Archives for June 2005

“He’d been thinking about late middle age, the years which a generous God and good health now offered. They could be fruitful years before death knocked, or a sterile barren delay before the cold. It all depended on how you handled them. It was absurd, no doubt, to pretend to be young: after thirty years of desk work it would be ludicrous to start waving guns. Charles Russell didn’t intend to. What he intended was a calculated avoidance, the avoidance of too much discipline and of over-rigid habits. At sixty one wasn’t elastic still, one had one’s little drills for things and was fully entitled to do so. They made life simpler, they spun out leisure, but what was very dangerous was when the drill became its own reward, not the muddle avoided, the moment saved, but the deadly satisfaction of having completed some trifle efficiently. If that was the trap of old age, its threshold, then Russell had seen it and wouldn’t step over.”

William Haggard, The Hardliners

Today marks the launch of artsjournal.com’s first jazz blog, Rifftides, written by veteran jazz journalist Doug Ramsey. In lieu of a recommendation, allow me to quote from what I wrote in The Wall Street Journal in April about Doug’s latest book, Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond:

It’s a serious, thoughtful book, as lucidly written as a first-class literary biography….While “Take Five: The Public and Private Lives of Paul Desmond” contains plenty of show-stopping gossip, it is in no way a pathography. Scrupulously researched and written with an attractive combination of affection and candor, it casts a bright light on Desmond’s troubled psyche without devaluing his considerable achievements as an artist. “Any of the great composers of melodies–Mozart, Schubert, Gershwin–would have been gratified to have written what Desmond created spontaneously,” Mr. Ramsey says. Strong words, but “Take Five” makes them stick.

Welcome to the blogosphere, Doug. It’s a pleasure to have you aboard.

Like everybody else in the world, I’ve become a compulsive shuffle-player. To date I’ve loaded 2,849 “songs” onto my iBook and iPod, and while I occasionally pick and choose from them at will, I usually let myself be surprised. One evening last week, iTunes unexpectedly served up a string of selections fraught with personal associations. Listening to them put me in mind of the scene in High Fidelity (I can’t remember whether it’s in the novel as well) in which John Cusack explains how he arranged his LP collection in “autobiographical order”:

If I want to play, say, Blue by Joni Mitchell, I have to remember that I bought it for somebody in the autumn of 1983, but didn’t give it to them for personal reasons.

Me, I’m a chronological kind of guy, so much so that the upper left-hand corner of the first CD shelf in my office-bedroom is actually occupied by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Nevertheless, I very much appreciate the theory of autobiographical order, and I thought it might amuse you to hear some of the long-lost memories summoned up by my iBook:

• The Classics IV, Stormy. This must have been the first 45 I bought with my own money. I know the year was 1969, and the other singles I remember buying around that time were Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” and Sergio Mendes’ “Mais Que Nada” (good choices both). I liked Dennis Yost’s soft, furry voice much more than well enough, but it was the song’s minor-key, modally tinted harmonies that caught and held my ear. They still do.

• George Strait, I’ve Come to Expect It From You. New Yorkers are almost always surprised to learn that I like country music. In fact, I grew up with it–I played in a country band in high school–and my appreciation for its clear-eyed view of romance and its discontents deepens as the years go by. I heard this tight-lipped, no-nonsense lament (I guess that I should thank my unlucky stars/That I’m alive/And you’re the way you are/But that’s what I get/I’ve come to expect it from you) on a car radio as I skidded over ice-covered highways after a performance of Turandot in Buffalo, and I picked up a copy of the CD as soon as I returned to Manhattan in one piece.

• Neil Young, The Loner. This is from Young’s first solo album, which I bought after reading about it in The Rolling Stone Record Review, a paperback anthology published in 1971. Some of those reviews were so vividly written that I can recall them to this day, and I thumbed through my heavily dogeared copy until it disintegrated. (Too bad I didn’t hang onto the loose pages. According to Alibris, used copies now sell for as much as $199 apiece.) I lost my youthful taste for the inside jokes and insipidities of Crosby, Stills & Nash a quarter-century ago, but Neil Young’s best songs still speak to me, and this was one of the first tracks I downloaded from iMusic last year.

• Elvis Presley, Jailhouse Rock. My family used to vacation at the Howard Johnson next door to Graceland (it’s long gone) back when Elvis Presley was thin. Alas, I already thought Elvis was irredeemably square, and it wasn’t until I saw Jailhouse Rock on TV as an adult that I caught on to what I’d been missing. Lilo was soooo right: the man rocked.

• Lou Reed, White Light/White Heat. This is from Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal, one of the fieriest and most furious live albums ever recorded. I heard it at a 1974 kegger where everybody but me was getting drunk, high, or laid. I, on the other hand, stuck close to the living-room record player, marveling at the slashing interplay between Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter, Reed’s guitarists. I was such a geekazoid avant la lettre, but at least I knew a good thing when I heard it.

• Cole Porter, Anything Goes. Porter recorded several of his own songs for Victor in 1934, accompanied only by his own clumpy piano and sounding rather like a dapper, effete gnome with slicked-back hair, which is pretty much what he was. I first heard this scratchy old 78 being played over the opening credits of The Boys in the Band, a film which then struck me as the acme of sophistication. I had a lot to learn, including the fact that Porter was singing the original, uncensored lyrics to “Anything Goes”: If old hymns you like/Or bare limbs you like/If Mae West you like/Or me undressed you like/Why, nobody will oppose. Nobody ever penned a craftier rhyme.

• Spike Jones, Cocktails for Two. Spike Jones is one of my earliest memories: he had a Sunday-night TV show in the late ’50s and early ’60s that my parents watched from time to time. Decades later, my friend Tim Page introduced me to this wildly funny record, and though I must have played it a hundred times since then, its lunatic incongruities still make me laugh out loud. (Just yesterday I noticed that one of the characters in I.Q. uses “Cocktails for Two” as a demonstration record for his sound system.)

• Dwight Yoakam, Honky Tonk Man. I fell out of touch with the country-music scene in college and for a long time afterward, thus missing out on the rise of the New Traditionalists, of whom Yoakam was one of the most significant and influential. Unlikely as it may sound, I discovered this wonderful song on a Smithsonian Institution box set of country records. I went right out and bought Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc., subsequently becoming a lifelong fan.

• Sidney Bechet/Rex Stewart/Earl Hines/Baby Dodds, Save It, Pretty Mama. I found out about jazz from my father’s big-band 78s, but my high-school record library also had a surprisingly varied selection of jazz LPs, among them a Sidney Bechet anthology on RCA Vintage that contained this strutting, suavely self-assured 1941 performance. Bechet has occupied a prominent place in my pantheon of great jazz soloists ever since the day I checked out Bechet of New Orleans (thank you, Fred Huff!). The best thing about “Save It, Pretty Mama,” though, is Baby Dodds’ immaculately swinging drumming. Press rolls are way cool.

• The Grateful Dead, Casey Jones. I was never, ever a Deadhead (eeuuww!), but I made an exception for Workingman’s Dead, whose clean, spare, mostly unamplified songs were praised to the skies in a review published in the late, lamented Stereo Review, the first music magazine to which I ever subscribed. (It was in Stereo Review that I also learned about Bobby Short.) I bought the LP on the strength of that piece, and I bought the CD version a quarter-century later on the strength of my fond memories. Some of the songs haven’t aged well, but I like “Dire Wolf” and “Casey Jones” as much as I ever did.

“The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.”

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Not to be missed: The Cod goes to Mr. and Mrs. Smith (though not in Washington). Hide your squalling children.

The Washington Post recently asked its arts writers to recommend “favorite books about favorite subjects.” Our recommendations appeared in Sunday’s paper, and you’ll find them here. (Each one is separately linked.)

Here’s mine:

Alec Wilder, who died in 1980, was one of the least classifiable human beings who ever lived. A sort-of-classical composer who doubled as a sort-of-popular songwriter, he wrote a few hits (“I’ll Be Around,” “While We’re Young”) and a medium-size stack of not-quite-standard ballads (“I See It Now,” “South to a Warmer Place,” “Did You Ever Cross Over to Sneden’s?”) sung and adored by such stellar vocalists as Frank Sinatra and Mabel Mercer. Late in life, Wilder was persuaded to set down his thoughts on the great popular songwriters of the 20th century, and despite his well-deserved reputation as a chronic procrastinator, he finally managed to produce a full-length book (written in collaboration with the popular-music scholar James Maher, who served as his patient amanuensis).

Though published by an academic press, American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (Oxford University, 1990 reissue, $45) is about as scholarly as a late-afternoon chat in a dark, oak-paneled bar. Holding forth in an informal, unabashedly opinionated style, Wilder offers a guided tour of the collected works of Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, the Gershwin brothers, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hart, and a sprinkling of lesser but still important lights, writing both as a connoisseur and as an important songwriter in his own right. The results border at times on thinly disguised autobiography….

Read the whole thing here.

I had grand plans for this evening. Yesterday I wrote half of a post responding to Chip McGrath’s New York Times piece on class in American fiction, but I couldn’t finish it before bedtime arrived. Tonight was the night I was going to unearth my copy of “In the Cage” and wrap that up. Also, it’s developed over just the last week that I am going to be moving in six weeks, and I need to make my apartment showable ASAP. So I was going to drag the laptop into the bedroom, where both the window unit and the critical mass of clutter are, bask in the coolth, and alternately write my post and put things away. Two birds with one air conditioner. Now here it is 10:07 and I’ve neither written a word nor stashed a sock. I’m also in the hot and sticky living room for some reason, feeling like I’m going to drop off two hours ahead of schedule. So something, perhaps both things, are going to give.

My mistake? Taking to the bike path as soon as I got home from work, out of my modified pantsuit, and into some workout clothes. After a year of inexplicably neglecting my bike and the glorious lakefront bike path just steps from my door, I got around to having the poor creaky thing tuned up last week. (South Siders: patronize this establishment. Yuvie’s your man.) I’ve now had three outings, tonight being the longest and possibly the most breathtaking, in more ways than one. Nowhere else I’ve ever lived has brought exercise in such close and easy proximity with gorgeousness. Chicago has pretty much spoiled me for working out in gyms, other than lifting weights, an activity that seems to be actually enhanced by an ugly, grubby, smelly setting.

Anyway. Despite the many possible moods of Lake Michigan, which I have been known to find inspiring, some days it’s not moody or interesting or sublime but perfectly, insipidly pretty, torn straight from a travel brochure. That was the deal tonight, the water merrily rippling and vacationland-blue–and what’s more, the path was amazingly free of jackasses. Somebody actually apologized for getting in my way at one point, an unheard-of nicety that practically made me fall off my bike and crack my skull.

I rode from 57th Street to the boat launch just north of the museum campus. They keep improving the bike path, and one of the best developments, dating back maybe five or six years, was to route it around the back of the Shedd Aquarium in a half-circle. Biking this stretch, you’ve got the oceanarium on one side of you–though you can’t, alas, see the belugas–and the lake on the other. You have to slow way down, though–it’s as narrow as possible, and a popular stretch of the path for pedestrians of the sightseeing variety: leisurely, benignly clueless, disinclined to stay on their side of the yellow line. That in itself doesn’t bother me, except that the racer boys–and yes, they’re nearly always boys–don’t believe in slowing down even in the interest of life and limb, their own or anyone else’s. So they bully their way through, frightening small children and benefiting from the forbearance of those around them; in the event of a crash, their speed and height make them odds-on favorites to scramble their brains on the pavement, helmets or no. But they survive by the good graces of those they weave around perilously, and they don’t entirely manage to spoil a good thing.

The whole ride long I was thinking how sad it was that I don’t have a camera in my phone and that we don’t have images on the blog, and so I couldn’t share the glories of the lakefront with all of you. But I knew, too, that this was a kind of beauty that wouldn’t translate well, being so bland. You’ve seen a thousand pretty pictures of a sparkling body of water on a brilliantly sunny day–even one dotted with white sails, I daresay–and another one would have made your eyes glaze over, or roll. There wasn’t anything all that remarkable about it. In fact, had I not been sweating and thirsting and fighting the wind, I may not even have found it so beautiful. I did, and it was, but it didn’t matter or last. In 24 hours or less, I’ll have forgotten all about it. Sometimes, though, it strikes me as completely insane that I can forget with impunity, that there’s essentially an endless supply of this. I like the lake best when it surprises me, which it does, often. But even when it doesn’t–or especially when it doesn’t–it’s pretty reliably stunning. Less beautiful, more interesting. Less interesting, more beautiful. You never lose with this lake.

To stop making a short story tremendously long, I’ll fast-forward and say that I got home and gave in to watching the premiere of TNT’s The Closer, which the network has been hyping for what seems like six months and I think actually is. It wasn’t bad. I liked how Kyra Sedgwick was constantly eating doughnuts and such. One scene had her deliberating carefully among ice-cream confections, a tad too easy a way of investing a tough-as-nails character with girlish vulnerability, but still and all, one that winningly features ice-cream confections. Although the obvious precursor for the show is Prime Suspect, to which it will never live up, the opening scene was ripped straight out of Silence of the Lambs (and then tweaked). I’ll probably watch again, but then, my TV standards are not “high.”

Aside from the couch potato routine, I spent the evening downing a lot of my own personal summertime nectar and eating a crudely constructed, you might say jerry-rigged, dinner, then sat down to excuse myself from blogging, and here we are. I probably won’t get to the McGrath thing until Wednesday now, and I’ll have to live with the mortification of imagining strangers tracking through here tomorrow getting an eyeful of clothes out of drawers and books off of shelves as far as the eye can see. But hey, I posted!

On Sunday I hung the newest addition to the Teachout Museum, Kenneth Noland’s Circle I (II-3). Published in 1978 by Tyler Graphics as part of Noland’s Handmade Paper Project, it consists of three layers of colored, pressed paper pulp with three lithographic monoprint impressions, floated on a white, cloth-covered board and sealed in a plexiglass box. Go here and here to see four pieces from the Handmade Paper Project. Mine is the one in the center of the bottom row of the first page. The photo isn’t very good, but it’ll give you a rough idea of what Circle I (II-3) looks like.

Noland, who was born in 1924, had been painting concentric circles for two decades when he made Circle I (II-3). These “Circle” paintings, the ones for which he’s best known today, are widely regarded as studies in pure color, but his own view is more nuanced: “People talk about color in the ‘Circles,’ but they are also about scales and juxtapositions. Making them taught me everything about scale.” In addition, the “Circle” prints in the Handmade Paper Series are also “about” the rough, unpredictably complex surfaces and textures of the paper out of which they are made. My print actually has something of the effect of a sculpture: it exists in space, not merely as a flattened-out image.

The experience of making the “Circle” prints left its mark on Noland’s later work, as Karen Wilkin explains in an invaluable 1990 monograph on the artist:

For all their declarative, legible structure, his [pre-1980] pictures were as disembodied as “something that you heard.” Their astonishing color appeared to have magically fallen into place; as though in order to appeal directly to the sense of sight, Noland had banished all sense of touch. Yet early in the 1980s, he began to explore media that depended utterly on touch…Cast paper proved especially fascinating to him. Working with colored paper pulp forced him literally to move color around as a tactile substance, instead of applying it as a skin on a flat surface. (He once described the process as “making a picture out of colored cottage cheese.”) It was a stimulating sensation. When he began to paint again soon after this experience, he found that he wanted the physicality of the cast paper works in his canvases. “I wanted to get expressive possibilities back into picture through the use of my hands or touch,” Noland says.

Though Noland and his fellow color-field painter Jules Olitski have been out of fashion for a long time now, I continue to admire their work, which speaks to me in much the same way as do music and plotless dance. I’ve been looking for an affordable Noland handmade-paper monoprint for the better part of two years, and I tracked one down last week (this is where I found it). Circle I (II-3) now hangs below the second most recent addition to the Teachout Museum, Olitski’s Forward Edge. The two pieces share the northwest corner of my living room with Grey Fireworks, a screenprint by Helen Frankenthaler, whose poured paintings of the Fifties were a major influence on Noland, Olitski, and their colleague Morris Louis (who called Frankenthaler “a bridge between [Jackson] Pollock and what was possible”).

That’s the good news. The bad news is that with the arrival of Circle I (II-3), I’ve finally run out of wall space. I spent a half-hour rehanging five other prints in order to make a place for it. Even with three pieces relocated to my loft, I no longer have room for anything much larger than a small etching. To be sure, the piece of art I most covet is a small etching, but I let it get away from me at an auction a year and a half ago, and it’s likely to be a long, long time (i.e., a cold day in hell) before I track down another copy at a price I can even pretend to afford. The other pieces for which I’m looking, a color lithograph by Hans Hofmann and a pastel by Arnold Friedman, are both larger than any of the remaining gaps on my walls.

What to do? I know a connoisseur in Chicago who bought a second apartment to house his collection, but he’s rich and I’m not. Nor would I consider moving to a larger place, even if I could afford to do so: I love my cozy little home, and I’ve fussed over it too long to let it go now. Several friends have suggested that I start rotating my collection, and one or two have even offered to serve as the recipients of long-term loans. I’m not entirely averse to the idea–in fact, I rather like it–but I’m not sure I could bring myself to go through with it, at least for the moment. (Sorry, Ali!) Part of the pleasure of owning art, after all, is being able to see it whenever you want. As of this morning, 34 pieces hang on the walls of my apartment, each one beautiful in its own right and all of them additionally beautiful as part of the larger totality that is the Teachout Museum. How could I possibly give one away, even temporarily? It’d be like shipping one of your kids off to a foster home.

Be that as it may, something’s got to give, so I probably won’t be buying anything else anytime soon–unless, of course, I change my mind, which I probably will. I guess I might as well face it: my name is Terry, and I’m a small-time art junkie. It’s not the worst addiction in the world.

UPDATE: A fellow New Yorker writes:

Andr