Archives for November 2006

“It’s difficult to explain, but I just somehow feel that I never really have lived; that I never really will live–exist or whatever–in the sense that other people do. I was terribly aware of it all those nights waiting for you in the Ritz bar looking around at what seemed to be real grown-up lives. I just find everybody else’s life surrounded by plate-glass. I mean I’d like to break through it just once and actually touch one.”

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

Here’s what I saw, heard, read, and did during my week off from “About Last Night”:

• I saw four shows: Mary Poppins, The Little Dog Laughed, and the revivals of Les Miz and Suddenly Last Summer.

• I added a new piece to the Teachout Museum, a 1936 print by Louis Lozowick, a precisionist who specialized in lithography. A sharp-eyed art collector who shares my passion for prewar American modernism had suggested that I look into Lozowick, and I liked his style so much that I decided to bid on a copy of Storm Over Manhattan when it came up for auction last week. (Click on the link to see what it looks like.) Now it hangs in my living room, directly beneath Alex Katz’s Late July II. They look beautiful together.

• I decided to check out the ambient music of Aphex Twin, about which I’ve been hearing interesting things. Two of the cuts I downloaded from iTunes, “Alberto Balsalm” and “Windowlicker,” are now in heavy rotation on my iPod. (When I told my trainer that I was listening to Aphex Twin, he looked at me as if I’d suddenly grown a horn and said, “You’re listening to techno?”)

• I read Gordon Forbes’ Goodbye to Some, a World War II novel suggested to me by a reader, and the galleys of Howard Pollack’s nine-hundred-page George Gershwin biography, which comes out next month. I also reread Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, one of Our Girl’s favorite novels.

• I knocked off two Wall Street Journal columns, revised the first five chapters of Hotter than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong, and wrote the outline of an opera libretto. (Yes, that’s a teaser–I’ll tell you more later if it pans out.)

• On Tuesday I took the train to Washington, D.C., where I spent three days in conference with the National Council on the Arts.

• The NCA plays a part in the selection process for National Medal of Arts nominees, so on Wednesday I dined with this year’s medalists, among them William Bolcom, Cyd Charisse, the members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, and Ralph Stanley. In addition, I met Mrs. William Bolcom, better known as Joan Morris, whose singing of American popular songs I’ve admired extravagantly for at least a quarter-century. Most of the two dozen albums she’s recorded with her husband at the piano are now out of print, but you can still get this one without difficulty.

• I sat next to Cyd Charisse at dinner. She was wearing pants, so I can’t say whether her legs are as perfect now as they were a half-century ago, but I can assure you that she’s as nice as can be and that she remembers Fred Astaire with great fondness. She wanted to know if I’d seen any good musicals lately, so I told her about the Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, and had the pleasure of reminding her that one of the characters in the show mentions her by name:

From seeing all those movie musicals, I used to dance around on the street, and I’d get caught all the time. God, it was embarrassing. I was always being Cyd Charisse. Always.

• On Thursday I had breakfast with a friend about whose wedding I blogged two years ago, then went to the White House to attend a reception for the recipients of the 2006 National Medals of Arts and Humanities, who met with President Bush in the Oval Office. The rest of us made do with the First Lady, who looked cool and composed in a simple greenish-beige suit. A sextet of military musicians played Debussy and Mozart (very prettily, too) as the crowd of gogglers jostled for position.

The whole first floor of the White House was open, so I skipped the buffet and gave myself a fat-free art tour instead. The reception rooms are elegant, serene, and immaculately kept, and the windows are so thick that you can’t hear any sounds from outside. The walls are covered with paintings, most of them presidential portraits of widely varying distinction. Two are first-class, Rembrandt Peale’s Thomas Jefferson and a museum-quality 1903 portrait of Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent that hangs in a corner of the East Room. Another Sargent, The Mosquito Net, is in the Green Room. (Alas, Childe Hassam’s Avenue in the Rain, the best painting in the White House’s permanent collection, is not hung in a public area.)

I was much taken with Aaron Shikler’s glamorously introspective paintings of John and Jackie Kennedy, by far the best of the postwar portraits. The booby prize, by contrast, goes to this cartoonish study of Lyndon Johnson by Elizabeth Shoumatoff, who is best known for the fact that she was painting Franklin Roosevelt at Warm Springs one spring morning in 1945 when a cerebral hemorrhage struck him dead. Also in the room was Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd, FDR’s mistress. I bet the White House guards don’t tell that to visitors!

A year ago I was dying. I like this better.

“It’s amazing how right you can sometimes be about a person you don’t know; it’s only the people you do know who confuse you.”

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado

It’s time for the Friday Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser, which is a bit jaundiced this week. I reviewed three shows–the New York premiere of The Clean House, the Broadway transfer of Grey Gardens, and a Seattle production of Steve Martin’s The Underpants–and didn’t like any of ’em:

Sarah Ruhl is officially trendy. Not only did the 32-year-old playwright just win a MacArthur “genius grant,” but she’s making a high-profile New York debut: “The Clean House,” which has been staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre and numerous other top regional houses and was a Pulitzer finalist last year, has now come to town in a glossy production starring Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh. As if that weren’t enough buzz for one human being to generate, Ms. Ruhl says she’s working on a new play about the history of…the vibrator.

If I sound skeptical about Ms. Ruhl, there’s a reason. It’s possible to be both trendy and talented, and I suppose it might be possible to write a good play about vibrators, too. I can even think of a few genuine geniuses who’ve won MacArthurs. But when all these suspicious-looking items turned up on the same resume, the red light on my Faux-O-Meter started blinking, which is why I wasn’t surprised when “The Clean House” failed to live up to its own hype. It’s clever–too clever by at least half–but scrape away the postmodern trickery and it’s nothing more than a soap opera for pseudointellectuals….

“Grey Gardens,” the cultiest show of the 2005-06 season, has transferred to Broadway, and though it’s been tweaked and tightened, I don’t like it any better now than when it opened Off Broadway at Playwrights Horizons back in March.

In case you missed it the first time around, “Grey Gardens” is a musical version of the 1975 cin

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I discuss Keeping Score, PBS’ new Michael Tilson Thomas-San Francisco Symphony TV series about classical music. It’s wonderful–but nobody is going to watch it. Why not? To find out, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.

“Sometimes I think nobody ever really gets to understand anybody else. Which is a horrible thought. At least, to me it is. We’re locked up inside our own bodies for life. Solitary confinement for life. We scream inside ourselves, but nobody seems to hear. We’re born alone, we try to communicate with other people all our lives, and fail mostly, and then we die alone. It’s crazy.”

Buddy Rich (quoted in John Minahan, The Torment of Buddy Rich)

Regarding yesterday’s quiz, the quote continues like this:

…Who among novelists ever more instantly recognized the absurd when she saw it in human behavior, then polished it off to more devastating effect, than this young daughter of a Hampshire rectory, who as she finished the chapters enjoyed reading them to her family, to whom she also devoted her life?

So yes, as many of you guessed (and some tracked down via Amazon’s Search Inside), the subject is Jane Austen. The author was trickier, but a couple of readers knew: it’s Eudora Welty, from her 1969 essay “The Radiance of Jane Austen.” Most interestingly, one correspondent guessed that Welty was the subject of the passage! Showing, perhaps, that whatever we’re writing about, we’re also writing about ourselves.

I urge upon you the entire essay, which leads off this collection. I love Welty’s canny use of Austen’s biography in this passage:

Reading those chapters aloud to her own lively, vocative family, on whose shrewd intuition, practiced estimation of conduct, and seasoned judgment of character she relied almost as well as on her own, Jane Austen must have enjoyed absolute confidence in an understanding reception of her work. The novels still have a bloom of shared pleasure. And the felicity they have for us must partly lie in the confidence they take for granted between the author and her readers–at the moment, ourselves.

Just one more taste:

Think of today’s fiction in the light of hers. Does some of it appear garrulous and insistent and out-of-joint, and nearly all of it slow? Does now and then a novel come along that’s so long, arch, and laborious, so ponderous in literary conceits and so terrifying in symbols, that it might have been written (in his bachelor days) by Mr. Elton as a conundrum, or, in some prolonged spell of elevation, by Mr. Collins in a bid for self-advancement? Yes, but this is understandable. For many of our writers who are now as young as Jane Austen was when she wrote her novels, and as young as she still was when she died, at forty-one, ours is the century of unreason, the stamp of our behavior is violence or isolation; non-meaning is looked upon with some solemnity; and for the purpose of writing novels, most human behavior is looked at through the frame, or the knothole, of alienation. The life Jane Austen write about was indeed a different one from ours, but the difference was not as great as that between the frames through which it is viewed. Jane Austen’s frame was that of belonging to her world. She could step through it, in and out of it as easily and unselfconsciously as she stepped through the doorway of the rectory and into the garden to pick strawberries. She was perfectly at home in what she knew, as well as knowledgeable of precisely where she was on earth; she even believed she knew why she was here.

The beginning of that makes me laugh: Just put the pen down, Mr. Collins, and nobody will get hurt. And makes me wonder just who deserves the Mr. Collins Award for Recent Long, Arch, and Laborious Fiction. The rest is a nice refinement of the notion that the past is a foreign country, with the point about different frames driven straight home by the paragraph’s last line–an understatement in good aim, one might call it.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in about the quiz! The stream of mail really enlivened my workaday day.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– A Chorus Line* (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

– Heartbreak House (drama, G/PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Dec. 17)

– Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here, closes Dec. 31)

OFF BROADWAY:

– The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

– The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (drama, R, adult subject matter and nudity, reviewed here, closes Dec. 9)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)