Archives for 2012

Hilton Kramer, who died today after a long and debilitating illness, was a great art critic who also founded an important magazine, The New Criterion. He was, like so many other great critics, more than a little bit narrow in his enthusiasms, but whenever he wrote about the artists who engaged his sensibilities most powerfully, he never failed to be illuminating.
I last had occasion to write about Hilton in 2007, when he brought out his final book, The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005:

Kramer is best known for his unfavorable reviews, and in recent years he has spent an ever-increasing share of his time commenting on politics. As a result, too many younger readers are unaware that he is one of the best critical advocates we have. I saw several of the shows reviewed in The Triumph of Modernism when I was first starting to take a serious interest in art, and I vividly remember how reading what Kramer had to say about such critically undervalued modern painters as Fairfield Porter, Arthur Dove and Richard Diebenkorn helped give shape to my inchoate excitement. For all his gifts as a demolition man, it is this aspect of his work that continues to mean the most to me. Nothing is harder to write than a good review, and nobody writes better ones than Hilton Kramer.

John Podhoretz, who has written well about Hilton’s political passions, portrays him as a difficult man who was hard to like. For my part, I found him so intimidating that it was impossible for me to get to know him more than superficially. I regret that, but I am proud both to have known Hilton at all and to have published in The New Criterion. He was a man of the highest possible seriousness, forthright and fearless, and I expect that he will not soon be forgotten.
UPDATE: The New York Times obituary is here.
Franklin Einspruch gets Kramer exactly right.

From 2005:

I found this note from an old friend, written apropos of a recent posting: “I felt, during my chemotherapy, that I lived in the Goldberg Variations, because it was the universe.”
I’ve never undergone chemotherapy (though I’ve watched it being given many times), but I have had a not entirely dissimilar experience with Bach’s Goldberg Variations. If you’re going to have mystical experiences accompanied by a piece of music, I guess you can’t do much better than the Goldbergs, and should the time ever come when I find myself in an extremity as dire as being on the business end of chemotherapy, I hope I’ll have the presence of mind to recall that reassuring fact….

Read the whole thing here.

“Yet when truth cannot make itself known in words, it will make itself known in deeds.”
Roger Scruton, “Should He Have Spoken?”

Mitch Miller’s “Horn Belt Boogie,” composed by Alec Wilder as the last movement of his Jazz Suite for Horn Quartet and Rhythm Section and recorded for Columbia in 1951. The instrumentalists heard on this recording include Ray Alonge, John Barrows, Jim Buffington, and Gunther Schuller on horn and Stan Freeman on harpsichord. This was one of Dennis Brain‘s favorite pop records:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

My brother and sister-in-law are moving into my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A. It was built a half-century ago and is in need of much repair, so Dave has set about remodeling the place, starting with what used to be my bedroom. Though he undertook the task with my wholehearted approval, it was still a jolt when I stopped by the house, opened the door to my old room, and found…nothing. The bed I’d slept in, the bookshelf that once held my burgeoning library of paperbacks, the chest of drawers in which I placed my neatly folded clothes–all had vanished. Even the carpet was gone.

“Oh, my!” I cried as I gazed through the open door, startled to hear the unfamiliar sound of my voice bouncing off the freshly painted walls. I stepped inside and was no less startled by how small the room looked. Could I really have grown up in this cramped chamber? Was this the place in which I dreamed my youthful dreams of glory? It was–or, rather, it had been. Now it was an empty, memory-free space waiting to be brought to life once more.

We have it on good authority that you can’t go home again, but the fact is that I’ve been doing so ever since I moved away from Smalltown at the age of eighteen. My mother lived at 713 Hickory Drive from 1962 until last summer, when she entered a nearby nursing home, and whenever I visited her, I always stayed there.

A few years ago I blogged about how it felt to return to the bedroom of my youth:

I sit at a rickety, ink-stained card table that’s as old as I am, set up next to the bed in which I slept as a teenager. When I glance up from my iBook, I see a homemade bookshelf (my father built it) full of tattered paperbacks, a complete set of Reader’s Digest Best-Loved Books for Young Readers, and a short stack of dusty 45s by such artists as Ray Anthony, Rosemary Clooney, Billy Daniels, Vic Damone, Stan Kenton, the McGuire Sisters, and Jo Stafford. A chromolithograph of Abraham Lincoln hangs on the wall behind me. To my left is a telephone with a dial. The only modern things in sight are the laptop computer on which I’m writing these words and the iPod on which I listen to music, both of which I brought with me….

Gone, gone with the wind!

Not surprisingly, opening the door to my bare room-that-once-was put me in mind of the last act of Our Town, in which the Stage Manager permits Emily to pay a spectral visit to the Grover’s Corners of her childhood. It felt as though I had turned that scene upside down, with the Stage Manager pulling back the curtain to reveal an empty stage.

At the same time, though, I also found myself thinking of Walking Distance, the episode of The Twilight Zone in which Gig Young visits the small town where he grew up and finds that nothing–absolutely nothing–has changed. Within a few minutes he realizes that the clock has somehow been turned back, and not long after that he runs across a little boy who is himself when young. Upon meeting his father, he confesses to feeling tempted to give up on the present and spend the rest of his life in Homewood: “I’ve been living in a dead run and I was tired. And one day I knew I had to come back here. I had to get on the merry-go-round and listen to a band concert. I had to stop and breathe, and close my eyes and smell, and listen.”

Says his father:

We only get one chance. Maybe there’s only one summer to every customer. That little boy, the one I know–the one who belongs here–this is his summer, just as it was yours once. Don’t make him share it.

Those are wise words. That doesn’t make them any less bittersweet. But I felt a surge of reassurance as I looked out the window of my old bedroom and saw that the dogwood tree in my mother’s front yard had burst into blossom, as it does around this time each year. Unlike a flowering tree, a house cannot renew itself, but my brother’s decision to live in the house where we grew up is the next best thing. No, it won’t look the same–but its doors will still be open to me, and it will still be full of people whom I love.

In today’s Wall Street Journal I join the chorus of critical praise for the Broadway transfer of Once, followed by a few short, sharp words about Jesus Christ Superstar. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
The deck is stacked against “Once.” Though the posters call it a musical, this starless stage version of the 2006 indie-flick sleeper is actually a play with songs, and it has moved from a 198-seat downtown performance space to a 1,078-seat Broadway house. That’s way too big for a plot-driven single-set show whose appeal is rooted in its directness and charm. To do “Once” at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre is like doing “The Fantasticks” in Madison Square Garden.
Never mind all that. Go anyway.
“Once” is the most touching new musical to come to Broadway since “The Light in the Piazza” opened there in 2005, and it deserves to be a hit. Sure, it belongs Off Broadway, but if you don’t see it now, you won’t get to see Cristin Milioti, who is giving the kind of performance that in a just world would do for her what “Venus in Fur” did for Nina Arianda. What she does in “Once” would be worth seeing even if the show were less good than it is….
Ms. Milioti, who made a splash two years ago in the U.S. premiere of Polly Stenham’s “That Face,” is something else again, a slight, huge-eyed young woman who grabs and holds your attention from the moment she walks on the stage. While nothing she does is exaggerated, she somehow gives the impression of standing in an invisible spotlight, which is a pretty fair working definition of star quality. Her singing is fragile but fetching, her Czech accent completely convincing, and she’s even a halfway decent piano player….
“Jesus Christ Superstar,” in which Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice set the Passion to ersatz rock and roll, has one thing in common with “Once”: It’s not a musical. Billed as a “rock opera” when it was first recorded in 1970, it’s really, like the Who’s “Tommy,” an oratorio, an evening-long sequence of musical numbers with no connecting dialogue or recitative. To stage it is thus an exercise in dramatic futility, and since the songs are synthetic Top-40 gimcracks that already sounded dated when they were new, the only way to make “Jesus Christ Superstar” “work” in the theater is to hose on the gloss, shovel on the glitz and buff until banal, which is just what Des McAnuff, the director of the new Broadway revival, has done….
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Read the whole thing here.

“Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no preparation is thought necessary.”
Robert Louis Stevenson, “Yoshida-Torajiro”