Archives for April 14, 2006

I finished writing the rough draft of “It’s Got to Be Art,” the fifth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, yesterday afternoon. It takes Armstrong up through the end of 1928. (That’s five chapters out of ten.) I’m going to polish it today, then put the book aside for a couple of weeks.

Really.

See you Monday.

Time once again for the regular Friday-morning Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, in which I have mixed tidings to report. I liked some parts of Stuff Happens, but no part of Festen:

Like so many British artists, David Hare is drunk on politics, and believes the world is waiting to know how he thinks it should be run. At the same time he is, or can be, a talented playwright, acutely sensitive to the demands of the stage. These two impulses are at odds in “Stuff Happens,” which had its New York premiere last night at the Public Theater. In fact, “Stuff Happens” is two plays in one. The first is a Shakespeare-style history play in which Mr. Hare tries to imagine how George W. Bush and his advisers might have decided to go to war with Iraq. It’s pretty good–at times quite good–and on occasion almost convincing. The second is a documentary play about the Bush administration’s conduct of the war. It’s a flop, full of coarse caricatures and stiff with smugness.

The star of Play No. 1 is Colin Powell (Peter Francis James), whom Mr. Hare portrays as a “tragic hero” (his phrase) who knows the war is a mistake but lacks the courage of his convictions and so crumbles into tight-lipped pusillanimity when put to the test by President Bush (Jay O. Sanders). This is a dramatically promising situation and Mr. Hare makes much of it…

Oh, dear, incest again: David Eldridge’s “Festen,” a stage version of Thomas Vinterberg’s 1998 film “The Celebration,” is another of those extravaganzas in which the members of a dysfunctional family get together for dinner and suddenly start blurting out long-suppressed truths….

No link, so buy the damn paper, O.K.? I’m tired of telling you. And if you’re really feeling ambitious, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instantaneous access to the complete text of my review, along with loads of additional art-related coverage.

UPDATE: The Journal has now posted a free link to this review. To read the whole thing, go here.

Here’s a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:

Remember the “Mozart effect”? That was the shorthand phrase for a group of studies purporting to show that playing classical music to children raised their IQs in later life. The actual research made no such claims, but such was the simplified version that found its way into the public domain, achieving such wide circulation that Zell Miller, then the governor of Georgia, actually proposed in 1998 to earmark $105,000 to buy a classical album for every child born in that state. Alas, later research left the original findings in doubt, and though the phrase entered the language, the actual concept went into the scientific wastebasket.

Even so, there remains something irresistibly seductive about the notion that listening to Mozart might actually make you smarter. William Safire, who gave up political punditry to become chairman of the Dana Foundation, a private philanthropic group (the Web site is dana.org) with an interest in brain research, gave a speech last month in which he reported on the latest studies into the relationship between arts education and brain function. That may not sound sexy, but it is–at least potentially–a public-policy bombshell….

As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

I may be quiescent, but I’m not altogether inert. Here’s some of what I’ve collected while trolling the blogosphere during the past few weeks:

– Further proof that I’m soooo behind the curve: it took an Indianapolis-based art blogger to clue me in to the coming release of Terry Zwigoff’s new movie, Art School Confidential, starring John Malkovich. (To view the trailer, go here.)

– In other film-related news, Mr. My Stupid Dog reports on the Criterion Collection DVD of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln:

The Lincoln of this film seems more a product of the 1930s than the 1830s–and in that respect, more like the sainted Democrat FDR than his own Republican self. In Trotti’s script, the rail-splitter has nothing whatsoever to say about race, and the closest he comes to acknowledging the reality of slavery is a not-quite throwaway line: Lincoln states that his family had to leave Kentucky because “with all the slaves comin’ in, white folks had a hard time making a living.” Except for an occasional servant, African-Americans are completely invisible in Ford’s Springfield. Class displaces race in the film’s mythic universe–to the point that when the title character, played by a startlingly young Henry Fonda, faces down an angry lynch mob, both participants and intended victims are White. Like Fritz Lang, who famously used lynch mobs as a metaphor for fascism in his film Fury Ford suggests a parallel between thuggish leaders who goad a mob to violence and equally grotesque forces poised to plunge Europe into a second world war. That Lincoln is singlehandedly able to quell the angry mob points to one of the film’s deepest contradictions: In Young Mr. Lincoln, democratic society is saved from fascist control through the actions of a single Great Leader. (Lang didn’t let America off the hook so easily.)

– Speaking of race, Mr. Something Old, Nothing New has found an online-viewable video of Coal Black and De Sebben Dwarfs, a miniature masterpiece of animation which is nonetheless banned from TV broadcast on TV because it’s jam-packed with racial stereotypes. See for yourself.

– Mr. Think Denk eats a plate of dumplings and reflects on the meaning of the opening bars of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata:

I have a hard time seeing where the opening of the Kreutzer “comes from.” There are no easy sources for its particular beauty. The sort of question I feel it asks is Why Do I Exist? or How Did I Come Into Being? And that is what gives it, for me, a kind of surreal beauty: an oddly certain question, a fragment that is strangely and prematurely complete. The piece is mature beyond its measures….

My favorite recording of this wonderful work, incidentally, is a live performance from 1940 by Joseph Szigeti and B

“‘I did think I could have trusted Boko not to make an ass of himself just for once,’ she murmured with a wild regret.

“‘I doubt if you can ever trust an author not to make an ass of himself,’ I responded gravely.”

P.G. Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning