Archives for 2018

From 2008:

It was Our Girl who introduced me to the music of Liz Phair twelve years ago. I had come to Chicago to pay her a visit, and she played me a mixtape(remember those?) as we drove to dinner. Our Girl has long considered it her duty to keep me conversant with the newest wrinkles in popular culture, so none of the artists on the tape was familiar to me. The music washed undistractingly over us as we discussed the day’s adventures. Then a woman with a low, throaty voice sang a song whose first lines caught my ear…

Read the whole thing here.

“To innovate is not to reform.”

Edmund Burke, “A Letter to a Noble Lord”

I posted this for the first time two years ago. It’s still relevant, and (I suspect) always will be.

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“I saw a woman in Central Park today wearing a T-shirt that said ‘America Was Never Great,’” a friend of mine tweeted over the weekend. I wasn’t surprised to hear it. My country contains many people who are contemptuous of its past, some of whom are no less dismissive of the men and women who endeavor to ensure that it will have a future. (Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep/Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap.) All they can see are the flaws, of which there were and are many—many flaws and much honor.

At no time am I more intensely aware of that honor, and the fearful toll that it exacted, than on Memorial Day. Mrs. T and I watched The Longest Day a couple of nights ago, and I found myself thinking: could I ever have done anything like that? I hope so, but I’ll never know, for history did not demand it of me.

And what did I miss, other than stark terror and the ever-present possibility of violent death? Justice Holmes, who fought and was wounded three times in the Civil War, summed it up in a speech that he gave on this day in 1884: “I think that, as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”

Whenever I read those words, I think of my late father, who served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Though he never saw combat, he stood ready to do his duty, and I have no doubt that he would have done it without hesitation, just as he unhesitatingly saved me from drowning at the risk of his own life when I was a child. He was that kind of man. I hope I would have been the same kind under similar circumstances—but I’ll never know.

That is why I overflow with respect for those who, like my father, did what they had to do when their country asked them to do it. More than anyone else save for the Founders themselves, they made America great. I have no doubt—none whatsoever—that they always will.

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“The Battle of Midway,” an official 1942 war documentary directed by John Ford. Some of the combat footage was shot by Ford himself with a handheld movie camera:

Lt. Col. Jason K. Fettig and the United States Marine Band play William Schuman’s When Jesus Wept, based on a round by William Billings:

A compilation of interviews with some of the oldest people in America, filmed on August 26, 1929, by Movietone News:

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

“Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.”

E.M. Forster, “The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy”

In today’s Wall Street Journal I review Signature Theatre’s off-Broadway revival of Stephen Adly Guirgis’ Our Lady of 121st Street. Here’s an excerpt.

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Stephen Adly Guirgis’ progress as a playwright is one of the happiest theatrical stories of the past decade. From the flabby, sophomoric antics of “The Last Days of Judas Iscariot” in 2005 to the taut discipline of “Between Riverside and Crazy,” which won and deserved a Pulitzer in 2015, Mr. Guirgis has come a long, long way, all of it in the right direction. So it’s interesting to look back at “Our Lady of 121st Street,” the 2002 play that helped establish him as an up-and-comer, and reflect on how he got from there to here. “Our Lady” has just been revived by Signature Theatre in an off-Broadway production directed by Phylicia Rashad, whose acting credentials need no repeating but who is now trying her hand as a stage director (this is her New York debut). The results, if uneven, are mostly pleasing, and the play itself, of which much the same could be said, comes through with all sails billowing….

The title character of “Our Lady of 121st Street,” a Harlem nun, is never seen. Literally: Sister Rose died shortly before the play gets underway, and her corpse has been stolen from the funeral home where it was being viewed prior to burial. While what happens to it is a plot development that I must keep under wraps, it’s not the point of the play, which consists of a string of blackouts in which we meet her mourners, most of whom were once her students and all of whom have come to her wake to send her off in style….

The problem with “Our Lady of 121st Street,” as you surely already suspect, is that it’s essentially plotless. No matter how funny you are, it’s tough to keep a plotless comedy in motion—especially a serious one. Mr. Guirgis has since learned this lesson, and one of the reasons why “The Motherf**ker With the Hat” and “Between Riverside and Crazy” are so superior to “Our Lady” is that they are meticulously plotted exercises in dramatic storytelling in which the laughter is as much situation-driven as character-based. It’s a tribute to his inborn talent that he manages to make “Our Lady” work in spite of its aimlessness, and it’s no less a tribute to this well-cast revival that everybody in it, from the marvelous Quincy Tyler Bernstine right down the roster, makes a sharp and strongly flavored impression….

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Read the whole thing here.

The trailer for Our Lady of 121st Street:

Johnny Carson interviews William Holden on The Tonight Show in 1976, shortly after the release of Network:

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