Archives for 2007

Most of what the National Council on the Arts does takes place behind closed doors, so I can’t tell you about it, except to say that Samuel Menashe paid us a visit and read several of his poems. Menashe is eighty-two, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and spent most of the rest of his life working in obscurity and living in a fifth-floor cold-water flat in downtown Manhattan. Now he’s famous–by the standards of contemporary poets, anyway–and has had a volume of his verse published by the Library of America, the only living poet to be so honored.
I breakfasted with Menashe twice, on Thursday and Friday, and found him utterly charming. At one point I mentioned that I played bass, and he immediately recited from memory a poem of his that compares the plucking of a bass string to the croaking of bullfrogs. I told him that Benjamin Britten had used the same sound to the same end in The Rape of Lucretia. “So my poem is true!” he said. You could have lit up a small city at midnight with the gleeful grin that flashed over his face.
Between meetings I took Hilary and a half-dozen of my fellow council members to the Phillips Collection, where we met my friend Laura Good, whom I’d last seen at our wedding. It was Hilary’s first visit to the Phillips, and she loved it. (These were her favorite paintings.)
It happens that I’d also taken Laura to the Phillips for the first time several years ago, and last week she blogged about the experience:

visiting the phillips is like visiting a childhood haunt–except that it’s a childhood haunt i didn’t find until i was a fresh-faced, 22-year-old midwestern transplant. i’d never hailed a taxi or tasted rugulach, and i’d never learned how to love meandering from room to quiet room of an art museum. i remember staring, completely confused, at cezanne’s last painting, trying to see something–anything!–while terry recited to me the painting’s history, meaning, and life, and then fell rapt and silent.
this time, though, i could see the cezanne: the fermenting colors, the lifting blue strokes, all as brisk and evocative as a real, ruddy garden–all the more urgent, perhaps, because the painter knew it would be his last canvas. as terry took off his glasses and leaned forward, i realized that i was leaning in, too: not in mimicry, but in satisfaction.

From there Hilary and I went to Megan McArdle‘s apartment to eat her fabulous cooking and meet two of her writer friends (one of whom has a blog of his own). The next morning we attended the NCA’s public meeting, where Nathan Darrow and Jessiee Datino, two fresh-faced young actors from Kansas City’s Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, gave a piping-hot performance of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, in which they appeared this past summer.
At morning’s end the council cast its votes, and Hilary and I subsequently returned to Manhattan by way of the Acela Express, Amtrak’s bumpiest train. For me it was the end of a near-uninterrupted month of travel. I slept for ten hours that night. I wanted to take the weekend off, but of course I never take weekends off: that’s when I see shows. On Saturday I went to the press preview of Tom Stoppard’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, and my favorite blogger arrived the next day to spend a hectic week as my houseguest…about which more later!
(Last of five parts)

Lee Gomes recently reported in The Wall Street Journal that “those who work behind-the-mic in the music industry–producers, engineers, mixers and the like–say they increasingly assume their recordings will be heard as mp3s on an iPod music player.” The news is enraging audiophiles, who know that the highly compressed data files used to send recorded music over the Web and store it on iPods sound inferior by comparison to a digital CD. I, on the other hand, take a different view of the matter, not because I don’t appreciate high-end sound but because I’m–brace yourself–middle-aged.
Why does the fact that I’m fiftysomething have anything to do with my willingness to listen to music on an iPod? For the answer, pick up a copy of Saturday’s Journal and turn to my “Sightings” column in the Weekend Journal section, in which I discuss the effects of presbycusis on music appreciation.
And what if you don’t know what presbycusis is? Then you really need to read my column tomorrow morning.
UPDATE: Online Journal subscribers can read this column by going here.

Inklings sans ink

Cling to the dry

Point of the pen

Whose stem I mouth

Not knowing when

The truth will out

Samuel Menashe, “Inklings”

• This Times of London story about a secret society of rooftop climbers at Cambridge has stayed with me ever since reading about it at Light Reading last weekend. The article mentions an antique book, The Night Climbers of Cambridge, authored by “Whipplesnaith” and published in 1937. The book is now out of print but can still be read online. (I’ve read it and plan to use its advice to scale the Methodist church up the block later today.)
• Michael Chabon reads from his new novel, Gentlemen of the Road.

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:

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

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

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

• Grease * (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• Pygmalion * (comedy, G, suitable for mature and intelligent young people, closes Dec. 16, reviewed here)

• Rock ‘n’ Roll (drama, PG-13, way too complicated for kids, 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, closes Jan. 20, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

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

From Smalltown I returned once again to New York, there to be reunited at long last with Mrs. T, who had finally spent enough hours in bed and quaffed enough antibiotics to recover from her virus. We saw Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway (she liked it better than I did) and reveled in the uncomplicated joy of being together again. Then we boarded a train to Washington, D.C., where I had a date with the National Council on the Arts.

We came to town two days early to look at paintings and attend a Supreme Court oral argument. I’ve watched a Senate session from the press gallery and visited the White House a couple of times, but I’d never before seen the Supreme Court in action. It’s quite a show. I suppose you can get used to anything–Dostoyevsky certainly thought so–but I’m sure it would take a good many visits before I stopped feeling awestruck when the clerk cries “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” and the nine justices step from behind the red curtains and take their seats at the bench.

Not all Supreme Court cases are interesting, or even intelligible, to the layman, but Mrs. T and I hit the jackpot, for one of the two cases the court heard that morning was United States v. Williams, whose subject was child pornography. (The second case, which had to do with the restoration of civil rights to convicted criminals, was more technical and less interesting.) The last thing I’d expected that day was to hear the phrase “snuff film” spoken from the bench of the Supreme Court, much less to witness a judicial skirmish over the relative merits of American Beauty and Lolita. The press was evidently no less struck by the proceedings, for United States v. Williams was written up the next day by the wire services and the New York Times.

I’m not a lawyer, but having read the briefs in Williams the night before, I understood nearly everything that was said. Nevertheless, I’ll leave it to the lawbloggers to parse the case’s legal niceties, and instead offer a tourist’s-eye view of what I saw:

• The courtroom is considerably larger than I expected. (The Senate chamber, by contrast, was smaller.)

• All nine justices are easily recognizable and act much the way you’d expect based on their reputations: Chief Justice Roberts is friendly but serious, Justice Scalia is a bit of a showoff, Justice Souter is painfully earnest, and Justice Thomas never asks questions.

• The audience was hushed throughout the proceedings–except when Justice Scalia cracked a joke, which he did fairly often, almost always at the expense of one of the lawyers.

• Justices Breyer, Thomas, and Kennedy, who sit together on the left side of the bench, sometimes whisper amusing comments to one another during oral arguments. (Not that I could hear what they were saying–I was on the far side of the room–but I could see that they were chuckling over something.)

• Justices Stevens and Ginsburg, the two oldest judges, look and sound their age–he’s eighty-seven, she’s seventy-four–but give every impression of being more than sufficiently sharp-witted to do their jobs.

• None of the justices seems much inclined to suffer fools, or to spare the feelings of lawyers who aren’t well-prepared and quick on their feet. Counsel for Williams, the kiddie-porn purveyor whose case was before the court, was neither, and had a tough time of it all morning long. I’m sure he was relieved when the red light on his lectern flashed to warn him that his half-hour was up.

After lunch we made our way to the National Gallery of Art for the first of two visits. We saw the Turner and Hopper retrospectives, both of which are major events, though the Turner is both bigger and more significant. I doubt there’ll be a more comprehensive Turner show in my lifetime, and I hope to walk through this one at least once more before it closes on January 6. The show travels to the Met in New York next June, but I expect the crowds there will be intolerable. In Washington they’re manageable, if intermittently oppressive. (This, by the way, is the painting that made the deepest impression on us, though this one ran it a close second.)

The Hopper show, by contrast, is pretty much a greatest-hits affair, containing a remarkably high percentage of his best-known paintings. That doesn’t make it any less satisfying, but if, like me, you spend a lot of time in American museums, you probably won’t find it especially surprising. For me the most interesting gallery was the one that contained a choice selection of Hopper’s etchings, the best of which are comparable in quality to his later canvases. The painting Hilary and I liked most was the very late, breath-catchingly bleak Sun in an Empty Room, which is, appropriately enough, the last piece in the show.

(To be continued)

“I envy people who can just look at a sunset. I wonder how you can shoot it. There is nothing more grotesque to me than a vacation.”
Dustin Hoffman (quoted in the Observer, Feb. 19, 1989)