Archives for March 2006

“The way one betrays one’s old loves–getting the new one to read Trivia or Matthew Arnold, going to the same churchyard. When we are older there seems no new approach left. The disillusionment of finding out that something (say Trivia) has been his thing with someone else.”

Barbara Pym, undated notebook entry (c. 1949)

I found this questionnaire in my e-mailbox earlier today and thought it might be fun to answer it in public:

• What time did you get up this morning? Eight a.m.

• Diamonds or pearls? No preference.

• What was the last film you saw at the cinema? Believe it or not, Capote.

• What is your favorite TV show? I really don’t have one, though I’ve been enjoying the reruns of The Equalizer currently playing on Sleuth TV.

• What did you have for breakfast? Grape-Nuts and skim milk, with a few raisins thrown in.

• What is your middle name? Alan.

• What is your favorite cuisine?, Er, yikes, that’s a tough one! Maybe sushi?

• What food do you dislike? Blue cheese.

• What is your favorite potato chip? Salt and vinegar, mmmmm.

• What is your favorite CD at the moment? Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac….

• What kind of car do you drive? I don’t have one.

• Favorite sandwich? Grilled ham (smoked salmon is a very close second, though).

• What characteristics do you despise? Thoughtlessness.

• What are your favorite clothes? I don’t think much about clothes and don’t have any strong preferences.

• If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you
go? Bologna, to see the Museo Morandi.

• What color is your bathroom? Yellow and cornflower blue.

• Favorite brand of clothing? I don’t have one.

• Where would you want to retire to? I hope never to retire.

• Favorite time of day? The blue hour.

• Where were you born? Cape Girardeau, Mo.

• Favorite sport to watch? Hockey, with Our Girl.

• Who do you least expect to send this back? Not applicable.

• Who will be the first to respond? Ditto.

• Coke or Pepsi? I like them equally.

• Are you a morning person or night owl? Night owl.

• Any new and exciting news you’d like to share with everyone? Nothing I’m inclined to share just yet.

• What did you want to be when you were little? A fireman.

• What is a favorite childhood memory? Spending holidays with my aunts, uncles, and cousins out in the country.

• What are the different jobs you have had in your life? Musical-instrument repairman, bank teller, jazz musician, library clerk, editor, writer.

• Nicknames? None in current use (I’ve been going by “Terry” for so long that I don’t think of it as a nickname).

• Any piercings? Lord, no.

• Eye color? Brown.

• Ever been to Africa? No.

• Ever been toilet papering? No.

• Been in a car accident? No.

• Favorite day of the week? As a friend of mine likes to say, every day above ground is a good day.

• Favorite restaurant? Good Enough to Eat, of course!

• Favorite flower? I’m not fussy.

• Favorite ice cream? Alas, I’m off ice cream these days.

• Favorite fast food restaurant? Taco Bell.

• Which store would you choose to max out your credit card? Sotheby’s.

• Bedtime? These days, 12:30 or so.

• Who are you most curious about their responses to this
questionnaire? Our Girl, naturally.

• Last person(s) you went to dinner with? Hilary, Corbin, and Henry.

• What are you listening to right now? The traffic on 82nd Street.

• What is your favorite color? I haven’t one.

• How many tattoos do you have? None.

• Who was the last e-mail you got before this one? I can’t remember–I was sifting through a whole day’s worth of accumulated e-mail, most of it junk, when I found this questionnaire.

• How many people are you sending this e-mail to? Thousands and thousands!

• What time did you finish this e-mail? One-thirty-five p.m.

It seems I stirred up a considerable fuss with the recent Wall Street Journal column in which I explained why I’d never been crazy about the singing of Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan. You may be surprised to hear, incidentally, that the fuss came from both directions–I even received an e-mail from a very prominent cabaret singer thanking me for “telling the truth” about Ella and Sarah.

Among the other people from whom I heard was a reader in search of enlightenment:

Very interesting column! I’m not sure I agree about Sarah Vaughan, but I can see right away where you are coming from. I’m sure you are getting a lot of comments about putting Fred Astaire in a list of favorites in an article where you take two legends to task. But again, I take the point. I’ve always sort of ignored him as someone who “sang like an actor,” but your spin makes me see that in a different light.

Astaire is well represented on iTunes. Any recommendations?

This e-mail surprised me, since most of us middle-aged pop-song connnoisseurs take Astaire’s vocal excellence so completely for granted that it would never occur to us how anyone could have overlooked his singing. To be sure, he was modest to a fault, and never admitted to having been anything more than a dancer who sang on the side. “He had put together, at his home, a film library of all his dance numbers,” Andr

Isolated in love as in a dark wood,

Our two hearts, breathing their peaceful tenderness,

Will be two nightingales singing in the eventide.

Without anxiety as to what Fate holds in store for us,

We shall walk side by side,

Hand in hand, with the childlike soul

Of those whose mutual love is unalloyed–will it not be so?

Paul Verlaine, “N’est-ce pas?” (trans. Roger Nichols)

What do artists do all day? Many of them spend their working hours alone, sitting at a desk or standing at an easel and wrestling with their imaginations. But others don’t have that luxury. If you run a ballet company, for instance, you do your creating in a crowded studio–and you spend most of the day acting more like a CEO than a creative artist.

I went down to Raleigh two weeks ago to pay a visit to Carolina Ballet (and hang out with Ms. Pratie Place). I was there to see Tempest Fantasy, a new ballet by Robert Weiss, the company’s artistic director set to Paul Moravec‘s Pulitzer-winning composition of the same name. In between performances, I spent a day following Weiss around. I’d expected to spend most of it watching the company rehearse. Instead, I got my nose rubbed in the exhausting realities of a choreographer’s life.

Weiss is both artistic director and chief executive officer of Carolina Ballet. Though he choreographs roughly half of the ballets danced by the company, the bulk of his time is given over to far less elevated tasks. Here’s some of what I saw him do that day:

– He paid a visit to company class, where he watched as two out-of-town dancers looking for work were put through their pli

“Then let us love one another and laugh. Time passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer–and meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer absurdities, for that is only to suffer one another.”

Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome (courtesy of Michael C. Magree)

My dialogue with Kenneth Burns about Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel Prep continues here.

Howdy Kenneth,

I loved the scene you mentioned in which Lee refuses to read aloud in class her essay revealing that her father runs a mattress store. And I think it is in scenes like this that Sittenfeld’s novel is discernible as a bona fide adult novel, despite its surface similarities to many a YA book, and as a novel depicting a social reality rather than the sort of idealized world in which simply “being yourself” is a sure road to rewards–the sort of world endemic, but far from limited, to YA. The reader, I submit, knows in her heart of hearts that Lee has sized up her peers’ class prejudices acutely and that on some crucial level she is right to suppress the knowledge of her father’s occupation. Not because it is shameful, obviously, but because in the setting in which she needs to survive, it will only make things harder. In a lesser novel, Lee’s choice would feel like a disappointment and defeat; in this bracingly disillusioned one, it made me feel relieved. Which is not to say it wasn’t heartbreaking, too.

As fascinated and moved as I was by Lee’s travails, I wouldn’t exactly call this a case of identification. It’s true–since you have egged me on to get personal–that I switched from public to private school for tenth to twelfth grades and that there was some associated culture shock and loneliness. But my school wasn’t Ault (though quite fancy, it was far from the east coast and mostly a day school) and I wasn’t Lee. What I identified with in the book had more to do with form than with content–it wasn’t the content of Lee’s experience that catapulted me back to those good/bad old days, but Sittenfeld’s formal approach of accreting an overwhelming multitude of mundane and ephemeral details to represent a way of taking in the world when one is unsure where one belongs in it (doubly for Lee, both by virtue of being a teenager and by virtue of being a fish out of water socially): observing and trying to properly interpret everything in one’s path, looking for clues that might chip away at the incomprehensibility of one’s surroundings. I think it’s pretty amazing that Sittenfeld was able to approximate that perceptual mode so uncannily while not boring us to tears with the details themselves–quite the contrary.

My parting question to you, should you choose to accept it, is this: what did you think of the ready-made structure of the book, which turns each season of Lee’s career at Ault into a chapter? Too facile or true to the way teenagers emplot their lives?

xo

OGIC

It’s time to start blogging again–or at least it would be if I hadn’t been too busy of late to sit down and write. In addition to seeing Ring of Fire, Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and Grey Gardens, I also went to Zankel Hall to hear Ian Bostridge, caught Mark Morris’ conducting debut in Brooklyn, got to DC Moore Gallery just in time for the last day of their Milton Avery-Jacob Lawrence show, and (drumroll) bought a Marsden Hartley lithograph at auction last Monday, which is now hanging proudly in the Teachout Museum.

Whew, huh? Sounds like the Bad Old Me, right? Well, it was, sort of, except that last week’s whirlwhind of art-related activity was (A) the first time I’ve been anywhere near that busy since I got out of the hospital in December and (B) a one-time deviation from my new, saner lifestyle. I slammed on the brakes as soon as I got home from the theater last night, and I intend to take it nice and slow for the rest of the month.

Having done all those cool things last week, I’ll be spending this week and next blogging about them. No rush–I have plenty of stories to tell. For the moment, I’ll start by making a major announcement: I painted my very first painting two weeks ago! Here it is, courtesy of Ms. Pratie Place, who talked me into it. (The photo posted on her site is wrong side up, by the way: the left-hand edge of the painting should be on top.) A homely thing, but mine own, and I had great fun doing it….

And now, if you’ll pardon me, I’ve got a drama column to write. See you tomorrow.