A friend of mine e-mailed me her horoscope for today, gleaned from the Village Voice‘s Web site:

You have two options, Virgo. The contrast between them reminds me of the difference between Norah Jones and Ani DiFranco. Jones’s work is “tasteful and listenable,” said The New York Times, though “nothing much happens in her songs.” Shakingthrough.net wrote that though Jones can be maudlin and subdued, she creates “a winning collection of polished (albeit innocuous) gems.” About DiFranco, the Times noted that “it’s worth putting up with a few overbearing moments to hear someone so willing to take chances.” Billboard said DiFranco’s latest CD is “raw–for better (the immediacy of the performance) and worse (traces of off-key harmonies).” So which way will you go: bland and classy like Jones, or rough and stimulating like DiFranco?

Here’s the funny part: my friend happens to be a jazz singer. Her response: “I have a lot more options than just these two!” I should damned well think so….

Right at this moment, “About Last Night” is being read in twelve different time zones.

Hello out there! Tell your friends about us….

“Evil comes to us men of imagination wearing as its mask all the virtues.”

W.B. Yeats, Dramatis Personae

I have all of Thursday off, glory be, so I’ll endeavor to do some juicy blogging later in the day. Meanwhile, here’s what I consumed on Wednesday:

– I saw a press preview of the Royal National Theatre’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, which opens in New York on April 25. I’ll be reviewing it in next Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

– In addition, I looked at extended chunks of a couple of old movies after returning home from the police station and washing my hands (how’s that for a teaser?). One was My Darling Clementine, John Ford’s version of what happened at the O.K. Corral, the only one of his major Westerns I hadn’t seen. Factual it isn’t (the only Wyatt Earp film that remotely approximates the truth about the Earp family is Tombstone), but it has a quietly elegiac quality that I found impossible to resist. Not only is each black-and-white scene composed with a painter’s eye, but Henry Fonda’s performance as Wyatt Earp is remarkably moving–Tom Joad without the corn–and Victor “Beefcake” Mature is unexpectedly good as Doc Holliday.

I also watched part of a new restoration of Sam Wood’s 1940 film of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which includes several members of the original Broadway cast (including Frank Craven as the Stage Manager), plus a score by Aaron Copland that’s comparable in quality to Appalachian Spring. If you’ve never seen it, do, though I suggest you record it off Turner Classic Movies rather than buying any of the currently available DVD versions, all of which appear to be from crappy-looking prints.

– Now playing on iTunes: Pierre Bernac’s 78 recording of Francis Poulenc’s C., with Poulenc at the piano (hopelessly out of print, I fear). I’m in that kind of mood–what my Brazilian friends call saudade. Maybe it’ll lift after a good night’s sleep.

Courtesy of DVD Journal, this long-overdue news:

The good people at Warner are cleaning out the vault with five films noir. John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle will include an introduction by the director and commentary from actor James Whitmore and film scholar Drew Casper. The quintessential 1944 Murder, My Sweet starring Dick Powell and Claire Trevor will offer a track from noir expert Alain Silver. Robert Wise’s 1944 The Set-Up with Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter will sport a track from none other than Wise and some guy named Martin Scorsese. The 1947 Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer will find noir buff Jim Ursini on the mic. And Joseph H. Lewis’s 1949 Gun Crazy with Peggy Cummins and John Dall will offer a track from the one and only Glenn Erickson (better known as our pal DVD Savant). All street on July 27 individually or in a five-disc Film Noir Classic Collection (SRP $49.92).

You know what to do.

A reader writes, quoting the last sentence of “Fiddlers Three,” my recent Commentary essay on Jascha Heifetz, Nathan Milstein, and Louis Kaufman:

In the realm of art, all things being equal, most people find unhappiness more interesting than joy.

Great insight. But why do you think this is? Is it
something particular to particular cultures, or more
or less universal in art? And putting “interestingness” aside, what about other characteristics–don’t most people somehow also find unhappiness in art more profound or meaningful or important, etc., than happiness?

These are challenging questions for which I don’t have any ready answers. I do think, however, that under the aspect of modernism, we’re taught to distrust happiness, at least as represented in art (and probably also in life as well). I myself don’t feel this way, which is why I gravitate to a great many artists whose view of the world is essentially sunny. On the other hand, that doesn’t stop me from embracing the dark side of art, so long as it isn’t ponderously dark. Even darkness can be “light,” like The Great Gatsby, Mozart in a minor key, or Bonnard at his most obsessive.

I said on Studio 360 the other day that bad reviews are easier to write than good ones, and I wonder whether this might have something to do with the comparative “interestingness” of unhappiness. If you’re really, truly happy, it tends to render you inarticulate, which is why happiness is most easily conveyed in the lyric arts: music, ballet, painting, poetry. The characters in a novel or play, conversely, can start out and even end up happy, but if they don’t become unhappy at some point along the way, the audience will fall asleep. In much the same way, it’s harder (though not impossible!) for me to describe in words what it’s like to experience a wholly satisfying work of art. At least for a time, analysis is pointless–what I want to do is sit there and feel. Only in retrospect am I able to think clearly about why a good play was so good, whereas I start honing the scalpel as soon as the curtain comes down on a bad one.

Needless to say, I’d rather go to good plays than bad ones, just as I’d rather be happy than unhappy–and maybe that explains why I’m a critic instead of a creator. I’ve been desperately unhappy on many occasions in my life, but never did it occur to me that I might profit from my misery, much less write a sonata about it. All I wanted was for it to stop.

This reminds me that Supermaud and I were exchanging e-mails earlier today about the glorious weather in New York. Surely, I said, it was impossible to be too unhappy on a golden day like this, to which she replied that she thought the Romantic poets might have been right about spring. For some reason this reminded me of what Jeeves says somewhere about Nietzsche, whom he regarded as “fundamentally unsound.” I think he probably would have said much the same thing about Keats and Shelley–but when it came to spring, he might have given them a pass. Me, too.

The cleaning lady chased me out of my office this morning, so I decided to get cracking on some chores I’d shoved under the desk. I retired to the back table of Good Enough to Eat, where I ordered waffles and started filling out an inch-thick application (don’t ask) that required me to answer all sorts of questions whose answers I couldn’t recall off the top of my head (in what month did I move to the apartment where I was living seven years ago?).

Temporarily stymied by the long arm of bureaucracy, I finished my breakfast and strolled over to the neighborhood Barnes & Noble to see whether A Terry Teachout Reader was on sale yet. It wasn’t in New Non-Fiction, so I climbed the stairs to the arts section in search of something to read. There I found three copies of the Teachout Reader shelved under Jazz/Blues, meaning that no one at Barnes & Noble had bothered to look at the contents of my book. Only a year ago, I was basking in the red-carpet treatment at that very same store, including an evening reading and deluxe placement for The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken. Now I’m relegated to Jazz/Blues (though at least I got what booksellers call “face-out” placement, meaning that the front of the dust jacket is visible). As Robert Mitchum says in The Lusty Men, “Chicken today, feathers tomorrow.”

From there I went to the police station to get myself fingerprinted (I told you it was a long form). I’d never before set foot inside a New York police station, and this one proved to be an oasis of dingy, demoralizing grayness in the middle of a cheery Upper West Side neighborhood. I put myself in the hands of a policeman who reminded me of the chauffeur in My Favorite Year, except that he was the most blas

“Marriage excuses no one the freaks’ roll-call.”

Joe Orton, What the Butler Saw