Archives for May 2006

I blogged a couple of weeks ago about Carl Van Vechten, the photographer-boulevardier-enthusiast whose portraits of famous people were recently exhibited at an Upper East Side bookshop. Since then I’ve had occasion to re-read an out-of-print biography of Van Vechten, and I confess to being envious of what you might call his achievements in the field of propinquity. Among many, many other things, he attended both the Armory Show in New York and the Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring, at which he shared a box with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, who subsequently became his lifelong friends, joining a troupe that also included Ronald Firbank, George Gershwin, Zora Neale Hurston, H.L. Mencken, Eugene O’Neill, and Bessie Smith.

Van Vechten was born in 1880, died in 1964, and in between was intensely curious about everything to do with the arts. I had forgotten when I wrote my previous posting, for instance, that he was not merely a dance critic but the very first American dance critic, and that he lived long enough to see and admire both Anna Pavlova and New York City Ballet. Van Vechten preserved his curiosity well into his old age: among the subjects of his later photographs were Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond, over whose music he “swooned,” writing with special admiration of “those long Rossini-like monotonous crescendos that stretch out endlessly like the moon of my delight in the orient.” (I’d bet money that this is the album he had in mind.) He even set down his opinion of Elvis Presley for posterity:

I heard him with amazement and I am convinced that his appeal is purely (or impurely) sexual. And as he does not appeal to me on that basis, I have discarded him forever, unless he comes around with his hand-organ to sing at my door.

“To me,” Van Vechten wrote, “discovery is nine-tenths of the interest in life.” Not a bad motto for someone in my line of work.

“Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.”

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (courtesy of such stuff)

“The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company, and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the taste of life was stale on her lips.”

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth

Having been tagged, I hasten to fulfill my obligation:

I am writing this in longhand.

I want Steve Yzerman to put off retiring.

I wish I were ice-skating NOW.

I hate drivers on cell phones.

I love northern Michigan (Michigancentrically, “up north”).

I miss the Clinch Park bears.

I fear speaking in front of an audience.

I hear a train, distantly.

I wonder what will happen on House next week. (In the first-season reruns on USA; do not send spoliers and nobody will get hurt.)

I regret not taking up ice-skating sooner.

I am not a credible liar.

I dance with Baryshnikov in my daydreams.

I sing at full volume when alone in the car or the kitchen.

I cry after double-overtime sudden-death playoff games that end badly.

I am not always conscious of how old I’ve gotten.

I make with my hands ice cream! Most recently, oatmeal ice cream (no raisins for me, thanks).

I write in longhand when practical, which is seldom.

I confuse being nice with giving undue encouragement sometimes. (Don’t worry, I don’t mean you. You I like.)

I need strong coffee every morning, iced during summer.

I should return my moldering Netflix discs and stop ordering movies that are good for me.

I start innumerable blog posts I never finish.

I finish basic skating lessons in two weeks and start looking for hockey lessons.

I tag Mr. Quiet Bubble and Ms. Bookish Gardener.

I just read James Wood’s review of Frederick Brown’s Flaubert: A Biography, which appeared in this week’s New York Times Book Review. It is 3,250 words long, of which only three hundred make any mention of the book Wood is allegedly reviewing, from which he quotes only a half-sentence, though he finds room to refer to Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and hip-hop. Am I the only person out here in the ‘sphere who considers this the wrong way to go about reviewing an important new biography of a major author in a widely read publication?

I’m not saying I haven’t committed the same critical crime on occasion–I’m sure I have, and I’m sure somebody will be pointing that fact out to me in fairly short order–but this piece strikes me as an especially egregious case in point. Brown’s Flaubert is a remarkable biography, maybe even a great one. It doesn’t deserve to get lost in the shuffle of its own reviews.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I bang the gong for one new show, The Drowsy Chaperone, and grumble about two others, Hot Feet and The Importance of Being Earnest:

At last–at last!–a new musical that is both utterly frivolous and entrancingly clever has opened on Broadway. “The Drowsy Chaperone,” an affectionate, encyclopedically knowing send-up of the who-cares-if-the-plot-makes-sense musicals of the ’20s, is funny, brainy, tuneful, concise (one hour, 40 minutes, no intermission) and performed with bewitching skill. You’ll love it even if you don’t know Jerome Kern from Jerome Robbins, though you’ll get more of the inside jokes, of which there are several thousand, if you do. Either way, “The Drowsy Chaperone” is deservedly destined for a long, profitable run….

Maybe I was simply grateful not to be seeing “Lestat” again, but “Hot Feet,” Maurice Hines’ dumbed-down, funked-up jukebox-musical version of “The Red Shoes,” turned out to be not quite as bad as I’d feared….

I couldn’t be more surprised to find myself saying so, but the Theatre Royal Bath/Peter Hall Company’s touring production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” now playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Harvey Theater, is a slow-moving bore….

No link. Buy the paper, or subscribe to the Online Journal by going here, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I just finished reading Peter Richmond’s Fever: The Life and Music of Miss Peggy Lee. I wish it were better—it is, like most pop-music biographies, gushingly overwritten and musically underinformed—but at least it’s thorough, and when you finish reading it you’ll know a whole lot more about Peggy Lee than you did when you first picked it up.

I suppose it’s possible that some of you have never heard a Peggy Lee album. If you’re among them, try this one, which is a pretty good and fairly wide-ranging complilation of some of her best-known records. Among other things, it contains Lee’s greatest hit, “Fever,” to which I paid tribute in a piece that wrote for the New York Times four years ago, the Sunday after she died. I didn’t include it in A Terry Teachout Reader because it’s too short, but I like it anyway, even though I was fighting a frighteningly tight deadline and didn’t have any time for second thoughts. I hope you like it, too.

* * *

Peggy Lee taught me all about sex. I was 12 at the time, and had just made the earthshaking discovery that my father’s record collection was of more than merely historical interest. This was in 1968, the year of the ”White Album,” and I was still trying to figure out how to play ”Rocky Raccoon” on my brand-new guitar, but I was also chewing my way through the selected works of Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Stan Kenton, Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee, whose recording of ”Fever” was—shall we say—instructive.

Not that she was obvious about it, or anything else. If a Hitchcock blonde could have raised her voice in song, then Peggy Lee, who died on Monday at the age of 81, would have sounded pretty much like that, cool and self-possessed and amused. But even at 12, I got the message, and then some: what the lady on the record had in mind was pretty much what I had in mind 24 hours a day, except that her point of view was more informed. That was when I realized my father knew a thing or two about music.

Thirty-four years later, I know a lot more about Peggy Lee, the English division of EMI having finally deigned to transfer the best of her albums to compact disc. I now know that ”Fever” was the least of her. She was exquisite—there is no other word for her. She floated atop a rhythm section like a soap bubble on a warm breeze, never raising her alto-flute voice a decibel more than absolutely necessary to get the exact effect she intended. She was a smart singer, the very opposite of all the cruel jokes some jazz instrumentalists like to tell about the women with whom they so often grudgingly share a bandstand. She chose her material with painstaking care, writing some of the best of it herself, and when she sang a song, it usually stayed sung. Other people do ”Don’t Smoke in Bed” and ”I’ve Got Your Number” and ”You Came a Long Way From St. Louis,” but when I hear them in my mind’s ear, hers is the voice I hear.

I know all that—and yet when I learned of her death, the first thing that popped into my head was a dirt-plain bass-and-drum riff and a soft, sly voice half-whispering ”Never know how much I love you/Never know how much I care/When you put your arms around me/ I get a fever that’s so hard to bear.” I didn’t need to go looking for that record on my shelves: it was burned into my memory, together with a mental picture of the beautiful woman who sang it. I remember how sure of herself she sounded, sure enough—and strong enough—to smile at the thought of playing with fire. Is this really what women are like? I wondered, and decided I’d better find out.

That’s quite a lesson to have learned from a three-minute single, but then, Peggy Lee was quite a teacher.

When I was a boy, my father bought me a statuette of W.C. Fields. I liked it fine and managed to hang onto it for a number of years, though I remember wishing even then that he’d given me the Louis Armstrong statuette from the same series. They were made by a company called Esco (which still exists, as I recently discovered). Needless to say, the statuettes long ago became collectors’ items, but I forgot about them until I saw a photograph of the Satchmo model in Gary Giddins’ Armstrong biography. As soon as I saw it I knew I wanted one of my own, and the desire grew stronger when I started writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong.

A Satchmo statuette turned up on eBay the other day, and I bought it on the spot. Those who know what Armstrong looked like in the flesh won’t need to be told that it is an extremely faithful depiction of the way he appeared on stage, with only a slight, self-evidently affectionate dash of caricature added by the anonymous artist. (It’s considerably truer to life than the po-faced, hyper-respectful Armstrong statue erected a few years ago in New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong Park.) It turns out that Esco’s Satchmo is coveted by collectors of black memorabilia, and I can see why: I’ve never seen a rendering of Armstrong that did a better job of conveying his irrepressible joie de vivre.

I’ve placed my latest acquisition on the corner of my desk, where I expect it to fill me with inspiration from now to the day next March when, God willing, I finish Hotter Than That and ship it off to Harcourt. No, it isn’t art, not in the Teachout Museum sense, but it does make me smile, for which there is ever and always much to be said.