Archives for 2009

When I read the obituaries for Edward Woodward last week, my mind went back to an essay I wrote in 1986 about The Equalizer, the stylish TV series in which he starred a quarter-century ago. This piece, which appeared in National Review, was one of the first things I wrote for a magazine that I really liked, and I’ve no idea why I didn’t include it in the Teachout Reader.

I especially like this part:

Over a churning electronic soundtrack, we see a jerkily edited sequence of New York nightmares. A young woman unsuccessfully attempts to board a subway car at Columbus Circle and a punk slithers out from behind a column as the train pulls away. A man pounds frantically on the door of a telephone booth as a big black car screeches toward him. One stark image bears down savagely upon the next. All at once the soothing image of a man in deep shadow fills the screen. He is The Equalizer, the Nietzschean superman come to make safe the mean streets of the Big Apple….

The dream of the Übermensch as urban savior has always gone over big in America. Superman fantasies can be easily found in the hard-boiled detective novel, many of our movies, and most of our comic books. But television, from Dragnet to Hill Street Blues, has generally preferred to let duly appointed authorities clean up the streets. It’s all right to be a maverick, a cop with an independent streak, but a current institutional affiliation in reasonably good standing is almost always a must. Shows that posit the helplessness of the police in the face of urban crime have never been popular on American television, which prefers to reassure rather than frighten. So it is intriguing that each episode of The Equalizer should enact the desperate notion that the center cannot hold without the occasional benign intervention of a fearless vigilante….

The show is clearly aimed at a sophisticated audience of baby-boomers, and the assumption that this audience would appreciate so straight-forwardly moralistic a denouement is a telling one. The baby-boomers, despite their notoriously touchy consciences, are still looking for simple answers to complex questions, and commercial television has long been in the business of supplying them. The Equalizer caters gracefully to subway-riding boomers who wonder nervously when their turn to be mugged will come up. Nothing stimulates the desire for order quite like advancing age.

* * *

The opening title sequence to The Equalizer. The music is by Stewart Copeland:

“Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.”
Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition

If you haven’t seen Michiko Kakutani’s New York Times review of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, go here to read it.
Not long after the Times review appeared on the paper’s Web site yesterday afternoon, Pops became the best-selling jazz book on Amazon. I don’t know how long it will stay that way, so if you haven’t gotten around to doing your bit, why wait? Christmas is just around the corner.
UPDATE: In addition to raving about “Pops” today, Kakutani has put it on her list of the ten best books of 2009.

• Jane Wilson, about whom I have written more than once in this space and elsewhere, has a show of new paintings and watercolors up at DC Moore Gallery through December 23. Busy as I am, I didn’t hesitate to carve out time to see it as soon as it opened, for Wilson is one of my favorite American artists. Imagine a cross between Mark Rothko and Fairfield Porter and you’ll get an inkling of what Wilson is up to in her near-abstract yet miraculously specific skyscapes, in which the fleeting manifestations of clouds and light are refracted through the transforming prism of an artist’s eye. I can’t praise Wilson more highly than to say that one of her small-format watercolors, Breaking Light, hangs in the Teachout Museum. I look at it every day.
DC Moore is at 724 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. For more information, go here.
• Maria Schneider, the most gifted of contemporary jazz composers, brings her big band to the Jazz Standard tonight for their annual Thanksgiving residency. They’ll be there through Sunday, playing a mixture of old and new tunes, and what I wrote about them in 2007 still goes:

Few instrumental composers of importance (and Maria is a very important composer) have drawn so directly on the remembered experiences that she transforms by an impenetrable act of mental alchemy into the pastel clouds of sound that are her compositions. I love to watch bits and pieces of her life find their way onto manuscript paper: hang gliding, childhood car rides, the dance music of Latin America, the sound of birds singing in Central Park.

No show on Thursday. Otherwise, two shows nightly, plus an additional late-night set on Friday and Saturday. Reservations are essential. For more information, go here.

“The people are a sovereign whose vocabulary is limited to two words, ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’ This sovereign, moreover, can speak only when spoken to.”
E.E. Schattenschneider, Party Government: American Government in Action

Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong got a rave from Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times:

With “Pops,” his eloquent and important new biography of Armstrong, the critic and cultural historian Terry Teachout restores this jazzman to his deserved place in the pantheon of American artists, building upon Gary Giddins’s excellent 1988 study, “Satchmo: The Genius of Louis Armstrong,” and offering a stern rebuttal of James Lincoln Collier’s patronizing 1983 book, “Louis Armstrong: An American Genius.”
Mr. Teachout…writes with a deep appreciation of Armstrong’s artistic achievements, while situating his work and his life in a larger historical context. He draws on Armstrong’s wonderfully vivid writings and hours of tapes in which the musician recorded his thoughts and conversations with friends, and in doing so, creates an emotionally detailed portrait of Satchmo as a quick, funny, generous, observant and sometimes surprisingly acerbic man: a charismatic musician, who like a Method actor, channeled his vast life experience into his work, displaying a stunning, almost Shakespearean range that encompassed the jubilant and the melancholy, the playful and the sorrowful.
At the same time, Mr. Teachout reminds us of Armstrong’s gifts: “the combination of hurtling momentum and expansive lyricism that propelled his playing and singing alike,” his revolutionary sense of rhythm, his “dazzling virtuosity and sensational brilliance of tone,” in another trumpeter’s words, which left listeners feeling as though they’d been staring into the sun. The author–who worked as a jazz bassist before becoming a full-time writer–also uses his firsthand knowledge of music to convey the magic of such Armstrong masterworks as “St. Louis Blues,” “Potato Head Blues,” “West End Blues” and “Star Dust.”…

I think this must be the first time that anyone has ever called me a “cultural historian” in print.
Read the whole thing here.

My friend Laura Lippman sent me this snapshot of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong on display at a bookstore in New Orleans’ Louis Armstrong International Airport.
Another friend in Washington, D.C., sends along this report:

You’ll be pleased to know that Pops is being showcased in the front window display of Politics and Prose, along with Ted Kennedy’s autobiography, Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest, and some other books.

You meet the most interesting people in a bookstore window….

The dust jacket of the American edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, designed by Mark Robinson, is one of the six nominees in the “Best Famous Faces” category of Amazon’s Best Cover of the Year competition.
If you like the cover of Pops as much as I do, vote for it by going here.