Archives for January 2006

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been easing my way back into blogging since I got out of the hospital. I’ve also been slow to resume surfing the Web, not because I love it less but because I’m afraid of it. For the recovering workaholic, a computer with a high-speed connection to the Internet is a perpetual temptation to excess, and I’m determined not to succumb. Nevertheless, I’ve started revisiting some of my favorite Web sites in recent days, and I’m struck all over again by how much more interesting they are than most of what I read in the mainstream media.

Here’s some of what I found there:

– Mr. Outer Life dreamed that he was reading his own biography:

My Boswell was nothing if not thorough. But as fact after fact piled up I found it harder and harder to find the me buried beneath. I mean, it’s interesting to note the shoes I wore in sixth grade, or my brand of toothpaste, or the scores I achieved on my SAT, or the friends I was closest to in college, or the books I enjoyed most when I was 32, but after a while it got really distracting, then it got annoying, this fire hose of facts drowning me on every page. I found myself reacting against this, at first trying to forget the facts but after a while simply repeating a mantra to myself, over and over: I am not those shoes, I am not that toothpaste, I am not those scores, I am not those friends, I am not those books….

– Lileks holds forth on Christmas songs:

They’re playing Christmas songs at the coffee shop now; the staff informs me that the selection consists of the same four songs played over and over again, but by different artists. I wouldn’t doubt it. There are only four songs, really–religious, secular songs sung like religious songs, happy upbeat modern tunes, and modern krep in which Grandma is run over by a reindeer or the various members of the family gather to rock around the Christmas tree….

This is nostalgia for some–it’s nostalgia for me, for that matter; I remember these versions from my childhood, although I never liked it–but you have to remember that it was nostalgia then, inasmuch as it refers to the “Currier and Ives” versions of the seasons that people already lamented losing. But that’s Christmas; a mass consensual illusion that the holiday existed in some perfect state, and that this state can be replicated again if we find the right combination of lights, ornaments, songs, nutmeg candles, Pottery Barn CD compilations, pine-scented infusers, kicky shoes and brie spreaders….

– My favorite blogger is in a didactic mood:

There are only three syllables in the word, but oh, they are such dangerous syllables. Pianist. Do you say it pompously, snobbishly, in a way that emphasizes the first syllable as if the word were three sixteenth notes placed squarely on beat one? “You’re a PI-an-ist?” This sounds haughty and condescending to my ears–I do not, after all, play a PI-an-o–but I always smile forgivingly and reiterate, “yes, I am a pianist,” as blandly and evenly as possible. In “notational” terms, out of three sixteenths, I tend to make the first a pick-up, saying the word “piano” and yielding to the “ist” four-fifths of the way through. (Sixteenth – bar line – two sixteenths.) Bleating like a lamb through the middle syllable (essentially giving it the full value of an eighth note) is another sloppy mispronunciation; though when accompanied by rolled eyes and lots of laughter, it’s also the perfect way for partying pi-AAN-ists to make fun of themselves….

– Richard Lawrence Cohen sums up art in a nutshell:

I once knew a man who commanded himself to write a sonnet every day for a year. He liked to say that God told him to. For a long time he wouldn’t show his sacred verses to anyone. At last he put them in a book and gave a reading, and I bought a copy.

The poems were skillfully done and showed a hard-earned knowledge of technique. They were full of smart soundplay and allusion and showed great sensitivity to the insensitivity of being male. He wrote about how strong his father was and how his wife had hurt him and how weak his father was and what a coarse, innocent teenager he had been. He wrote about eBay and iPod in meters Dryden had known. Every poem made me feel I had to tell him how good it was.

But of course there was something missing and he knew it. No need for anyone to say it. It wasn’t anything I could advise him to put in. To do that, I would have had to know where to find it. It was–let me try to think–it was that these were the poems any American man our age would have written if he could write poems. And while it was nice to see those things said with assonance and alliteration and half-rhyme and flexible rhythm, none of the lines was more beautiful than we had a right to ask. Which is, of course, what we have a right to ask….

– Jeannine Kellogg is similarly observant about the dilemma of the modern-day singleton:

All the media images bombarding us everyday imply that most everyone in the world is in love or falling in love. Yet there are many singles internet sites that offer to you the love of millions of singles at your keyboard fingertips. So if love or lust is so prevalent and so easily attained, then why are there millions on the internet paying so much money to search for it?

Our tax forms, insurance forms, employment forms, all ask us if we are “single” or “married.” It is our culture’s great delineator; those of us in love and those of us not. A friend said to me that she hated being asked by coworkers, parent’s friends, and married women, if she was single. When she answers, it’s as though she’s contracted a new incurable personality virus. At which point, the inquirer squints and winces and knows not what else to say. For her, an older single woman, the label of single sometimes just feels like a label adhered to the leftovers….

– Ms. A Glass of Chianti, who hails from Fort Worth, Texas, reads a knuckleheaded art review in the local newspaper and finds herself reflecting on the perpetual problem of where to live:

It’s not just art, of course. There’s not a culture of reading. People read, of course, they just tend not to read things that aren’t written by the new pastor of whatever megachurch recently expanded. The books are great; they teach people how to be more involved with their families and churches and communities and how to make God the center of their life… all of the things that really matter. People go to church on Sunday here. Ask any teacher and he will tell you that there is a lot of pressure not to assign homework that’s due on Thursday (as Wednesday is “church night” for most youth groups here).

Now, all of this isn’t to say that there’s nothing to see here. There’s a ton, but there isn’t anyone with whom to talk about it. On the one hand, an empty gallery makes viewing art much easier but on the other, you kind of start wondering what’s wrong with you that you’re all alone yet again. So, if it’s not a cultural wasteland, but people aren’t really engaged in the “high culture,” why might this be?…

As a small-town Missourian turned big-city aesthete, I often find myself pondering such questions. So did Willa Cather, who wrote about them with great subtlety and sympathy in many of her novels and short stories, never more penetratingly than in “A Wagner Matin

Julia Dollison, who sang with Maria Schneider‘s big band last week, is in town to promote her first CD, Observatory. To that end she’ll be performing tonight at the Jazz Standard, accompanied by Ben Monder on guitar, Matt Clohesy on bass, and Ted Poor on drums, the same band heard on the album.

Regular visitors to this blog won’t need further instructions, but if you’re just now joining us, here’s an excerpt from the liner notes I wrote for Observatory:

“There’s this singer I want you to meet. She’s really, really good.” I must hear at least three variations per month on that tired old theme, but when Maria Schneider spoke those words to me five years ago, I took them seriously. What kind of jazz singer, I asked myself, would be interesting enough to catch the ear of the outstanding big-band composer of her generation?

Here’s the answer.

It starts with the voice: warm, airy, dappled with summer sunshine, technically bulletproof from top to bottom….Such voices are born, not made, and Julia Dollison has one. Yet she never coasts on her chops. Instead, she sings like a horn player in love with lyrics, the way Lester Young knew all the words to every ballad he played. Her solos are pointed and meaningful, little musical stories that take you to places you’ve never been.

Then comes the style, an alchemical blend of jazz and pop that makes Harold Arlen and Rufus Wainwright sound not like strange bedfellows but the oldest of friends. Don’t call it “fusion,” though: that might smack of calculation, and there’s nothing calculated about Julia’s singing. She grew up listening to all kinds of music, and now she just sings what she hears, naturally and unselfconsciously….

Two sets, at 7:30 and 9:30. For more information, go here and scroll down.

“At the beginning of the season, when she was not singing often, she had gone one afternoon to hear Paderewski’s recital. In front of her sat an old German couple, evidently poor people who had made sacrifices to pay for their excellent seats. Their intelligent enjoyment of the music, and their friendliness with each other, had interested her more than anything on the programme. When the pianist began a lovely melody in the first movement of the Beethoven D minor sonata, the old lady put out her plump hand and touched her husband’s sleeve and they looked at each other in recognition. They both wore glasses, but such a look! Like forget-me-notes, and so full of happy recollections. Thea wanted to put her arms around them and ask them how they had been able to keep a feeling like that, like a nosegay in a glass of water.”

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)

– Doubt* (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene, closes July 2, reviewed here)

– Sweeney Todd (musical, R, adult situations, strong language, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Woman in White (musical, PG, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– Abigail’s Party (drama, R, adult subject matter, strong language, reviewed here, closes Apr. 8)

– In the Continuum (drama, R, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Jan. 28)

– Mrs. Warren’s Profession (drama, PG, adult subject matter, closes Feb. 19, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

– The Trip to Bountiful (drama, G, reviewed here, closes Feb. 19)

I’m back from a quick playgoing trip to Washington, D.C., just in time to review Nilo Cruz’s Beauty of the Father in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

Nilo Cruz, the prolific Cuban-American playwright, didn’t make his Broadway debut until 2003, when “Anna in the Tropics,” which won that year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, had a three-month run at the Royale Theatre. Though it got mixed reviews, I liked “Anna in the Tropics” very much and resolved to keep an eye on Mr. Cruz thereafter. Now he’s back in town with “Beauty of the Father,” a play about Emiliano, a bisexual artist (Ritchie Coster) whose reunion with his estranged daughter (Elizabeth Rodriguez) hits the skids when she falls for his boyfriend-prot

“I regard writing not as an investigation of character, but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed. I have no technical psychological interest. It is drama, speech and events that interest me.”

Evelyn Waugh, Paris Review interview (1962)

Following are passages from two mid-late Henry James works that concern things we know but, for reasons emotional and social, don’t quite own. When Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew opens, Maisie is six, her parents recently divorced, Moddle her nurse.

It seemed to have to do with something else that Moddle often said: “You feel the strain–that’s where it is; and you’ll feel it still worse, you know.

Thus from the first Maisie not only felt it, but knew she felt it. A part of it was the consequence of her father’s telling her he felt it too, and telling Moddle, in her presence, that she must make a point of driving that home. She was familiar, at the age of six, with the fact that everything had been changed on her account, everything ordered to enable him to give himself up to her. She was to remember always the words in which Moddle impressed upon her that he did so give himself: “Your papa wishes you never to forget, you know, that he has been dreadfully put about.” If the skin on Moddle’s face had to Maisie the air of being unduly, almost painfully stretched, it never presented that appearance so much as when she uttered, as she often had occasion to utter, such words. The child wondered if they didn’t make it hurt more than usual; but it was only after some time that she was able to attach to the picture of her father’s sufferings, and more particularly to her nurse’s manner about them, the meaning for which these things had waited. By the time she had grown sharper, as the gentlemen who had criticised her calves used to say, she found in her mind a collection of images and echoes to which meanings were attachable–images and echoes kept for her in the childish dusk, the dim closet, the high drawers, like games she wasn’t yet big enough to play. The great strain meanwhile was that of carrying by the right end the things her father said about her mother–things mostly indeed that Moddle, on a glimpse of them, as if they had been complicated toys or difficult books, took out of her hands and put away in the closet. A wonderful assortment of objects of this kind she was to discover there later, all tumbled up too with the things, shuffled into the same receptacle, that her mother had said about her father.

Maisie is a deep little vessel for knowledge, even knowledge she can’t yet understand. Her eventual strategy for handling the volatile stuff–for both fending off the parental versions and more efficiently capturing the genuine article–is to play dumb, to appear “not to take things in”:

The theory of her stupidity, eventually embraced by her parents, corresponded with a great date in her small still life: the complete vision, private but final, of the strange office she filled. It was literally a moral revolution and accomplished in the depths of her nature. The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phrases began to have a sense that frightened her. She had a new feeling, the feeling of danger; on which a new remedy rose to meet it, the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.

I think James intends this notion of a necessarily secretive inner self as both general and specific. The idea of concealment is inseparable from the idea of an inner self, but for a character like Maisie the role of concealment is heightened. It is, as well, for the unnamed telegraphist who is the protagonist of James’s novella “In the Cage”:

It has occurred to her early that in her position–that of a young person spending, in framed and wired confinement, the life of a guinea pig or a magpie–she should know a great many persons without their recognising the acquaintance. That made it an emotion the more lively–though singularly rare and always, even then, with opportunity still very much smothered–to see anyone come in whom she knew outside, as she called it, any one who could add anything to the meanness of her function. Her function was to sit there with two young men–the other telegraphist and the counter-clerk; to mind the “sounder,” which was always going, to dole out stamps and postal-orders, weigh letters, answer stupid questions, give difficult change and, more than anything else, count words as numberless as the sands of the sea, the words of the telegrams thrust, from morning to night, through the gap left in the high lattice, across the encumbered shelf that her forearm ached with rubbing. This transparent screen fenced out or fenced in, according to the side of the narrow counter on which the human lot was cast, the duskiest corner of a shop pervaded not a little, in winter, by the poison of perpetual gas, and at all times by the presence of hams, cheese, dried fish, soap, varnish, paraffin and other solids and fluids that she came to know perfectly by their smells without consenting to know them by their names.

The heartbreaking circularity of that opening paragraph has always gotten to me. A few pages later, James puts a finer point on her rough similarity to Maisie:

The girl was blas

I’m hitting the road for a few days–my first out-of-town theater trip since returning from Smalltown, U.S.A. I’ll be back on Thursday evening and will check in with you then.