because I know several of the parties involved, but readers of this blog shouldn’t need to be reminded that I don’t recommend anything in advance unless I have damned good reason to think it’s going to be worth seeing and/or hearing. This will be both.

Jandrokovic’s gorgeously designed Web site, with full information on the program, is here.

To purchase tickets, go here.

Things I didn’t know till now, gratefully culled from The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film:

– Total number of feature-length commercial sound films of plays by Shakespeare: about 40.

– Average percentage of Shakespeare’s original text heard in these films: 25-30%.

– Director who “consistently uses fewer words for each transaction between characters” in his Shakespeare films: Orson Welles.

Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is inviting
bloggers to write about their favorite painting in America and their favorite American painting (which I suppose could be one and the same).

This is, of course, an impossible task, but having just said that it can’t be done, I’ll do it, subject as always to minute-by-minute changes of mind.

As of the time stamp on this posting, the winners are as follows:

– Favorite American painting: Fairfield Porter’s The Mirror, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City. As regular readers of this blog know, my passion for Porter is boundless–his work is my major preoccupation as a collector–and I can think of a half-dozen of his paintings that I might be inclined to put at the top of this list. “The Mirror,” though, seems to me a particularly revealing exemplar of Porter’s highly individual brand of realism, and one that I don’t get to see often enough because it hangs in a Midwestern museum. All the more reason, then, for me to pay a visit to Kansas City this summer. Good jazz, good barbecue, a good museum with my favorite Porter–what’s not to like?

– Favorite painting in America: Paul C