Archives for 2016

From 2006:

Teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom, says the psalmist. I wonder how many of us do, or even try. I nearly died nine months ago, and you’d think that such an sobering experience would cause me to devote my remaining days to none but the most consequential of tasks–but you’d be wrong. A couple of Saturdays ago, for instance, I found myself with no shows to see and no appointments to keep. How did I spend my precious night off? Did I pile up fresh pages of my Louis Armstrong biography? Did I closet myself with a hitherto-unread classic, or listen anew to Op. 111, or spend hour upon hour contemplating the Teachout Museum in breathless silence? No, indeed. I sent out for pizza, curled up on the couch, and watched a pair of perfectly silly movies….

Read the whole thing here

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.”

G.K. Chesterton, column, Illustrated London News (October 23, 1909)

Mrs. T and I drove from Connecticut to Boston on Sunday to see a musical that I’ll be reviewing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal. Come Thursday I’ll be taking the train down to Washington, D.C., to see a play. From there I return to New York, at which point the summer will officially be over. It was, I rejoice to report, a perfectly lovely summer, the best I’ve had in ages. Mrs. T and I spent much of it on the coast of Maine and in our two favorite country retreats, doing nothing in particular and loving it. But all good things must come to an end, and the time has come for me to get back to work.

Not that I didn’t spend the whole summer working. Among other things, I made my debut as a stage director in Florida, opened yet another production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, and reviewed seventeen shows in six states and the District of Columbia, fewer than usual but more than enough to keep me on the jump.

On the other hand, I got to do most of my work in pretty places, and Mrs. T and I went on a full-fledged nine-day no-writing vacation, which for us is highly unusual. We also visited a wonderful art museum that was new to us, ate at a stupendously good hot-dog joint in Connecticut, and saw two brand-new movies, Love & Friendship and Hell or High Water, something that we rarely find time to do (though there aren’t all that many grownup-friendly movies to see these days!).

Needless to say, I did pay a certain amount of attention to the news throughout the summer, so I’m very much aware of the Baton Rouge flood. In fact, the Great Flood of 2016 touched me personally, albeit at the safest of distances, since it resulted in the temporary postponement of the Louisiana premiere of Satchmo. And as I read one account after another of the terrible havoc that has been wrought by the rising waters, I thought—as many of you doubtless did—of Hurricane Katrina.

Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, well before Facebook and Twitter transformed the way in which postmodern Americans interact with the world. By then blogs were already common, but the establishment media had yet to figure out what effect they would have on the gathering and dissemination of news. On the other hand, I’d been blogging for two years, and I realized at once that my fellow bloggers had something important to contribute to the emerging story.

Here’s what happened next, as I described it in this space a couple of days later:

Like many, perhaps most Americans, I didn’t realize until Sunday afternoon that a Category Five hurricane was headed for New Orleans. I’d spent the whole morning writing a long, involved posting about how I’d become disillusioned with the new Museum of Modern Art. I came up for air, turned on the TV, and discovered to my astonishment that the city about which I’d been writing for the past few months (I’m working on a biography of Louis Armstrong) was at high risk of being blown into the Gulf of Mexico.

Being a blogger, my snap reaction was to head for my iBook and find out what was what. I quickly discovered that lots and lots of people were posting on Hurricane Katrina. But while most of their postings included links to other blogs, no one had thought to assemble a one-stop list of stormblogs and other relevant sites. After bookmarking a few of the best ones, I got the idea to throw together an “About Last Night” posting called Live from Katrina. The first version, as I recall, contained links to a half-dozen blogs, most of which made mention of one or two other bloggers. I checked out every link I ran across and, when appropriate, added it to my original posting. Within an hour or two, other bloggers, including Jeff Jarvis, were linking to my list, which by then included a number of other informational sites. At that point it occurred to me to send an e-mail to Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit suggesting that he take a look at what I’d done. He linked to it a minute or two later, and the hits started pouring in.

That was when the Web began to work its own mysterious, self-sustaining magic. Stormblogs I didn’t yet know about started turning up in my referral log courtesy of the Instapundit link, and I in turn transferred them to my new blogroll, adding other useful links as I discovered them. By the time I went to bed at three-thirty that morning, I realized that my informal little list had turned into a potentially significant resource.

I awoke without benefit of alarm at seven and set to refining my list, indicating which blogs had been updated most recently and posting excerpts from the best ones. Within an hour or two I had created what was for all intents and purposes a manually operated aggregator page of Katrina-related sites. I was supposed to deliver a piece to Commentary at noon that day, but by mid-morning several other high-traffic pages, including MSNBC’s “Clicked,” National Review’s The Corner, and The Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web, had linked to “Live from Katrina.” I felt I ought to keep on doing what I was doing, so I sent an e-mail to Neal Kozodoy, the editor of Commentary, asking him if he could extend my deadline for a day. He agreed on the spot, and I spent the rest of Monday updating “Live from Katrina” more or less continuously….

As Hurricane Katrina finally slowed down and Monday shuddered to a close, I stopped updating “Live from Katrina” and started thinking about the implications of what I’d been doing for the past two days. On the one hand, nothing could have been less typical of “About Last Night” than for me to have thrown myself head first into so unlikely an undertaking. Yet at the same time, nothing could be more characteristic of the new world of new media. One of the most distinctive properies of blogs, after all, is that they are instantly and infinitely malleable at the whim of the blogger. “About Last Night” is about art because Our Girl in Chicago and I want it to be about art. If we decided at noon tomorrow that it would henceforth be about hockey, or smoked salmon, there’d be nothing to stop us from changing course at 12:01. Instead, we decided to make a one-day detour into citizen journalism, and the blogosphere promptly sat up and took notice….

To read these words eleven years later is to smile at their quaintness. I sound like a whiskery old ham-radio operator reminiscing about the marvels of Morse code. It’s easy to forget that blogging was still revolutionary in the days of Katrina. Witness this column by Michael S. Malone, which ABC News published on its website on September 1, 2005, the day before I finally wrapped up “Live from Katrina” and went back to blogging about the arts:

In the midst of the mind-boggling disaster of Hurricane Katrina, we are also seeing an interesting—and unprecedented—technical phenomenon that may bode well for how we respond to these horrors in the future.

It has to do with the Internet, and what might be called “virtual newsrooms.” And it can involve, as in the case over the last few days with Katrina, the most unlikely people. Their role suggests that in the future, the process of getting important information—and perhaps even warnings—out to the world may be more fluid and dynamic than we have ever imagined…

Terry Teachout is one of America’s leading art critics. I’ve read his writings for years, first in journals such as Commentary, and most recently in the Wall Street Journal. With Laura Demanski (“Our Girl in Chicago”) Teachout also runs a cultural Web site at ArtsJournal.com called “About Last Night.” It is usually a potpourri of selections from Teachout’s reviews, asides about movies, diary entries of various museum visits, and interesting quotes from recent books read….

But, as Katrina hit, suddenly in the midst of the G.K. Chesterton quotes and Mark Morris dance reviews, Teachout inserted what he called a “stormblog.” Basically a list of links to bloggers operating within the hurricane zone, it quickly grew to nearly 30 sites—and became the essential place to go for first-person descriptions of the crisis. Ominously, throughout the storm, some of these sites would suddenly shut off—leaving readers to fear for the writers’ fates. Only now, as some have reached safety (and power) have they reappeared online to the considerable relief of the readers.

Teachout’s stormblog quickly became the essential source for anecdotal information during the disaster. The site, now beefed up with added links to traditional organizations, continues to be a key place to learn about what it is like to be in Katrina’s aftermath.

Nowadays, of course, it would never have occurred to me to turn this site into a “stormblog.” Twitter and Facebook long ago superseded blogs as the medium of choice for snap responses to the news of the day. Even so, more than a few of the beleaguered citizens of Baton Rouge took to the blogosphere to get the word out about the terrible effects of the Great Flood of 2016. What’s more, they did so well before the national news media, distracted as they were by the Trump Follies, started paying serious attention to what was happening in south Louisiana—and what they wrote made a difference.

As for me, I’m still blogging, and I plan to keep it up for as long as it amuses me to do so. Devoted though I am to Twitter and Facebook, “About Last Night” remains the sturdiest of the three legs of my social-media triad, a home-grown, hand-cranked electronic printing press that lets me say whatever I want, whenever I want. Even when Mrs. T and I pack our bags and head for the hills, or the coast of Maine, you’ll find me doing business every weekday at the same old stand. I like it here.

Matt Dennis sings and plays “Violets for Your Furs” on The Rosemary Clooney Show in 1957. Dennis also wrote the music, and the lyric is by Tom Adair:

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

“There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.”

G.K. Chesterton, G.F. Watts

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I review a Connecticut revival of Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw. Here’s an excerpt.

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I keep two lists in the top drawer of my desk. The first one is of plays that I love but have yet to see onstage. (“While the Sun Shines,” anyone?) The second is of first-rate plays that I’ve never seen done well. Prior to this week, the second list was topped by “What the Butler Saw,” Joe Orton’s 1967 farce about an insane asylum, its sex-crazed staff and an equally crazy policeman who goes there in search of dirty work at the crossroads. “What the Butler Saw” is one of the few perfect farces to be written in modern times, but it’s tricky to stage, which may explain why it’s never been produced on Broadway and is infrequently performed anywhere else in America. I’ve reviewed it in Chicago and Tampa, and while both versions were watchable, neither came up to scratch. Not so Westport Country Playhouse’s production, directed by John Tillinger and starring Paxton Whitehead, which gets everything right about a play that’s perilously easy to get wrong….

A lightly veiled homage to “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “What the Butler Saw” was the last of Orton’s three full-length black comedies. No sooner did he finish editing it than he was beaten to death by his lover, a failed actor who couldn’t come to terms with his gifted companion’s success. All three plays are farces peopled with seemingly respectable middle-class Brits who seethe with repressed desires. In “What the Butler Saw,” for instance, we meet Dr. Prentice (Robert Stanton), a psychiatrist who longs to invade the person of Geraldine (Sarah Manton), a prim young maiden who has come to his office looking for work. No sooner does he inveigle her into stripping (he’s a doctor, you know) than his wife (Patricia Kalember) shows up and the doors (there are four) start slamming….

What makes Orton’s one- and-two-liners land with such explosive satirical impact is that they’re propelled by a plot so tightly wrought that “What the Butler Saw” can’t help but go over—so long as the director doesn’t get in the way by inserting gratuitous business whose sole purpose is to let the audience know when to laugh. Fortunately, Mr. Tillinger, who is well known for his stagings of the farces of Alan Ayckbourn, doesn’t need to be reminded that the characters in a farce don’t know that they’re funny (that’s the joke). Instead, he starts things off at a leisurely pace and lets the momentum build, and before you know it, you’re whizzing round Orton’s sharp comic curves at well past the speed of sound….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for John Tillinger’s 2014 Los Angeles revival of What the Butler Saw, starring Paxton Whitehead:

Orson Welles appears in a scene from King Lear on The Ed Sullivan Show, originally telecast on CBS on February 5, 1956. Welles’ self-directed stage production of Lear, in which he played the title role, had closed at New York’s City Center on January 29. He injured an ankle on opening night and was forced to perform in a wheelchair for the remainder of the run. It was the last time he appeared on stage in New York:

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

“The critics, in their inevitable struggle for modernity for themselves, are abnormally sensitive to outmodedness in other people.”

Frances Donaldson, Freddy Lonsdale