Archives for 2007

I’m writing these words at nine a.m. on Christmas Eve. Not a creature is stirring, not even Mrs. T, who isn’t a morning person, or my mother, who went to bed gratefully last night and with any luck will sleep a little while longer. The sun is shining in Smalltown, U.S.A., something it evidently felt no need to do last week. I showed up on Thursday after a more than usually tedious eleven-hour journey and plunged myself into the complicated routine of taking care of my seventy-eight-year-old mother, who broke her pelvis two months ago. Mrs. T flew out to Smalltown to look after her while I wrapped up my remaining deadlines for 2007, and now I’m here, too, making coffee, running errands, and exuding all the good cheer I have in me.

The sunshine helps, as does the season. Mrs. T put up a Christmas tree in the living room last week, and I opened up the old spinet piano the other day and banged out carols and seasonal songs to the best of my now-limited ability. Still, I feel a bit like Othello right now: my occupation’s gone. I’m too preoccupied with looking after my mother to work on my Louis Armstrong biography or do any serious reading, I don’t have any pieces due until the second week in January, and the nearest theater is two hours away (though I heard the other day that the Smalltown Little Theater was holding auditions for its spring production of South Pacific).

So yes, I’m at loose ends–but very, very glad to be. What better way is there to spend Christmas, after all, than the way I’m spending this one? I’m with the people I love most, helping to take care of someone who not so long ago took loving care of me. As folks say around here, that’s the reason for the season, and a good one, too.

I hear one of my housemates stirring, so I’ll see you later. Merry Christmas to all!

“Christmas is not a time or a season but a state of mind. To cherish peace and good will, to be plenteous in mercy, is to have the real spirit of Christmas. If we think on these things, there will be born in us a Savior and over us will shine a star sending its gleam of hope to the world.”
Calvin Coolidge, presidential message, Dec. 25, 1927

My “Sightings” column in today’s Wall Street Journal goes after the management of the New York Philharmonic for agreeing to send the orchestra to North Korea:

Zarin Mehta and Paul Guenther, the president and chairman of the Philharmonic…shared a platform with Pak Gil Yon, North Korea’s ambassador to the United Nations, and announced that America’s oldest orchestra would be playing in Pyongyang next February. It horrified me–no other word is strong enough–to see them sitting next to the smirking representative of Kim Jong Il, the dictator of a brutally totalitarian state in whose Soviet-style prison camps 150,000 political prisoners are currently doing slave labor.
In public as well as in private, the management of the Philharmonic has made it clear that the orchestra is going to North Korea with “the encouragement and support of the U.S. Department of State” (to quote from the press release announcing the trip). While Mr. Mehta went out of his way to say that no pressure was put on the orchestra, it’s widely believed that the White House means to use the concert as a bargaining chip in its ongoing negotiations with Pyongyang.
I leave it to more qualified observers to predict whether anything of value will emerge from these negotiations. But it is not the job of the New York Philharmonic to enact foreign policy, much less to besmirch its own honor by taking part in what, in a previous column on this topic, I called “a puppet show whose purpose is to lend legitimacy to a despicable regime.” Nor do you have to be a diplomat to know that Mr. Guenther was blowing smoke when he compared the trip to the 1989 concert that Leonard Bernstein and members of the Philharmonic gave at the soon-to-be-dismantled Berlin Wall. Nobody is tearing any walls down in North Korea….

Read the whole thing here.

It’s A Wonderful Life leaves Mr. Tingle va klempt but I tend to wander off halfway through. However, there are a few movies we always watch together this time of year: Thin Man (for the Christmas party scene); Wonder Boys (not technically a Christmas movie but it feels like one, and not just because of all the snow and sleet); and the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy (because nothing says “Merry Christmas!” like 10,000 Orcs on your doorstep).
The other Christmas-watching tradition calls for Mr. Tingle (who is a tolerant man) to trundle an old television with VCR attachment from our attic so I can watch a VHS tape of Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov dancing The Nutcracker. This year I intended to pair it with Mark Morris’s Hard Nut, which Terry recommended here a while back, but Netflix has alas, not obliged.
I plan to pop in here next week. But just in case: I wish you all a merry and joyful holiday!

• It’s hard to read this list of drinks inspired by Dickens novels and not want to head immediately to the store to pick up the ingredients for some Smoking Bishops. (via Bookslut.)
• Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder (so secondeth Strindberg).
I’ve not yet had absinthe, and I long to try a thimbleful. My adult self feels about it the way my kid self once felt about Turkish delight. As you’ll remember, Turkish delight is what the White Witch gives Edmund a packet of in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and it sounded so mysterious and delectable. I have a distinct memory of standing in front of the candy counter at the Marshall-Fields in Chicago as a child looking in vain for the tray of Turkish delight. (A few years ago a friend brought some home from a cruise in Greece, and I finally got to try some. It turns out that Turkish delight is made up of oddly nubby, jelly-like candies covered in powdery sugar. Not quite what I imagined — which was something even more snowy with a deep emerald center — but still very satisfying to eat.)
It’s funny how many of the food descriptions one reads as a child stick. For me it wasn’t just the Turkish delight from The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe that I fancied, but also the buttery toast points and tea Lucy has with Mr. Tumnus. The blancmange Jo brings Laurie in Little Women. The acorn pancakes in My Side of the Mountain. And the chocolate river in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well as the toad in the hole in Danny the Champion of the World.
Meanwhile, the list of drinks inspired by Dickens novels makes me want to re-read Pickwick Papers and make a list of all the food consumed in it. The club eats so many gluttonous meals, many of the components of which, if I remember correctly, are pleasantly strange and slightly disgusting to read about now.

I reviewed two plays in today’s Wall Street Journal drama column, one on Broadway (Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming) and one off (George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, performed by the Irish Repertory Theatre). Here’s a preview.
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“What the hell was that all about?” said the friend who went with me to “The Homecoming” as we left the theater. The last scene of Harold Pinter’s best-known play hasn’t lost its power to reduce audiences to head-scratching confusion 40 years after it was first seen on Broadway. But even if you’re not sure what all of “The Homecoming” is all about, you’ll still get the message of the viciously comic revival now playing on Broadway–and you’ll revel in the work of six actors who definitely know what’s what….
Daniel Sullivan is one of New York’s most uneven directors, but when he’s hot, he’s hot, and his staging of “The Homecoming” cuts like a hacksaw. Ian McShane, Eve Best (who is a very great actress in the making) and Raúl Esparza have the showiest parts and make the strongest impressions, though no apologies need be made for their colleagues, or for Eugene Lee’s seedy set, which looks as though someone had worked it over with a wrecking ball….
Like so many of Shaw’s plays, “The Devil’s Disciple” is a sneaky piece of theatrical prestidigitation in which the shell of an old-fashioned Victorian melodrama is stuffed with decidedly un-Victorian notions about morality (“He has been too well brought up by a pious mother to have any sense or manhood left in him”). Director Tony Walton, who also designed the production, takes care to keep the pace brisk–not even the preacher is preachy–and the cast responds to his lightness of touch with acting to match. John Windsor-Cunningham comes close to stealing the show as the urbane General Burgoyne, but Lorenzo Pisoni and Curzon Dobell steal it right back from him, and Cristin Milioti catches the eye and ear in the supporting role of Essie, the bastard waif who loves Dick in her own desperate way….
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To read the whole thing, go here.

And though in tinsel chain and popcorn rope

My tree, a captive in your window bay,

Has lost its footing on my mountain slope

And lost the stars of heaven, may, oh, may

The symbol star it lifts against your ceiling

Help me accept its fate with Christmas feeling.

Robert Frost, “To a Young Wretch”