Archives for May 2006

“The Evening Pulpit was supposed to give daily to its readers all that had been said and done up to two o’clock in the day by all the leading people in the metropolis, and to prophesy with wonderful accuracy what would be the sayings and doings of the following twelve hours. This was effected with an air of wonderful omniscience, and not unfrequently with an ignorance hardly surpassed by its arrogance. But the writing was clever. The facts, if not true, were well invented; the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.”

Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (courtesy of Clive Davis

“As soon as he’d discovered that the object of bowling was to learn how to do exactly the same thing every time, he’d lost interest.”

Brian Garfield, Hopscotch

On Saturday afternoon I saw my last show of the 2005-06 season, Tarzan. The New York Drama Critics Circle, of which I am a member, votes this Thursday on the best plays of the year, and the names of the winners will be released immediately after the ballots are tallied (the news will be posted here).

All this means that Broadway is quiescent until August, when Martin Short’s new musical comes to town. I have a couple of weeks to catch my breath before I hit the road and start seeing out-of-town shows, and I’m going to need it. It’s been a long, grueling season, full of the good, the bad, and the ugly, though I suppose in the long run that I’ll remember it above all for the fateful night when I had to be helped into a cab by a kindly press agent, followed a few hours later by my admission to Lenox Hill Hospital.

Amazingly enough, I only skipped a single drama column last December, and I was back on the aisle two days after coming home from the hospital, marveling
at the Irish Repertory Theatre’s revival of Mrs. Warren’s Profession. In retrospect I suppose it was stupid of me to get back on the horse so quickly (though I left New York the very next day to spend a couple of weeks convalescing in Smalltown, U.S.A., which was a bit smarter). Nevertheless, I did it, and I’m not sorry: I had something to prove to myself, and I managed to prove it without doing any damage to my weakened heart.

Having done so, though, I scaled back my playgoing, restricting myself to two shows a week. It wasn’t until the spring rush started that I opened up the throttle, and even then I took care to husband my energy. As regular readers of this blog are well aware, I stopped going to nightclubs, and I haven’t been to a single movie since I got out of the hospital.

So has the time come for me to resume normal activities? Yes and no. I have no intention of reviving the Old Me, the fellow who never spent an evening at home when he could be anywhere else. I was already growing more reflective in the weeks just prior to my collapse, and I mean to stay that way. On the other hand, I’m feeling better than ever, and now that I’ve survived the spring rush, I’m inclined to test myself still further–within limits. The past six months have taught me a number of valuable lessons, the most important of which is to be unafraid of doing nothing.

Just the other day I spent the morning writing my Wall Street Journal drama column, then decided on the spur of the moment to stroll across Central Park to the Guggenheim Museum to see the David Smith retrospective. It was an eat-your-spinach self-assignment: I’ve never warmed to Smith’s welded sculptures, but every art critic I respect says he’s the real deal, so I figured I ought to give him yet another try and hope that the scales would fall from my eyes.

I hadn’t yet eaten lunch, so I bought a couple of dirty-water dogs from the pushcart at Eighty-First Street and Central Park West, then perched myself on a convenient rock and dined al fresco. After that I headed east–but not for long. No sooner did I pass under Winterdale Arch than I spotted an empty park bench, and in an instant my high-minded resolve evaporated. Instead of spending the afternoon with David Smith, I spent it sitting on the bench. The sun warmed my skin, the breeze cooled it, and though I gave brief thought to taking an improving book out of my bag, I ended up doing nothing at all but listening to the birds and looking at the passers-by.

Midway through my reverie, an anxious-looking pedestrian politely interrupted me. “Pardon me for bothering you,” she asked, “but will I get to the East Side if I stay on this path? These roads are awfully curvy, and I seem to be going in circles.”

“I know what you mean,” I replied, “but if you go this way and keep an eye on the skyline, you’re bound to end up on the East Side sooner or later.”

She thanked me and moved on, leaving me to ponder the lovely implications of the phrase sooner or later. I make my living by going to performances and hitting deadlines, so when I’m off duty, I try to let things happen when they happen instead of insisting that they happen at this time or that. I doubt the Celestial Accountant really means for us to account for every second of wasted time, but should it turn out that He does, I intend to tell Him that I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a cloudless summer afternoon than sitting on a park bench, reveling in the passing moment. I didn’t spend enough afternoons that way in the first part of my life, and now that I know better, I have every intention of wasting every second I can spare.

* * *

I’ve decided to play hooky for the rest of the week. I’m leaving you in the capable hands of Our Girl, who will post my regular theater-related items on Thursday and Friday, along with whatever else she may have in mind. See you Monday!

“Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.”

Evelyn Waugh, diary, March 26, 1962

Kentucky Derby photos, replete with characters, wit, and color, color, color.

An informal catalogue of cardinal critical sins, with fresh and glaring illustrations from some of today’s Most Favored Critics, seems to be underway this month. Just yesterday Terry tagged James Wood for devoting a mere ten percent of his prime NYTBR real estate to the new Flaubert biography he was purportedly reviewing there. Commandment the first: You shall not overlook the book under review.

Meanwhile, last week, James Marcus rightfully zapped John Banville for finding Philip Roth’s new novel insufficiently, well, Banvillesque:

This is transparently the recipe for a John Banville novel–the infinite nuances, the atomized perceptions–and the biggest boner a critic can commit is the insistence that all writers should do what he does. It’s embarrassing.

Thus, Commandment the second: You shall not critique a tulip by wishing it a rose, especially if you grow roses. (Sorry, tulips on the brain these days–they are everywhere, and god bless ’em.) Marcus considers Roth’s book on its own aesthetic terms here.

Virtually nobody watches D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation anymore, even though it was one of the half-dozen most influential films in the history of the medium. Much of the lingua franca of cinematic storytelling was invented by Griffith, and The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915, was the laboratory in which he brought his ideas to fruition. It was also one of the most racist movies ever made, a shameless glorification of the role played by the Ku Klux Klan in the reconstruction of the postbellum Old South.

Or so, at any rate, we’re told. Never having seen The Birth of a Nation, I only “knew” it was racist because that was what I’d always heard and read. So when Turner Classic Movies aired the film last week as part of a month-long series called Race and Hollywood: Black Images on Film, I decided it was time to see for myself.

In case you’re wondering–or worrying–this isn’t going to be a revaluation of The Birth of a Nation. Somewhat to my surprise, it turned out to be every bit as appalling as everyone says, a near-encyclopedic compendium of racial stereotypes of the grossest, most offensive sort. Small wonder that TCM prefaced and followed it with an on-camera discussion by Robert Osborne and Donald Bogle, the author of Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films. (I’m a bit surprised that the network didn’t run on-screen disclaimers during the film itself.)

None of this, however, interested me half so much as the fact that The Birth of a Nation progresses with the slow-motion solemnity of a funeral march. Even the title cards stay on the screen for three times as long as it takes to read them. Five minutes after the film started, I was squirming with impatience, and after another five minutes passed, I decided out of desperation to try an experiment: I cranked the film up to four times its normal playing speed and watched it that way. It was overly brisk in two or three spots, most notably the re-enactment of Lincoln’s assassination (which turned out to be quite effective–it’s the best scene in the whole film). For the most part, though, I found nearly all of The Birth of a Nation to be perfectly intelligible at the faster speed.

Putting aside for a moment the insurmountable problem of its content, it was the agonizingly slow pace of The Birth of a Nation that proved to be the biggest obstacle to my experiencing it as an objet d’art. Even after I sped it up, my mind continued to wander, and one of the things to which it wandered was my similar inability to extract aesthetic pleasure out of medieval art. With a few exceptions, medieval and early Renaissance art and music don’t speak to me. The gap of sensibility is too wide for me to cross. I have a feeling that silent film–not just just The Birth of a Nation, but all of it–is no more accessible to most modern sensibilities. (The only silent movies I can watch with more than merely antiquarian interest are the comedies of Buster Keaton.) Nor do I think the problem is solely, or even primarily, that it’s silent: I have no problem with plotless dance, for instance. It’s that silent film “speaks” to me in an alien tongue, one I can only master in an intellectual way. That’s not good enough for me when it comes to art, whose immediate appeal is not intellectual but visceral (though the intellect naturally enters into it).

As for The Birth of a Nation, I’m glad I saw it once. My card is now officially punched. On the other hand, I can’t imagine voluntarily seeing it again, any more than I’d attend the premiere of an opera by Philip Glass other than at gunpoint. It is the quintessential example of a work of art that has fulfilled its historical purpose and can now be put aside permanently–and I don’t give a damn about history, at least not in my capacity as an aesthete. I care only for the validity of the immediate experience. I’m with A.E. Housman:

A year or two ago, in common with others, I received from America a request that I would define poetry. (America is the source of much irritation of this kind, to be sure.) I replied that I could no more define poetry than a terrier can define a rat, but that I thought we both recognised the object by the symptoms which it provoked in us. One of those symptoms was described in connexion with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: “A spirit passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up.” Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine; there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats’s last letters, where he says, speaking of Fanny Brawne, “everything that reminds me of her goes through me like a spear.” The seat of this sensation is the pit of the stomach.

This famous passage is from Housman’s 1933 lecture The Name and Nature of Poetry, and even after making due allowance for the personal prejudices of the practicing artist, it pretty well sums up my view of things. Thrill me and all is forgiven. Bore me and you’ve lost me. That’s why I think it’s now safe to file and forget The Birth of a Nation. Yes, it’s still historically significant, and yes, it tells us something important about the way we once were. But it’s boring–and thank God for that.

UPDATE: Mr. Parabasis has cleverly turned the sixth paragraph of this posting into a meme. Care to play, OGIC?

While we’re on the subject of how blacks were portrayed by the American mass media at the turn of the century, allow me to direct your attention to Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1891-1922 (Archeophone, two CDs), an anthology containing fifty-four of the earliest commercial sound recordings made by black performers and public figures.

You can order Lost Sounds here, and you can also listen for free to streaming-audio samples of every track included on the set, including speeches recorded by Booker T. Washington in 1908 and by Jack Johnson in 1910. If, like me, you’re interested in early spoken-word recordings, I guarantee that you’ll find these particular snippets fascinating in the extreme.