Archives for October 2006

As I was soaring through the skies of Pennsylvania the other day, my iPod served up Leopold Stokowski’s 1937 recording of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (not currently available on CD, alas). You may know it as the piece to which Mickey Mouse nearly drowned in Fantasia. No sooner did it start playing than I broke out in a broad grin. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice always does that to me–and did so long before I ever saw Fantasia. It’s one of the many pieces of music that has the mysterious power to make me happy.

Readers of this posting will recall that I’ve been reading Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Among the many tasty tidbits of research-derived fact tucked into its pages is this delicious nugget:

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is the center of the brain’s reward system, playing an important role in pleasure and addiction. The NAc is active when gamblers win a bet, or drug users take their favorite drug. It is also closely involved with the transmission of opioids in the brain, through its ability to release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Avram Goldstein had shown in 1980 that the pleasure of music listening could be blocked by administering the drug nalaxone, believed to interfere with dopamine in the nucleus accumbens….

The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum’s conribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one of the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people’s moods. Now we think we know why.

To which I reply: I thought so. I’ve always found music to be one of the most potent means of attitude adjustment known to man, and now science has proved it. Ha!

All of which inspires me to pass along this list of things to which I listen whenever I feel the urgent need to upgrade my mood:

Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse

Stan Kenton’s recording of Gerry Mulligan’s “Young Blood”

Bernstein’s Candide Overture

Wild Bill Davison’s 1943 recording of “That’s A-Plenty” (turned up very loud)

Luciana Souza’s “Doce de Coco” (from Brazilian Duos)

Noël Coward’s “Uncle Harry”

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”

The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek”

Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture

The finale to Fauré’s incidental music to Shylock (George Balanchine used it in Emeralds)

The John Kirby Sextet’s “It Feels So Good”

Buddy Rich’s 1966 live recording of “Love for Sale”

Booker T. and the MGs’ “Hip Hug-Her”

Gershwin’s An American in Paris

Shostakovich’s Festive Overture

Johnny Cash’s “Hey Porter”

Deidre Rodman and Steve Swallow’s “Famous Potatoes”

Copland’s “Buckaroo Holiday” (from Rodeo)

Jelly Roll Morton’s “Wolverine Blues” (with Baby and Johnny Dodds)

The Who’s “Shakin’ All Over” (from Live at Leeds)

The finale of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber

Blossom Dearie’s “If I Were a Bell” (the version on Winchester in Apple Blossom Time)

The Dixieaires’ “Joe Louis Was a Fighting Man”

Donald Fagen’s “Morph the Cat”

Sidney Bechet’s 1932 recording of “Maple Leaf Rag”

Doc Watson’s “Let the Cocaine Be”

Lee Wiley’s “You’re a Sweetheart”

Sergio Mendes’ 1966 recording of “Mais Que Nada” (not the icky hip-hop remake, eeuuww!)

Wesla Whitfield’s “Lucky to Be Me”

Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso

The Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man”

Stephen Sondheim’s “A Weekend in the Country” (from A Little Night Music)

The first movement of Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488

Frank Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”

Steely Dan’s “My Old School”

Walton’s Crown Imperial (as played by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble)

Flatt and Scruggs’ “Farewell Blues”

Stan Getz and Bob Brookmeyer’s “Open Country”

The first movement of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto

R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe”

The Beatles’ “Revolution”

Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide”

The first movement of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony

Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus Overture

Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Three little maids from school are we” (from The Mikado)

Django Reinhardt’s “Swing 42”

Pretty much anything by Count Basie, Erroll Garner, Fats Waller, Haydn, or John Philip Sousa

The sound of Louis Armstrong’s voice

I don’t guarantee results, but all of the items on this list can be counted on to give me a cheap, easy high–with no side effects.

“For of course I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the esthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist kitsch, no matter how much of the demos loves it. To me, it is a form of manufactured tyranny. Some Australians feel this is a confession of antidemocratic sin; but I am no democrat in the field of the arts, the only area–other than sports–in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm.”

Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir

I just added a very large number of new YouTube clips to the fine-arts/historical video-on-demand “network” about which I wrote in my recent Wall Street Journal column about YouTube. To view them–and hundreds of other equally interesting video and audio clips–go to the right-hand column and scroll down until you see Satchmo’s name. The latest links are marked with asterisks.

As always, feel free to send me the URLs of any video or audio links of comparable quality that you’d like to see me post. (Also, be sure to let me know if any of the existing links have gone dead since I posted them.)

Enjoy!

Supermaud dangled a tasty bit of bait in front of my nose the other day:

Colin Burrow argues, while reviewing a new biography of John Donne, that “literary biography is intrinsically pernicious.” I wonder how biographers, including my friend Terry Teachout (who penned a biography of H.L. Mencken, and talked a bit about the experience here), would respond.

I’ll see you and raise you, Maudie.

First, though, here’s the context for that nose-thumbing sound bite:

Literary biography is one of the background noises of our age. It’s a decent, friendly sort of hum, like the Sunday papers or chatter on a train. It gives the punters a bit of history and a bit of literature, and perhaps a bit of gossip, and what’s more it saves them the trouble of reading history. And poems too, for that matter. Not to mention the ordeal of ploughing through a load of literary criticism. But there are two respects in which literary biography is intrinsically pernicious, however well it’s done. The first is that literary biographies need a thesis in order to catch the headlines. This can turn what ought to be a delicate art into a piece of problem-solving or a search for a key to a life….The other problem is that even the best examples can’t entirely avoid the naive reduction of literature to evidence or symptom–epiphenomena which are brought about by, and potentially reducible to, biographical origins.

Yeah, well, O.K., I get the idea, and I even agree with it, sort of. Far too many new biographies–including a forthcoming book about a famous filmmaker that I read last week and will be reviewing later this year–are rigidly and reductively thesis-driven, an approach that never fails to remind me of what Earl Long, Huey’s brother, said about Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Life: “Mr. Luce is like a man that owns a shoestore and buys all the shoes to fit himself. Then he expects other people to buy them.”

I loathe biographers who nudge you in the ribs every few pages, sticking in pointed little reminders that the deeply suppressed sadomasochistic tendencies (or whatever) of Flannery O’Connor (or whoever) permeated her life and thought and insinuated their way into every page she wrote, blah blah blah. Who among us hasn’t thrown up his hands in despair at the prospect of reading another such book, especially when it’s nine hundred pages long? Repeat after me: show, don’t tell. Let the reader draw his own conclusions. Or, as Our Lord and Master Henry James instructed us, Dramatize, dramatize!

On the other hand, I don’t think my biographies are like that, and even if you beg to differ, I’m sure you can think of any number of biographies that fail to fill Colin Burrow’s bill of attainder. Most people, after all, are complicated, and the biographer’s job is to give literary shape to that complexity. Of course we simplify–every human utterance more elaborate than a wordless howl is an act of simplification–and on occasion we pocket pieces of the puzzle that don’t fit our story line. Nevertheless, the smart biographer never papers over or tries to explain away his subject’s inconsistencies. Instead, he treasures them, for they are the salt that gives savor to the story of a life.

For what it’s worth, here are five first-rate biographies that in my opinion succeed in presenting clear, coherent accounts of their subject’s lives without stooping to rigid reductiveness:

• W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson

• Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life

• Tim Page, Dawn Powell: A Biography

• Justin Spring, Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art

• Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle

I will be sinfully proud if Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong ends up being half as good as any of these books.

“Do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies. Only art can explain the life of a man–and not the contrary.”

Orson Welles (quoted in Simon Callow, Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu)

Sidle over to the right-hand column and you’ll find lots of fresh stuff, including several new Top Five and Out of the Past picks and a number of additions to “Sites to See.” (The new blogs are marked with asterisks.)

Alas, I’ve been too busy to hunt for new YouTube links, but I’ll get around to it in the next couple of weeks. As always, I welcome your suggestions. In addition, please let me know if you should run across any dead links so that I can knock them off the list.

This has been a busy theatrical week, and so The Wall Street Journal kindly gave me extra space sufficient to review four revivals, two in New York and two in Minneapolis.

For most readers, the big news will be the return to Broadway of A Chorus Line:

Is it time to start feeling nostalgic for the ’70s? The producers of the first Broadway revival of “A Chorus Line,” which opened in 1975 and ran for 6,137 performances, clearly hope so. I’m part of their target market, for I saw the original road-show production some 30 years ago. It was my very first touring Broadway musical, and I remember it with undimmed affection. Alas, I didn’t see “A Chorus Line” again until two nights ago, when I caught a preview of the current revival. Naturally, I wondered how such show-stoppers as “Dance, Ten; Looks, Three” and “What I Did for Love” had held up. I rejoice to say that they’re as fresh as ever–and that they profit from the sumptuous singing and dancing of a superlative cast….

Would that Eric Bogosian’s subUrbia had held up half so well:

First performed in 1994 and filmed two years later, “subUrbia” is the story (not that there’s much of a story, but you know what I mean) of five suburban slackers who spend their days and nights hanging out in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, getting high and/or drunk and wallowing in alienation. Unlike the half-crazed freaks whom Mr. Bogosian portrayed with feral intensity in his one-man shows, their dialogue fails to ring true–it sounds scripted, not overheard–and the melodramatic hoops through which their creator puts them don’t add up to a plot….

The news from Minneapolis, by contrast, is largely good, though I didn’t much care for the brand-new headquarters of the Guthrie Theater:

I’m not an architecture critic, but I do spend a lot of time in theater lobbies, and this one didn’t do a thing for me: The low-ceilinged public areas are dark, oppressive and laid out with irksome illogic. Rarely can there have been a theater whose interior was less well suited to the purpose of making its occupants feel festive and expectant. The process of getting from the street to the Wurtele Thrust Stage, the largest of the three performance spaces, is so protracted–not to mention confusing–that I briefly had trouble focusing on the revival of Neil Simon’s Lost in Yonkers that had lured me to town. Once I forgot the building and started thinking about the show, though, I very much liked what I saw….

Last year’s Tony Award for regional theater went to Minneapolis’ Theatre de la Jeune Lune, an avant-garde troupe with a zany sense of humor. Its off-center adaptations of the classics are performed in a crumbling turn-of-the-century downtown warehouse that the company has converted into a flexible, characterful performance space full of the charm that somehow got left out of the new Guthrie.

This fall Jeune Lune is presenting in alternating repertory its much-praised versions of two Moli

Gene Janson died on Wednesday, twenty minutes into a matin