Archives for 2005

I’m back in Chicago tonight, much against my will, and I’m afraid I don’t have much left in the tank, figuratively or literally. Christmas was lovely but it was brutally compressed and fleeting. Can it have been only yesterday? My family was in nonstop action from ten in the morning until eleven at night, and when I awoke this morning the bags had to be packed and loaded, the kitty-cat medicated (pink calm-down pills to which she seems impervious), the road hit.

I’m kind of expecting the day at work tomorrow to shred me. But I hope and plan nevertheless to get something of some substance up here in the evening, however folded, spindled, and mutilated I may emerge. In the meantime, allow me to point you toward worthy content elsewhere:

– Cinetrix gifts us with not one, but two reviews of recent films over at Pullquote. They are David Cronenberg’s History of Violence and Noah Baumbach’s The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach’s film KIcking and Screaming recently made my Meme of Four list. (She also had a grade-A celeb sighting to ring in the holidays.)

– Quiet Bubble, a recent discoverer of Jane Austen, has posted a typically sharp review of the newest film adaptation. QB just gets better and better.

– Top-ten lists of the year’s best cultural offerings are well and good and, well, unavoidable. I prefer the tack taken by M.S. Smith at CultureSpace, a brief conversational essay that doesn’t confine itself to things that were new in 2005, but to things that were new to Smith. This has been up for a couple of weeks already, for all of which time I’ve been meaning to link to it. If I were to make a list of my top ten cultural discoveries of 2005, CultureSpace and Quiet Bubble would definitely be on it.

– More bookishly, Newsday has a round-up of several critics’ favorite reads of the year. Among the experts are ALN blogroll mainstays Maud Newton and James Marcus. Remember, many of the books named will be published in paperback right around the corner (herein, I think, lies the real usefulness of these lists, to remind us of everything we failed to read but can soon read more cheaply by virtue of lagging).

Finally, an administrative note. I owe several of you email. Thanks awfully for writing, and please bear with me one more day. I’ll be in touch tomorrow.

Not only am I not dead yet, but I’m back in The Wall Street Journal today with a review of two shows, Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life:

George Bernard Shaw had all the defects of all his virtues. He offered Edwardian theatergoers a heady brew of progressive ideas–but the left-wing notions that propelled his once-controversial plays long ago lost their power to shock. His characters were forever tossing off speeches that crackled and fizzed with wit–but they never knew when to shut up. Even the best of his plays can be unutterably tedious in anything short of a near-perfect performance. Am I surprised, then, that the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” is so exciting? Not even slightly. When it comes to my favorite Off Broadway company, I take such marvels for granted….

I wasn’t around for the 1975 New York Shakespeare Festival revival of “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which starred Lynn Redgrave and Ruth Gordon, but I can’t imagine it having been superior to this production, which ranks with “The Trip to Bountiful” and “Sweeney Todd” at the top of my list of new shows worth seeing….

It’s not ungentlemanly to say that Chita Rivera is 72, since she makes no secret of it. Nor has she sought to conceal the fact that her “autobiographical” show, “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life,” was written by playwright Terrence McNally. For that matter, “The Dancer’s Life” isn’t even a one-woman show: Ms. Rivera does nearly all the talking, but she’s backed by an ensemble of ten dancers and an on-stage orchestra. So if you were expecting something similar to “At Liberty,” Elaine Stritch’s brassily candid solo show about life upon the wicked stage, you’re going to be surprised by “The Dancer’s Life,” which feels more like an as-told-to musical than a hot-dish gossipfest. It’s brisk, slick, just a little bit impersonal–and boundlessly entertaining….

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing, pick up a copy of today’s Journal, or give yourself a Christmas present by going here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review (along with lots of other art-related stories).

Not forever! But in light of my new resolve to take things easier, my plan for the coming week is to blog minimally–if at all. I might conceivably poke my head in once or twice, but don’t count on seeing me again until next Friday.

Before I go, here’s a sneak preview of my next “Sightings” column, “Not for Blacks Only,” which will be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:

Morgan Freeman may have a bone to pick with you–especially if you’ve ever had occasion to refer to him as “one of America’s best black actors.” Which he is, of course, the same way that Lynn Nottage is one of America’s best black playwrights, or Martin Puryear one of America’s best black sculptors. But the trouble with these three descriptions is that each contains the same needlessly limiting adjective. Mr. Freeman is one of America’s best actors–period. To narrow the scope of his superiority to other actors with black skin would be like calling Helen Frankenthaler “one of America’s best woman painters”: True, yes, and totally beside the point….

Needless to say, there’s plenty more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

One last thing: I suspect that most of you have some idea of how deeply touched I am by your kind words and best wishes. There is nothing I could possibly say that would do more than hint at what I’m feeling right now, so I’ll put it as simply as I can: you have lifted up my heart.

Merry Christmas!

“I think the name of leisure has come to cover three totally different things. The first is being allowed to do something. The second is being allowed to do anything. And the third (and perhaps most rare and precious) is being allowed to do nothing.”

G.K. Chesterton, “Our Notebook,” Illustrated London News (July 23, 1927)

Not a lot of arts content from my corner this week, but I do have this recipe for the cookie that has been deemed best in show at our house this year.

Pecan Cups


1 cup flour

3 oz. cream cheese

1/4 lb. butter, softened

3/4 cup brown sugar, firmly packed

1 tbsp. melted butter

1 egg

1 cup chopped pecans

dash salt

3 drops vanilla

Make the dough by blending flour, cream cheese, and softened butter together well. In a separate bowl, combine remaining ingredients to make the filling. Roll dough into 1-inch balls and flatten evenly into mini-muffin pan cups, dough flush with tops of cups. Drop about a teaspoon of filling into each cup (do not overfill). Bake in a 350-degree oven for 25-30 minutes.

Walnuts would work, too. We doubled the recipe, a wise move since we ate half the results almost immediately.

UPDATE: A reader knowledgeable in these matters writes, “This recipe is an old Southern favorite of British origin. The

Happy holidays! Since arriving home Tuesday night, I’ve been sucked into the vortex of Christmas at the parents’, a nonstop whirlwind of baking, wrapping, bow-tying, and, still, shopping, which is where we’re headed now. A few items on the fly:

My poem is up today at Coudal Partners. I haven’t had the guts to listen. Hope it turned out all right.

There are three really curious cats around here, and one enormous bedecked tree. They seem utterly disinclined to jump on it. Are stories of cats downing Christmas trees mainly apocryphal? Send your true tales of tree mayhem to me.

I’m about to be left behind! More later.

I awoke at six a.m. on Tuesday with sentences forming in my head. Knowing there was no point to staying in bed, I got up to write my Friday drama column for The Wall Street Journal, the first time I’d written anything for money since I went to the hospital.

This time, though, I didn’t stick to my normal obsessive-compulsive routine of going straight from bed to desk. Instead I headed for the kitchen of my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., where I popped an English muffin in the toaster, poured myself a bowl of raisin bran, and sat down at the table with a small glass of orange juice, there to reflect on my changed state. At forty-nine I’ve made a discovery: Breakfast Is the Most Important Meal of the Day, especially for overweight workaholics with slightly enlarged left ventricles. So now I eat my raisin bran every day, like it or not, and the exasperating part is that I do like it. Somehow I doubt anyone really enjoys finding out in middle age that the rest of the world has always been right. Breakfast every morning, a vacation every year…what next? Am I to become a reality-TV addict?

From there I shuffled down the hall to my bedroom, pulled a folding chair up to the rickety card table next to the bed, turned on my iBook, and dialed up the Web to find out what was happening in the rest of the world (my mother doesn’t have a computer of her own, much less a high-speed connection). I downloaded my e-mail, checked out the latest details of the New York transit strike, eyeballed a couple of favorite blogs, logged off, and started writing. Save for the change of venue and the fact that I was writing on a full stomach, I might almost have been at my own desk in Manhattan.

Of course I wasn’t, nor am I the same person who sat at that desk two weeks ago and knocked out a review of The Trip to Bountiful. For one thing, I’m twenty pounds lighter, and both my arms are still covered with the bruises that heart patients invariably bring home from the hospital as souvenirs of their stay (every shot the nurses give you leaves a bruise behind when you’re taking daily doses of a blood thinner). Nor did the words that gush forth from my fingers on Tuesday mornings come quite so easily this time around. It took me an hour and a half longer than usual to finish my column.

Those weren’t the only reminders of what I’d been through. I reviewed two plays this week. One was the last show I saw before going into the hospital–the one from whose preview I had to be helped into a cab by a press agent–and the other was the first I saw after coming home last Tuesday. It felt strange to open my notebook and look at the random phrases I’d scribbled down in the dark while watching Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, wondering as I scribbled whether I’d live long enough to file my review. One of them was a line from Terrence McNally’s script, a description of Bob Fosse, the director of Sweet Charity and Chicago: “All smiles and cigarette smoke.” I thought of All That Jazz, the movie in which Fosse dramatized his first heart attack, the one he survived. (It was the second one that killed him.) The line was perfectly legible, as if the person sitting behind me had been shining a flashlight on my notebook while I wrote it down. I made a point of including it in the review.

At length I finished the piece and e-mailed it to my editor at the Journal, afraid it might not be up to par. I thought it was, but what did I know? Perhaps I’d lost my touch. A couple of hours later the copyeditor kicked it back with a couple of minor queries, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Whatever else my brush with death had done to me, I could still write. The trick, I thought, will be to write a bit less, to spend more nights sitting at home listening to music and looking at the Teachout Museum, to knock off earlier each day and go to bed earlier each night and take a day or two off each month. Or maybe even each week.

All changed, changed utterly, I told myself, knowing too well that it won’t be so easy as that. Every day I’ll get out of bed and do battle with the demon who drives me, and every night I’ll go to bed and rest up for the next day’s fight. Some days I’ll win, some days I won’t. The trick, I suppose, will be to win more often than not, to slowly drain the congestion of overwork from my life as the doctors at Lenox Hill Hospital drained the excess fluid from my heart and lungs. Would there were a pill for that! Instead I must teach myself to make more room for life and love and everything else I spent the past few years pushing away. That’s something I learned in the hospital: if you want to be loved, you have to make room.

I spent the rest of Tuesday watching old movies on TV, idly chatting with my mother about nothing in particular, and talking on the phone to friends who longed to know more about the changes in my life that began when I called 911 last week. I slept deeply and well, then awoke at six with new phrases forming in my head. Knowing there was no point to staying in bed, I got up to write my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Journal–but not before breakfast.

“Word has reached me that you are having fun on the set. This must stop.”

Jack Warner, from a memo sent to Howard Hawks during the shooting of To Have and Have Not (quoted in Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood)