Archives for March 2015

Mrs. T and I are thinking about adding another piece to the Teachout Museum, a lithograph by Romare Bearden, an artist whose work we both love, enough so that I’m surprised we’ve never before discussed the possibility of buying one of his prints. (Bearden is best remembered for his collages, but he was also a highly accomplished printmaker.) Though we already have a particular piece in mind, this isn’t something that we’ll do casually. Any art purchase, however modest the price, is by definition a big deal for us, and so we’re prepared to spend a considerable amount of time looking for just the right piece.

Needless to say, it’s a lot easier to collect art if you’re rich, but I doubt that it’s more fun. In fact, I suspect that the necessity to pinch our pennies may well enhance the pleasure that Mrs. T and I get out of spending them on a work of art. I spent several years tracking down an affordable copy of the Childe Hassam lithotint that we acquired last fall, but it was worth the wait, and then some.

When I tweeted about all this last week, Aaron Haspel, a Twitter-based aphorist, responded as follows: “Taste is quality divided by expense. Limited means provide unlimited opportunity to show it.” I can’t put it any better than that. If you can afford to buy whatever you want whenever you want it, you’re a lot more likely to pull the trigger casually, and your purchases may not be as reflective of such taste as you have. Mrs. T and I can’t afford to do that. Whenever we buy and hang a piece of art in our New York apartment, it’s because we love it enough to make a financial sacrifice in order to have the pleasure of looking at it every day, and everything we purchase is a direct reflection of our deepest aesthetic values. We believe in our shared tastes.

It remains to be seen whether Romare Bearden will join the roster of artists for whom we’re willing to make such a sacrifice. If he does, though, you can be sure that we’ll both feel confident that we did the right thing.

From 2005:

“The world presents itself to me, not chiefly as a complex of visual sensations, but as a complex of aural sensations,” H.L. Mencken, himself a sometime music critic, once wrote. I’m far more aesthetically polydextrous (if that’s a word) than he was, but my long experience as a musician did make me so sensitive to what comes in through the ear that it may well amount to a kind of bias. I know, for instance, that it has a great deal to do with the way I respond to people in my daily life. At brunch yesterday, I was seated near a woman whose voice was so harsh and grating that it interfered with my ability to enjoy my meal….

Read the whole thing here.

“Everybody is interesting for an hour, but few people can last more than two.”

V.S. Naipaul (interviewed in Time, July 10, 1989)

Three years ago I posted an almanac entry drawn from an essay by L.E. Sissman called “The Constant Rereader’s Five-Foot Shelf”:

A list of books that you reread is like a clearing in the forest: a level, clean, well-lighted place where you set down your burdens and set up your home, your identity, your concerns, your continuity in a world that is at best indifferent, at worst malign.

A reader of this blog has now invited me to draw up my own five-foot shelf of books that I like to reread. As I doubt I need to remind you, I turn to the novels of Raymond Chandler, William Haggard, Elmore Leonard, Patrick O’Brian, Rex Stout, Donald E. Westlake, and P.G. Wodehouse when I feel the urgent need to relax. Here is a shortish and by no means comprehensive list of other, more variously ambitious books to which I have also returned with fair regularity in recent years:

• Kingsley Amis, Girl, 20 and The Russian Girl

• Alan Ayckbourn, The Crafty Art of Playmaking

• Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor and Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu

• Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

• Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

• James Gould Cozzens, By Love Possessed, Guard of Honor, and The Just and the Unjust

• Peter De Vries, The Blood of the Lamb

• The Film Criticism of Otis Ferguson

• Carl Flesch, Memoirs

• Gielgud’s Letters: John Gielgud in His Own Words

• Moss Hart, Act One

• Hugh MacLennan, The Watch That Ends the Night

• All of the novels of John P. Marquand

• Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale, The Narrow Margin, and The Razor’s Edge

• Edwin O’Connor, All in the Family and The Edge of Sadness

• The Library of America’s Flannery O’Connor volume (very much including the letters)

• Richard Osborne, Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music

• Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time

• Dawn Powell, The Locusts Have No King and A Time to Be Born

• All of the novels of Barbara Pym, but especially Excellent Women

• The Library of America’s Reporting World War II

• David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film

• Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path

• Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now

• Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men

• Evelyn Waugh, Sword of Honour

• Angus Wilson, Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

I make no claim, by the way, that all of these books are “classic,” or that I think they’re better than other books that I reread less often (or not at all). They are nothing more—or less—than books that I like to reread fairly often for reasons that are in some cases not entirely clear to me. Make of that what you will.

New York City Ballet performs George Balanchine’s Symphony in C in 1973. The soloists are Karin von Aroldingen and Jean-Pierre Bonnefous in the first movement, Allegra Kent and Conrad Ludlow in the second movement, Sara Leland and John Clifford in the third movement, and Marnee Morris in the finale. The score is Georges Bizet’s Symphony in C, composed shortly after Bizet turned seventeen:

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

“‘The point is,’ cutting off Gustav’s usually indignant scream, ‘a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn’t even have a sense of humor. I tell you,’ shaking his skinny old fist, ‘there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part of La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!’”

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (courtesy of Tim Page)

Today’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column is about Cy Coleman, one of my favorite songwriters. Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Long after their passing, many of the key figures of the bygone era now known as the Golden Age of American Popular Song are still widely known by name—many, but not all. When you think of “I Got Rhythm,” you think of George Gershwin, but when you think of “Witchcraft,” you think of Frank Sinatra, whose finger-snapping 1957 record of that hipper-than-thou tune is featured on the soundtrack of “Fifty Shades of Grey.” Yet Cy Coleman, who penned the music to “Witchcraft,” “Big Spender” and numerous other blue-chip standards, was one of the most consistently and deservedly successful songwriters of the postwar era. Between 1960 and his death in 2004, he wrote the scores for 11 musicals that made it to Broadway, where he worked with Lucille Ball, Sid Caesar, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Bob Fosse, Neil Simon and Gwen Verdon. Most of these shows had long, lucrative runs, and one, “On the Twentieth Century,” has just hit big in its first Broadway revival.

By all rights, then, Coleman ought to be as well remembered as Gershwin or Richard Rodgers. So why is his name little known save to connoisseurs of Broadway musicals and popular song? How could so excellent an artist have fallen into the memory hole?…

Born in New York in 1929, Coleman was a musical prodigy who underwent rigorous classical training but shrugged it off to play piano in high-end hotel lounges and supper clubs. He was, in fact, the only golden-age songwriter to have started out as a full-time jazz instrumentalist, an experience that shaped his composing style. “Witchcraft” is one of many tunes by Coleman that are built out of the short, swinging rhythmic phrases that jazzmen call “riffs,” and he also employed the complex harmonies of modern jazz….

Then as now, jazziness signified cultural sophistication, and most of Coleman’s hits featured the like-minded lyrics of Carolyn Leigh, who in “Witchcraft,” “The Best Is Yet to Come,” “I Walk a Little Faster” and “I’ve Got Your Number” wrote eloquently of the ins, outs, ups and downs of big-city romance: “Oh, yes, you’ll brag a lot,/Wave your own flag a lot,/But you’re unsure a lot,/You’re a lot like me.” Coleman’s heavily syncopated tunes fit her sexy sentiments like a bespoke sharkskin suit….

Coleman’s musical sophistication made it possible for him to jump from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway, where he proved equally adept at writing theatrical songs that propel the plot of a musical instead of telling self-contained stories. He made the switch just in time, a few years before rock shoved aside golden-age pop to become the lingua franca of American popular music. Though Coleman did all he could to come to terms with the new music, he neither liked nor understood it….

Broadway, which also had no use for rock, kept Coleman afloat and made him rich—but at a high price. He increasingly turned away from jazz, opting instead to become a stylistic chameleon…

* * *

Read the whole thing here.

The first episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, a 1959 TV variety series hosted by Hugh Hefner. Cy Coleman, the first guest, sings and plays “Witchcraft,” accompanied by Charlie Shavers on trumpet: