After a week of tweaking, adjusting, practicing, and otherwise getting used to our new publishing platform, I’m pleased (and relieved) to say that “About Last Night” once more looks the way it’s supposed to look. Making the switch to Movable Type wasn’t fun, but it turned out to be more than worth the trouble. Alas, Our Girl was out of Chicago on business last week and thus hasn’t had a chance to learn the technical ropes, but Doug McLennan and I hope to have her up and running within a few days.
The only problem we haven’t yet managed to fix is that our alternate URL, www.terryteachout.com, is still bouncing to the main ArtsJournal page instead of “About Last Night.” I don’t know why. The techies don’t know why. Nobody knows why. But we’re all working on it….
I’m also pleased to announce that the right-hand column has been updated, and I also added a half-dozen new blogs to “Sites to See.” Check it all out.
Now, back to blogging!
Archives for April 2007
TT: Eight isn’t enough
I wrote a review of Desmond Stone’s biography of Alec Wilder for the New York Times Book Review in 1996:
Alec Wilder spent his life looking for cracks to fall through. Though he wrote three songs that became standards (“I’ll Be Around,” “While We’re Young” and “It’s So Peaceful in the Country”), most of his “popular” music was too delicate and introspective to please a mass audience; though he composed hundreds of works for some of America’s greatest instrumentalists, these “classical” pieces were too strongly colored by jazz and popular music to win critical acceptance. Today, he is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking book “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950,” surely the wittiest work of musical analysis ever written–and one that characteristically has nothing whatsoever to say about Wilder’s own songs, even such miniature masterpieces as “I See It Now” and “Did You Ever Cross Over to Sneden’s?”…
Wilder’s narcissistic shyness (he was precisely the sort of person for whom the term “passive-aggressive” was coined) didn’t stop him from moving to New York in the early 1930’s and setting up shop as a songwriter and arranger, but it did place severe limits on his ability to get ahead in the hard-nosed world of commercial music. As one contemporary recalled: “His music sounded different, he dressed differently, he acted differently….He just wrote what he wanted and the devil take recording supervisors, radio executives and bandleaders.”
No less problematic was his interest in writing music that moved freely from jazz to classical and back again, the first fruit of which was a series of three-minute cameos for five woodwinds, harpsichord, bass and drums. The limpid melodies, piquant scoring and fey titles (“Jack, This Is My Husband,” “It’s Silk, Feel It”) of Wilder’s octets delighted musicians and befuddled everybody else. Recorded in 1939 and 1940 by a crack group of studio players, the octets reinforced their composer’s reputation for uncommercial eccentricity, but also won him influential fans…
I’ve been praising Wilder’s octets for years to anyone who’d listen, but only seven of them have ever been reissued on CD. The rest remain firmly ensconced in limbo, and so far as I know, no one in the world has any plans to make them available again. (Are you listening, Hep Records?)
For this reason, I am delighted–nay, ecstatic–to announce that some anonymous benefactor lurking in cyberspace has celebrated Wilder’s centenary (he was born on February 16, 1907) by making eight of the Wilder Octet recordings available as podcasts.
Click on the links below and you can listen to:
• Concerning Etchings
• Dance Man Buys a Farm (the reference is to Artie Shaw)
• A Debutante’s Diary
• The House Detective Registers
• It’s Silk, Feel It!
• Little White Samba
• Neurotic Goldfish
• Sea Fugue Mama (the reference is to “Want some sea food, Mama,” a line from a 1939 pop song called “Hold Tight” whose lyrics are, ahem, cunningly naughty)
For the record, the rest of the octets have similarly fetching titles: “The Amorous Poltergeist,” “Bull Fiddles in a China Shop,” “The Children Met the Train,” “Footnotes to a Summer Love,” “Her Old Man Was Suspicious,” “His First Long Pants,” “Kindergarten Flower Pageant,” “A Little Girl Grows Up,” “Pieces of Eight,” “Please Do Not Disturb the House Detective,” “Remember Me to Youth,” “Seldom the Sun,” “She’ll Be Seven in May,” “Such a Tender Night,” “They Needed No Words,” and “Walking Home in the Spring.”
Give a listen. I guarantee you’ll be charmed.
UPDATE: Mr. Anecdotal Evidence is also a fan of Wilder’s octets.
TT: Almanac
“Though the years are sad, the days have a way of being jubilant.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance
DVD
Of Mice and Men. Like so many middlebrow “classics” of the Thirties and Forties, John Steinbeck’s best-known novel plays better than it reads. Lewis Milestone’s handsomely photographed 1939 film version, adapted by Steinbeck himself from the stage version he wrote two years earlier (with the unacknowledged assistance of George S. Kaufman), is an unexpectedly impressive piece of work. Burgess Meredith is perfect as George–he never gave a better performance–and though you’ll have to brush aside countless half-remembered parodies to see how good Lon Chaney, Jr., is as George, it’s worth the effort. The music is by Aaron Copland, and it’s every bit as powerful as his better-known scores for Our Town and The Heiress (TT).
BOOK
Michael Barrier, The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney (University of California, $29.95). The last word on the man who made Mickey Mouse talk. No gossip, no nonsense, just an authoritative, lucidly written chronicle of Disney’s life and work by a critic-historian-blogger who knows as much about animated cartoons as anyone alive. Don’t waste time on Neal Gabler’s Disney biography–this is the real right stuff (TT).
CD
Hollywood String Quartet, Beethoven Late Quartets (Testament, three CDs). Felix Slatkin, Leonard’s father, was a superbly gifted Heifetz-style violinist who served as concertmaster of the Twentieth-Century Fox orchestra and, after hours, led an ensemble of Hollywood studio players good enough to stand up to direct comparison with the Budapest Quartet. Their 1957 Capitol recordings of the late quartets of Beethoven, now available once again after a long hiatus, rank among the finest chamber-music recordings ever made. Rarely have Beethoven’s most sublime inward utterances been played with such awesome technical finish–or interpreted with such self-effacing seriousness (TT).
TT: Little Miss Wrong
I report on two plays in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, one off-Broadway (Blackbird) and one out of town (The Life of Galileo). One thumb down, one thumb up:
Forbidden love has always been a favorite topic of playwrights, who like nothing better than to add an extra touch of drama to the old, old story. Unfortunately–or not–the list of officially proscribed romantic partners grows shorter every day, thus making it harder to portray any relationship, however outré, as illicit. Once the merest hint of homosexuality was enough to send a delicious shudder through most any audience, but that was then. David Harrower’s “Blackbird,” in which we are invited to contemplate the coupling of a 40-year-old man and a 12-year-old girl, is ever so much more up to date….
This is where I’m supposed to say that I found “Blackbird” challenging, disquieting, disturbing…you know the litany. No doubt some trendy critic will even call it transgressive. But what I find most disturbing about “Blackbird” is that in the absence of any moral frame for the events Mr. Harrower is describing, it’s hard to see a point to his play beyond mere prurience….
Bertolt Brecht wrote three different versions of “The Life of Galileo,” and each time he added a fresh layer of moral complexity to his fictionalized stage biography of the Italian scientist who proved that the earth orbits around the sun, then recanted his discovery in order to escape the fires of the Inquisition. The first version is a Marxist parable of Reason Enlightening the World. In the second, written after Hiroshima, Brecht rethought his blind faith in science as the engine of human happiness; in the last verson, written after he returned to East Germany and was forced to choose between supporting a totalitarian regime or having his theater company shut down, he sharpened his portrayal of Galileo’s self-protective opportunism.
After “Mother Courage,” “The Life of Galileo” is Brecht’s finest play, but it doesn’t get done nearly often enough in this country (so far as I know, it hasn’t been staged in New York since 1991). That’s why I made a point of going to Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater to see the American premiere of David Edgar’s new translation. This production, directed by Blanka Zizka, is a lively, plain-spoken modern-dress staging devoid of the heavy-handedness that can make Brecht awfully hard to swallow….
As per usual, no free link. To read the whole thing, buy today’s paper or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you two-click access to my column, plus the rest of the paper’s extensive, excellent arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)
TT: Almanac
“I often wonder whether a frumpy old woman can ever be quite fair in her estimate of a young & lovely one.”
Edith Wharton, letter to Bernard Berenson (Dec. 19, 1921)