Archives for July 2006

“Offhand one would expect that the mere possession of power would automatically result in a cocky attitude toward the world and a receptivity to change. But it is not always so. The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power–a slogan, a word, a button.”

Eric Hoffer, The True Believer

I’ve been on the road all weekend and only just got back. More soon, including an extensive report on my latest misadventures.

My next Commentary column, in which I hold forth at length on the life, music, writings, and posthumous reputation of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, is taking a bit longer to polish off than I’d expected. One reason for this is that I put my trusty iBook to sleep on Thursday afternoon and took a subway down to the studios of WNYC-FM, where I chatted about Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue for an upcoming episode of Studio 360. It seems that a producer there ran across an “About Last Night” posting in which I discussed that classic album and thought it might be fun to have me do the same thing on the air. I don’t know whether she had fun, but I sure did. I love talking on the radio. It’s a good thing nobody’s ever offered me a full-time radio gig, because I doubt I’d write another word if that were to happen.

Anyway, that’s where I was all afternoon, and that’s why I’m still at my desk at midnight, doing my damnedest to finish my Gottschalk essay. I’d better go back to work–I’d really like to get some sleep tonight. See you Monday.

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on my recent visit to the Utah Shakespearean Festival:

To get to the Utah Shakespearean Festival, I flew into a small airport perched atop a bluff and stepped out of the plane into shockingly hot weather (the temperature was 110 when I arrived two weeks ago). Then I drove north through the most spectacular countryside imaginable, a gaudy parade of red cliffs, mesas and buttes so redolent of the films of John Ford and Budd Boetticher that I half expected to see Randolph Scott riding over the next hill. At the end of the trip was Cedar City, a college town near the mouth of a canyon, home since 1962 to one of the biggest Shakespeare festivals west of the Mississippi.

The Utah Shakespearean Festival, which runs from June to October, puts on four Shakespeare plays, three revivals and two musicals each season. The company, which performs on three different stages on and around the campus of Southern Utah University, won a Tony in 2000 for outstanding achievement in regional theater. No doubt because its audience consists in large part of tourists who come to the area less for Shakespeare than the scenery, the festival is unabashedly conservative in both programming and production style. Big-city visitors may well find its Ye Olde Renaissance Faire atmosphere a bit on the twee side–the snack bar actually serves turkey legs and Cornish pasties–but most of the onstage offerings I saw were solidly entertaining….

As usual, no link. To read the whole thing, pick up a copy of the Journal at your neighborhood newsstand, or be smart and go here to subscribe to the online edition.

“I know nothing more ill-bred than a fashionable Englishman, unless it be two fashionable Englishmen.”

Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Notes of a Pianist

Via Household Opera, a pet-peeves meme:

• Grammatical pet peeve. Misplaced apostrophes. My father, God rest his soul, once commissioned a huge sign that read Season’s Greetings From The Teachout’s. I secretly attempted to paint out that damned apostrophe, but to no avail. It caused me years of annual adolescent embarrassment, though I’m pleased to say that I wasn’t enough of a smartass to tell my father about it. (Orthographic runner-up for jazz musicians only: if you can’t spell Thelonious Monk’s first name correctly, write about somebody else.)

(I used to be irked by the increasingly indiscriminate use of the singular “their,” but have since been inundated with irrefutable evidence of its impeccable historicity. Enough already–I give up!)

• Household pet peeve. Guests who don’t close lids completely. May they be forced to walk barefoot over kitchen floors littered with shards of broken Mason jars.

• Liturgical pet peeve. Two words: crappy music.

• Wild card. Logorrheic quarterwits who jabber on their cellphones while walking down the street–especially those who use handless headsets. The garrote is too good for them, but it’s a start.

The co-proprietors of “About Last Night” were interviewed over the weekend by Bloggasm. To see what we had to say, go here.

My trip to the Village to hear Julia Dollison was the fourth time I’d set foot in a nightclub since getting out of the hospital last December. I can remember when I went to hear live jazz at least twice a month, and usually more.

It’s not just jazz, either. Just the other day I read Jay Nordlinger’s New Criterion chronicle of his favorite classical-music concerts and operatic performances of the 2005-06 season, and was startled to realize that I hadn’t attended any of them. Since December I’ve heard two concerts, seen two dance performances, and gone to the opera once. Nor have I been to a single movie, even though I very much wanted to see Art School Confidential and Nacho Libre (not to mention The Lady in the Water, in which an actress I know has a featured role). And with the exception of my regular Wall Street Journal and Commentary columns and the postings on this blog, I’ve published only one piece.

At first my semi-sabbatical was motivated by an understandable desire to stay out of the hospital. Then I got wrapped up in my Louis Armstrong biography, which failing health had forced me to put aside for several months. After that the theater season started its downhill run to the announcement of the Tony nominations, and all at once I was seeing a minimum of three shows each week, which didn’t leave me much time to do anything else. Now I’m hitting the road once or twice a month to cover regional theater companies.

My plate, in short, is full. I’m no invalid. Yet I feel restless and out of touch, not so much with the world of art–I’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s out there–as with the steady flow of immediate artistic experience on which I’ve been nourishing myself for the past couple of decades. To put it another way, I used to be a boulevardier, and now I’m not.

Might that be a good thing? It’s no secret that I’m a workaholic, and the frequency with which I once spent my nights on the town was a symptom of what finally turned into a life-threatening problem. Two years ago, at the height of my performance-going frenzy, a fellow blogger posted this cautionary item:

Critic Terry Teachout
Consumes Too Much Art,
Violently Explodes

MANHATTAN–In news that has the arts world reeling, Wall Street Journal drama critic Terry Teachout exploded yesterday after consuming too much art.

In New York, art lovers are asking whether the fatal tragedy could have been prevented.

According to one art historian, “Most critics don’t eat art. But it has been known to happen from time to time. What’s surprising in this case is that Teachout actually wrote about his strange proclivities on the Internet.”

Now that I’m well again, I have no intention of returning to my past state of life, not merely for the sake of staying alive but also for the sake of my soul. I used to fill my waking hours with so much aesthetic experience that it left next to no room for the contemplation without which the mere accumulation of experience can have no meaning.

On the other hand, I’m not cut out to be a full-time contemplative. I don’t claim to have any original ideas of my own. I was born to celebrate other people’s ideas, both as a critic and as a biographer. As Kenneth Tynan put it:

I see myself predominantly as a lock. If the key, which is the work of art, fits snugly into my mechanism of bias and preference, I click and rejoice; if not, I am helpless, and can only offer the artist the address of a better locksmith. Sometimes, unforeseen, a masterpiece seizes the knocker, batters down the door, and enters unopposed; and when that happens, I am a willing casualty. I cave in con amore. But mostly I am at a loss.

In order to be unlocked with sufficient regularity, I have to be out and about. What’s more, I want to be, so long as I don’t kill myself in the process. The trouble is that striking balances doesn’t come naturally to me. I’m a head-first guy, an enthusiast who jumps first and looks on the way down. Right now I’m not doing enough. Next month I may be doing too much. Somewhere in between manic activity and paralytic passivity lies the point of equipoise that I seek–in vain, of course. Equipoise is for teeter-totters. Real life is full of earthquakes. The trick, I’ve decided, is not to bounce around too much, or get knocked off too soon, and I think I can manage that without staying home five nights a week.

To this end, I put down my tools Wednesday afternoon, jumped in a cab, and headed over to Salander-O’Reilly Galleries to see a pair of exquisite small paintings by Albert Kresch, then down to the International Center for Photography for a long-deferred look at Unknown Weegee. After a healthy bite to eat at a noodle shop, I walked to Madison Square Park and took in a free outdoor concert by Fred Hersch and Kate McGarry, two jazz musicians whom I admire greatly and hadn’t seen for at least a year. As if to express approval of my venture, a cool breeze blew the cloying humidity out of the park just as Fred struck up “At the Close of the Day,” one of his most beautiful compositions. Not too shabby for a boulevardier emerging from temporary semi-retirement–and I even got home by nine!

I think I can live with that.