“Why is it that one can look at a lion or a planet or an owl or at someone’s finger as long as one pleases, but looking into the eyes of another person is, if prolonged past a second, a perilous affair?”
Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Archives for 2010
TT: Snapshot
Dmitri Shostakovich plays an excerpt from the finale of his First Piano Concerto, filmed circa 1940:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
TT: Almanac
“She can only believe I am serious in her own fashion of being serious: as an antic sort of seriousness, which is not seriousness at all but despair masquerading as seriousness.”
Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
TT: Just because
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli plays the slow movement of Ravel’s G Major Piano Concerto in 1982, accompanied by Sergiu Celibidache and the London Symphony:
TT: Almanac
“You can still get all A’s and flunk life.”
Walker Percy, The Second Coming
BOOK
Scott Eyman, Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille (Simon & Schuster, $35). Who knew that the private life of the man who made The Ten Commandments and The Greatest Show on Earth would turn out to be so scandalous? Yet DeMille’s three mistresses are only a small part of this solidly written, impeccably researched biography, which traces with satisfying skill the nineteenth-century roots of the director’s grandiose, often cartoonish style of epic filmmaking. It’s one of the best Hollywood biographies to come along in recent years (TT).
PLAY
A Life in the Theatre (Gerald Schoenfeld, 236 W. 45, now closing Nov. 28). David Mamet’s 1977 two-man play about a pair of actors, one young and one old, who are battling for dominance over one another, now on Broadway in a production graced by a superlative performance from Patrick Stewart. Though his acting is unmistakably English in tone–Americans expect a faster pace in Mamet–Stewart is fully alive to the complicated mixture of envy and rue that his character feels as he watches his younger, more talented colleague (T.R. Knight) take flight. The results are poignant and compellling (TT).
TT: Traveling light
Mr. Jazz Lives asks:
When we are able to buy all the recordings of Louis or Django at one expensive shelf-filling gulp, do we listen to them completely? Or are we perversely overawed by the completeness, the profusion?…
I am reminded of my conversation with a musician who is now eighty, who talked about being able to buy one 78 record a week, so it had better be perfect. I am sure that had he, in 1944, been able to visualize the Complete Art Tatum Solo Performances in one package, he would have seen it as a wondrous mirage. How does it make us feel, I wonder. When our wants are gratified, will we be happier?
When I read this passage, I recalled the perverse sense of gratitude that I felt when I moved to a much smaller apartment a number of years ago and was forced to dispose of roughly two-thirds of my personal library–mostly books, to be sure, though I also pruned my CDs extensively and continue to do so on a regular basis.
Joseph Epstein, who had previously done the same thing, wrote an essay about the experience called “Books Won’t Furnish a Room” that made a powerful impression on me at the time. This is the next-to-last paragraph:
I have almost as little desire to live in a library as I do on a golf course. I seek a compromise: living in a place where not every wall has a bookcase. I hope that by now the book collector’s impulse is dead in me. With luck, I expect always to have the right books to keep my mind engaged, to put me gently to sleep at night, to be on hand to distract me during bouts of insomnia. I’m far from ready to go so far as Philip Larkin and say that “books are a load of crap.” But in selling off my books I felt I was freeing myself in some way, entering another stage in life–though I’m not altogether clear what it might be. Behind my selling all these books was a longing to streamline my life a bit, make it feel less cluttered, encumbered, book bound. In doing so, I feel as if I had gathered my desert-island books about me without actually having to sail off for the island….
It was this piece, which was originally published in 2000, that gave me the courage to shed so many of my books and CDs. Never since have I regretted that hard decision, not even when I find myself briefly wishing that I had a specific book or album close to hand for purposes of research.
This is even true in the case of the jazz CDs that rank among my greatest treasures. I, too, once felt the mad desire to own every jazz record ever made, and to have them all shelved in chronological order at arm’s length from my desk. Today I own just two racks, and whenever I acquire a new album, I get rid of an old one in order to make room for it. Not only has this imperative made me ruthlessly selective, but it has forced me to reconsider my priorities. Time was when I bought records in order to say that I had them. Now I keep them only because I love them.
No doubt the day is almost here when it will be possible for people like me to download the Complete Performances of Everybody to our computers…except that I’m no longer that kind of person. I love Art Tatum, but I don’t want to own every record he ever made. I want to own the ones that matter to me, and let the others go. I want to be able to pull a CD or book from my shelves at random and know that it will please me, just as I hang on my walls only paintings and prints that move me deeply.
Why have I come to feel this way? Because I’m fifty-four. Life, I now know, is short, too short to waste, and the actuarial tables leave no possible doubt that most of mine has passed me by. As a professional critic, it’s my job–my destiny, you might say–to spend a fair amount of time experiencing art that I don’t like. Insofar as possible, though, I don’t propose to waste any more of the days that remain to me consuming bad art than is absolutely necessary. Unless I’m being paid to do so, I won’t even finish reading a book I don’t like, or listening to a record that fails to engage me. I have better things to do, and not nearly enough time in which to do them.