Says Instapundit:

I don’t think most bloggers are blogging away in the expectation of getting rich. Some will, and some larger (but still small) number will be comfortably well off, or at least make enough money to pay the hosting fees. But people blog so that they can express themselves–to be producers, not consumers–and we see this impulse across the world of new and alternative media. But it’s not really new. Lots of musicians play music in spite of the fact that most of them won’t get rich….They do it because they like to play, and they want their music heard. I think the same kind of thing drives most bloggers, too. It’s certainly what’s driven me. And while some people will drop out after a while (heck, most people will drop out after a while) the blogosphere will remain.

All absolutely true, as far as it goes, and I’d even venture to say that “citizen journalism” in its countless varieties will prove over time to be the most significant part of blogging. But one of the reasons why I started blogging was in the long-range expectation that to do so would ultimately provide me with an additional source of income, one that might someday compensate for the mainstream media’s steadily declining interest in the arts. Note the multiple temporal qualifiers with which that sentence is studded! I’ve discovered (not to my surprise) that I love blogging for its own sake, and I expect to go on doing it for some time to come, regardless of whether or not it ever becomes profitable. Nevertheless, my oft-repeated prophecy about the blogosphere–that it is the place to which serious commentary about the arts is destined to migrate–will not come true until and unless it becomes possible for serious, committed artbloggers to make a reasonable amount of money from their blogs.

One thing that compensates to some degree for the continuing unprofitability of artblogging is the fact that the blogosphere is now “hot,” meaning that some of the best bloggers are starting to attract mainstream media attention simply by virtue of the fact that they’re working in a brand-new medium. This allows them to leverage their small-scale celebrity into print-media gigs of various kinds. I couldn’t be happier about this development, since it means that the blogosphere is now providing talented unknowns with a new and better way to become known. (Not coincidentally, all my blogger friends are writers of whom I’d never heard until they started blogging.)

My own situation is, of course, different, and I think this difference may explain why so comparatively few established professional writers have embraced blogging: they can’t see what’s in it for them. Having done it for a year and a half, I know what’s in it for me. Not only do I relish the direct contact with readers that it makes possible, but my imagination is stimulated by blogging, which lets me try out ideas in public that very often find their way into my print-media pieces. Even when I don’t end up doing anything with these ideas, they quite often set me to thinking in unforeseen ways that lead me in more productive directions. I can already see that this speculative, experimental aspect of blogging, coupled with the immediacy and lack of editorial interference, is what makes the medium so addictive. (It also gives me another way to flog my books.) But be that as it may, I am a professional writer, meaning that I earn my living by selling my words, and I sincerely hope the day comes when I can earn some part of that living by blogging–especially since it’s so much fun.

Don’t worry: Our Girl and I aren’t planning to ask you to subscribe, at least not any time soon! We would, however, be greatly obliged if you’d tell your friends about “About Last Night.” Our readership has been growing, slowly but steadily, ever since we went live in the summer of 2003. The steady part we like, but we wouldn’t mind seeing our numbers grow a bit faster. So if you like what you see here, spread the word.

It’s drama-column time! I reviewed three plays in today’s Wall Street Journal: Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals, and Paula Vogel’s The Baltimore Waltz.

To my absolute amazement, I really liked Fat Pig:

I’m sure I’m not the only theatergoer who’s had trouble making up his mind about Neil LaBute, whose powerful new play, “Fat Pig,” opened Wednesday at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. No one is better than Mr. LaBute at sketching the outlines of a relationship: A few quick strokes of casual-sounding dialogue and it’s right there in front of you. Nor has he any rivals at the dark art of making an audience anxious: Time and again his characters say and do things so disturbing, and so unexpected, that you all but break out in a sweat of discomfort as you watch them warily circling one another, looking for a chance to shove in the blade. Yet his work is also blighted by a coarse didacticism that too often manifests itself in here’s-what-it-all-means speeches as blatant as an episode of “Dragnet,” and I’ve never felt inclined to write in unmixed praise of anything he’s done–until now.

Why is “Fat Pig” different? Partly, I think, because the point of this hard-edged little fable, produced by MCC Theater and running through Jan. 15, is so self-evident that Mr. LaBute feels no need to harp on it. As the lights go up, we see Helen (Ashlie Atkinson), a bright, funny, seriously overweight young woman, eating to excess in a cafeteria. Tom (Jeremy Piven), a somewhat less bright, reasonably good-looking white-collar gent, sits down at her table. They strike up a conversation, and Tom discovers, to his obvious surprise, that he finds her appealing. No sooner does she give him her phone number (a typically LaButeian touch) than we meet Tom’s friend Carter (Andrew McCarthy), a viciously callous yuppie who regards his interest in Helen with contemptuous pity, and Jeannie (Keri Russell, formerly of TV’s “Felicity”), Tom’s alarmingly thin semi-girlfriend, who is reduced to a frenzy of self-loathing at the thought that he might prefer a “fat bitch” to her. With that, the game’s afoot, and you know somebody’s going to get hurt–badly.

Can love really conquer all? It’s to Mr. LaBute’s credit that he stares down this tough question without blinking, seconded by the performances of his four-person cast and the taut staging of Jo Bonney (“Living Out”). In Ms. Bonney’s knowing hands, each scene is screwed up to the highest possible degree ot tension without slopping over into sadistic excess, and none of the characters is ever permitted to overplay his or her hand….

Not so The Rivals, which I loved and expected to:

It’s been a long time between drinks for Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s “The Rivals,” written in 1775 and last seen on Broadway in 1942. Now Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater is putting on a sumptuous new production of Sheridan’s classic comedy that isn’t even slightly musty.

Directed at a brisk canter by Mark Lamos (“Big Bill”), this delightfully noisy tale of two young couples and their discontents offers its good-sized cast of scene-stealers plenty of prime opportunities to strut their stuff. Who comes out on top? That’s an impossible call, though Dana Ivey has more than her share of the best lines as the linguistically challenged Mrs. Malaprop (“Female punctuation forbids me to say more!”). You’ll revel in the lewd, gravelly basso of Brian Murray as Sir Lucius O’Trigger; you’ll be touched by the unforced warmth and sincerity of Carrie Preston as Julia Melville; you’ll be thrilled by the infallible comic authority of Richard Easton as Sir Anthony Absolute. As for John Lee Beatty’s too-good-to-be-true set, which depicts a block of townhouses in Bath, it’ll knock you out even before you’ve gotten settled in your seat….

Nor was I much surprised by my strong negative response to The Baltimore Waltz, since Paula Vogel’s been disappointing me for quite some time now:

Paula Vogel’s “The Baltimore Waltz,” playing through Jan. 9 at the Signature Theatre Company’s Peter Norton Space, is a nauseatingly coy black comedy about AIDS. Written in 1989, it’s being revived as part of the Signature’s season-long series of productions of Ms. Vogel’s plays. Her brother died of AIDS not long before she started writing the play, and I trust that it helped ease her sorrow, but that doesn’t make the results any more artful.

The only good thing about “The Baltimore Waltz” is the ever-wondrous Kristen Johnston, cast in what I take to be the semi-autobiographical role of a woman who, upon learning that her brother (David Marshall Grant) is dying of AIDS, dreams that she has been infected by a deadly virus caught from unclean toilet seats and known as Acquired Toilet Disease, or ATD (“It seems to be an affliction, so far, of single schoolteachers”). This, I fear, is Ms. Vogel’s sensible-shoes version of Swiftian irony, and it is a tribute to Ms. Johnston’s powers as a comedienne that she actually contrives to squash a few laughs out of it….

No link. To read the whole thing, buy today’s Journal, or go here and follow orders.

I mentioned the other day that Dvorak’s String Sextet was written in “A major, that most divinely innocent of keys.” Now a reader writes to ask:

Is there something intrinsic to the key of A major that makes it more innocent than any other? Is it innocent only when strings are playing in it? What about a piano? If it’s a brass sextet playing, is A major more or less innocent than B-flat major? Does the emotion a key conveys depend partly, mainly or entirely on what instrument(s) is (are) playing? Were you being whimsical?

I heard Billy Joel say once (1985) that he hated E major. I couldn’t imagine having a feeling about a particular key. I still can’t.

Any help in assuaging this bafflement would be welcome.

Wonderful questions all, and fearsomely difficult to answer–impossible, really, though I’ll do what I can.

To begin with, I was being perfectly serious about the key of A major. I think most musicians feel that certain keys have “characters” or “personalities,” though I suspect they feel this way because they have come to associate those keys with specific pieces of music. For instance, I associate A major with a cluster of celebrated compositions whose expressive content I would describe as somehow suggestive of innocence. In addition to the Dvorak Sextet and Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet and A Major Rondo for piano duet, Mozart wrote a great many such pieces, most famously the the A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488, and the Clarinet Quintet. D minor, by contrast, is widely thought to be a “demonic” key, threatening and unstable, whereas G major strikes most musicians as warm, friendly, and down to earth. (I once told Nancy LaMott that she was “a real G-major kind of girl,” and I didn’t have to explain to her what I meant.)

All this, of course, begs my reader’s question: are there intrinsic, non-arbitrary reasons why so many composers have tended to choose specific keys in which to make certain kinds of music? Donald Tovey, the great English musicologist, believed that all such key-related associations had to do with the relative “distance” of a given key from C major. (The larger the number of sharps or flats in the key signature, the greater the distance, and the farther the key is removed from the fundamental stability and repose of C major, the “home key” of Western music.) In addition, most musical instruments have perceptibly different tonal qualities when played in particular keys or key families.

Alas, none of this really explains what makes A major sound innocent, so in an attempt to shed more light on the matter, I looked up “key” in the second edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and found this paragraph:

Keys are often said to possess characteristics associated with various extra-musical emotional states. While there has never been a consensus on these associations, the material basis for these attributions was at one time quite real: because of inequalities in actual temperament, each mode acquired a unique intonation and thus its own distinctive “tone,” and the sense that each mode had its own musical characteristics was strong enough to persist even in circumstances in which equal temperament was abstractly assumed. Though highly specific with respect to different repertories and listeners, these expressive qualties fall into two basic categories, which conform to the basic difference–often asserted as an opposition–between major and minor: major is heard to be brighter and more cheerful than minor, which in comparison is darker and sadder.

You have to know quite a bit about music to make sense of the middle part of this “explanation,” but it’s worth noting that according to the author, the “expressive qualities” of given keys are often “highly specific” with respect to individual listeners. Since I experience the expressive qualities of keys as something like a cross between a color and an emotion, “hating” the key of E minor would be like hating, say, dark blue-green, a notion that strikes me as alien but not altogether absurd (one might well speak of “hating” fear, just as you might hate the taste of cauliflower). In any case, other musicians have had prejudices similar to that of Billy Joel: Sviatoslav Richter, the great Russian pianist, mentioned more than once in his diary that he disliked the key of F minor.

It’s probably worth mentioning that I had perfect pitch when I was a working musician, but that I lost it when I stopped playing an instrument regularly and fell out of touch with the physical materials of music-making. I still have perfect relative pitch, but my mental key center has sagged a half-step. Ask me to sing an A and I’ll sing an A-flat (unless I stop to think about it, in which case I’ll remember to transpose the note I hear in my head up a half-step to compensate). Nevertheless, the Dvorak String Sextet still sounds innocent to me.

I sometimes wonder whether lay listeners who lack this kind of perceptual sensitivity might possibly experience music in more or less the same way that an achromatically color-blind person (that is, someone who sees the world in black and white) experiences visual stimuli, at least when compared to someone like me. To be sure, I’m not a synaesthete: I don’t see specific colors when I hear specific sounds. I do, however, experience key signatures and harmonies in a way I take to be analogous to the perception of color, and because I have perfect relative pitch, this also means that I always “know where I am” when listening to a piece of tonal music.

Let me try to explain myself a bit more impressionistically, though I don’t know whether it’ll help. When I listen to a piece of tonal music, be it a symphonic movement or a three-minute song, I feel as though I’m listening to a short story or novel being read aloud rather than looking at a painting. On the other hand, I experience this musical “story” as a kind of perceptual space through which I move at a rate of speed determined by the composer, in rather the same way that one might envision the “world” of a novel in pictorial terms. And though this space is abstract–I don’t “see” anything when I listen–I’m definitely in a “place” where significant events are unfolding in a meaningful order, even though their meaning cannot be expressed in words or represented by colors and shapes.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? No? Well, I’ll try one last comparison: if you’ve ever seen a plotless ballet by George Balanchine, that will give you a very rough idea of what I’m experiencing when I listen to music.

UPDATE: Sarah writes to remind me of those wonderful lines from Cole Porter’s “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye”: “There’s no love song finer/But how strange the change from major to minor/Ev’ry time we say goodbye.” (Here’s the best recording of that perfect song.) She also passes on this great one-liner:

My favorite quote about keys was attributed to the klezmer clarinetist Sid Beckerman, though he probably stole it from someone else: “D minor: it’s not just a key, it’s a living!”

That’s a musician’s joke.

“Stephen admired his learning, his skill in diagnosis, and his wonderful handing of his lunatics; Choate could often bring comfort to those who seemed so deeply sunk in their own private hell as to be beyond all communication, and although he had some dangerous patients he had never been attacked. Choate’s ideas on war, slavery, and the exploitation of the Indians were eminently sound; his way of spending his considerable private means on others was wholly admirable; and sometimes, when Stephen was talking to Choate he would consider that earnest face with its unusually large, dark, kindly eyes and wonder whether he was not looking at a saint: at other times a spirit of contradiction would rise, and although he could not really defend poverty, war, or injustice he would feel inclined to find excuses for slavery. He would feel that there was too much indignation mingled with the benevolence, even though the indignation was undeniably righteous; that Dr. Choate indulged in goodness as some indulged in evil; and that he was so enamoured of his role that he would make any sacrifice to sustain it. Choate had no humour, or he would never have linked drink and tobacco to issues so very much more important–Stephen liked his glass of wine and his cigar–and he was certainly guilty of deliberate meekness on occasion. Perhaps there was some silliness there: might it be that silliness and love of one’s fellow men were inseparable?”

Patrick O’Brian, The Fortune of War

That’s soooo it for me. And yes, I know I said that earlier today, but this time I really mean it. I’m hitting the road first thing Saturday morning, not to resettle in Smalltown, U.S.A., until some time on Sunday (I’m going straight from the St. Louis airport to a wedding in the middle of Missouri, then turning around and heading for points southeast). I won’t be blogging again until Monday at the earliest.

I do, however, plan to report from Smalltown with reasonable if not excessive regularity, just like I did last year. Even when I’m not posting, I’ll be thinking of you. And I’ll also be updating the right-hand column from time to time, starting with the three brand-new Top Fives I just posted. “About Last Night” never sleeps!

Which reminds me: did I tell you that Our Girl in Chicago will be coming to New York shortly after Christmas? I’m planning to show her off to all my blogfriends on New Year’s Eve, and certain selected luminaries may even be allowed to see her without the mask. She’ll be posting from here, so keep your eyes peeled for staggering revelations.

So long for now. Happy happy joy joy.

P.S. Oh, yes, one more thing: don’t forget to buy copies of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine and A Terry Teachout Reader for the as-yet-ungifted on your Christmas list!

Now I’m done. Finally. Really.

So little energy, so much on my mind! I want to post a dozen things, but I can’t get the car to start. Aside from the writing-for-money I have to wrap up and send off so that I can go west to Smalltown, U.S.A., with a clear conscience, I seem to be feeling the accumulated effects of weeks of overwork, exacerbated by the flu I finally shook off this past weekend. In short, I need a rest, and my hope (no doubt futile) is that I’ll get one in Smalltown, the continuous hum and buzz of family life notwithstanding. I’m bringing my iBook with me for the holidays, in the hope that I’ll spring back to life, but for the moment I think I need to lie fallow.

Incidentally, I got some nice e-mail from those of you who heard me on Soundcheck
the other day, to which I can only say that I enjoyed myself as much as you enjoyed me. (I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds.) John Schaefer and I have always had excellent chemistry, and whenever I chat with him on the air without notes or prior preparation, I catch myself wondering whether it might be more fun to talk on the radio for a living than to sit at my desk for hours on end, putting premeditated words into precise order…but no! That way lies the fate of Desmond MacCarthy, Robert Benchley, and all those other writers who lost their appetite for Getting It Down on Paper. I’ll flirt with radio–indeed, I might even engage in heavy petting on a semi-regular basis, assuming she were to make me a sufficiently enticing offer–but that’s where it stops. Honest.

I’ve also received several different versions of the following letter, which was inspired by a passing remark I posted
the other day:

I’m one of those unfortunate folk who is allergic to most of the Major American Novelists who came of age in the Fifties. Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike: all leave me cold as last month’s fish.

To which an old friend whom I haven’t seen in far too long replied:

So liberating to read your admission of an allergy to “important” 50’s-burgeoned Major American Novelists Roth, Bellow, Mailer, Updike, all of whom I have tried to “appreciate” and detest…mainly because I couldn’t respect them due to their awful lack of ability to create memorable, fully realized female characters…do you suppose that a possible reason for your allergy is that you are, like your beloved Balanchine, a Man who Loves Women?

As you can see, the author of this particular e-mail knows me very well. For as long as I can remember, all but a handful of my closest friends have been women, and it thus stands to reason that I’d tend to find women-unfriendly writers tedious. What’s more, I can think of several less-than-important novelists (Elmore Leonard comes to mind) whom I enjoy in part because their women characters are both “fully realized” and extremely likable. On the other hand, none of this explains why I’m also so powerfully drawn to noir tale-telling, both on paper and on screen, which is about as misogynistic as it gets (though the noir writers, Raymond Chandler above all, seem as a rule to be more afraid of women than disgusted by them). Any ideas?

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I know exactly what I’m up to: even as I earnestly explain why I’m not going to post today, I’m succumbing to the stealthy undertow of blogging. Yes, I’ve been watching the referral log, and I have a few pithy comments to make about…but they’ll have to wait. Instead, I’m shutting the shop down and leaving the rest of my inchoate thoughts unrecorded, at least for the moment. They’ll keep. I’ll keep. And I’ll keep better for having taken another day off.

See you Friday.

I just burned the following mix for a friend:

– Aaron Copland, “Down a Country Lane” (original version for piano)

– Bill Frisell, “My Man’s Gone Now”

– Claire Lynch, “Jealousy”

– Erin McKeown, “A Better Wife”

– Jonatha Brooke, “Is This All”

– Steely Dan, “Any Major Dude Will Tell You”

– Selim Palmgren, “West Finnish Dance” (played by Benno Moiseiwitsch)

– Luciana Souza, “Doce de Coco”

– Pat Metheny, “Midwestern Night’s Dream”

– Emmanuel Chabrier, “Idyll” (orchestral version, from Suite pastorale)

– Tony Rice Unit, “Neon Tetra”

– Percy Grainger, “Brigg Fair” (sung by Peter Pears and the Linden Singers)

– Nickel Creek, “Seven Wonders”

– Ned Rorem, “The Lordly Hudson” (sung by Susan Graham)

– Mary Foster Conklin, “Mad About You”

– Bill Charlap, “A Quiet Girl”

– Gabriel Faur

“So maybe movies are always about the faces on the screen, as opposed to the minds that constructed them?”

David Thomson, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood