Archives for December 12, 2006

David King and Ethan Iverson of the Bad Plus are circulating a musician questionnaire whose results are being posted on their blog. If you’re curious, go here and start scrolling down to see the replies, which are pouring in.

Needless to say, I’m strictly a recovering musician, but I found the questions (and answers) so fascinating that I decided to play as well.

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Give us an example or two of an especially good or interesting:

Movie score. Chinatown, Election, Sunset Boulevard.

TV theme. The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Equalizer, Miami Vice. (I also love “Woke Up This Morning,” the A3 song used as the theme to The Sopranos.)

Melody. Standards: “Autumn in New York,” “The Bad and the Beautiful,” “Lucky to Be Me,” “One for My Baby.” Classical: Bach’s chorale prelude on “Schm

– My Wall Street Journal column about the dance bust stirred up a fair amount of talk, most of it favorable and some of it from unexpected quarters. (Much to my surprise, for instance, the Little Professor commented on it at length.)

It also brought me an e-mail from a reader of “About Last Night” who showed the column to his cousin, who in turn wrote back as follows:

Thank you for forwarding this. Yes, he’s quite right–lots of the
companies I loved in my ballet-filled youth are gone, and all those
little girls taking ballet class have grown up to raise daughters who
take soccer and softball. I expect that the vast improvement in
after-school options for strong, athletically inclined girls is
actually all to the good; lots of talentless kids are no longer
clumping around in leotards. But I do miss the exciting froth of new
little companies putting on performances on a shoestring. In my
Chicago years I (briefly) did fund-raising and audience development for
the company which became the Chicago City Ballet, and I was so
impressed by the determination of these young people who had so little
common sense and so much passion for dance….

I love that last line. I’m not an idealist–life has made me fairly hard-headed–but I’m well aware that many, perhaps most of the great things that get done in this world, especially in the realm of art, are done by people with no common sense whatsoever. George Bernard Shaw described the Julius Caesar of his play Caesar and Cleopatra as “a man of great common sense and good taste–meaning thereby a man without originality or moral courage.”

Of course it’s more complicated than that, but those who (like me) lack a poetic streak should always be wary of condescending to those who don’t. If George Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein had had any common sense, they wouldn’t have founded New York City Ballet.

– A reader writes, apropos of this posting:

Your posting brought to mind a winter night in Minneapolis more than forty years ago. While most people like to just lie still and savor the mood afterwards, this girl often felt like dancing. I can still remember her dancing naked in the moonlight coming in through the picture window of my apartment. The music? Smetana’s Moldau. So long ago, but so vivid!

Somehow that memory reminds me of this.

“Going home must be like going to render an account.”

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Don’t worry–Terry is not in the hospital again! His heart is in perfect condition.

We occasionally get e-mails asking why the chronological order of this blog’s postings appears to have melted down, but the frequency of those e-mails has gone up sharply in the past couple of days, and here’s the reason: what you’re seeing, if you’re seeing it, are last year’s postings about Terry’s illness.

So what’s the problem? Whenever you visit the main page of “About Last Night,” what you see are the last seven days’ worth of postings, and nothing else.

If, however, you come to “About Last Night” via a link to a specific posting, the first thing you’ll see on your screen is the posting in question. Above and below it are all of the other postings for that week, in reverse chronological order.

Clear so far? Hang on–this is where it gets tricky. Start scrolling down and you’ll find all of the “About Last Night” postings for the same week last year, in reverse chronological order. Keep on scrolling down and you’ll find all of the postings for the same week in preceding years…and on and on ad infinitum, or at least all the way back to 2003, when “About Last Night” was launched.

This is how “About Last Night”‘s archives are set up, and it’s been causing a good deal of understandable reader confusion in the past few days. If, for instance, somebody sent you a link to Monday’s posting about Terry’s Christmas tree, you would have seen, not far below it, Our Girl’s posting from December of 2005 announcing that Terry was in the hospital. Result: alarms and confusions.

Alas, there’s nothing we can do about this peculiarity–it’s an immutable quirk of the software that generates our archives. So forgive us (and artsjournal.com) for giving you a scare, and please be assured that Terry is not–repeat, not–back in the hospital.