Another dark night, thank God, since I’m covering three plays this coming week, starting with the Broadway revival of Jumpers, from which I should be returning in 24 hours or so. Even so, it was a sufficiently busy day–I wrote this Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column, among other things–and I’m still run down from finishing the Balanchine book. As a result, I (A) didn’t consume much art yesterday and (B) don’t have much pre-bedtime steam tonight. So I’ll be brief, hoping that Our Girl will take up some of the slack:

– I read part of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff over lunch and am about to take it to bed with me. I hadn’t looked into it for a number of years, and was happy to see how well it holds up.

– Now playing on iTunes: an advance copy of the Trio Solisti‘s recording of Paul Moravec‘s Mood Swings, out this fall from Arabesque Records. The word “great” is commonly misused by critics of my generation (though we deserve some credit for knowing there’s such a thing as greatness), but I have no doubt whatsoever that it applies to this piece. I’d stake my reputation on it. Which reminds me of a favorite saying of an actor whose name escapes me: “You bet your life, fella…and you may have to.”

That’s about all I’m good for. See you tomorrow.

“He had sensed that in educated America, humor was the number 1 language, for criticism, passion, even cooking: and he set about learning it with grim intelligence.”

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

From Edward N. Meyer’s Giant Strides: The Legacy of Dick Wellstood, here’s a list drawn up by Wellstood of the kinds of people who came to hear him play jazz piano at Hanratty’s, the New York saloon where he appeared in the Eighties:

1. The drunken girl who sits on the piano and nuzzles while the boyfriend watches. She plays at you or, as one did once, on the backs of my hands.

2. The singers, about whom the less said the better. It’s always worse after Cardiff has won.

3. They who like it and talk about it at length so that I can’t play.

4. The ones who mumble inaudibly and expect an answer.

5. The shouters from the back of the room.

6. The glowerers who say nothing.

7. The experts, who, after I have just made a success of a Jelly Roll Morton stomp, request a Cy Coleman song with a meaningful glare and a nasty edge to their voice.

8. The critics, who buttonhole me during the intermission and talk of (1) Tony Jackson, J. Russell Robinson, and Cripple Clarence (if I’ve played too modern); or (2) McCoy Tyner, Albert Dailey, and Harold Mabern (if they think I’ve been hopelessly old-fashioned).

9. The know it alls: You’re wonderful, surely you compose–what?

10. The Hotel Carlisle executive types: Must you play like THAT?!!

11. The out & out hostile types: You Stunk.

12. The mistaken nitwit, who chides me for having played “Dark Eyes” badly, when in fact what I played was “Bourbon Street.”

13. The out of place, who wants to sing Irish songs in a room full of jazz lovers and vice versa.

14. The jury: silent, attentive, well versed, determined. It’s important.

15. The jazz lover, who finds shreds of people you never heard of in your playing.

16. The groupie, who just saw Cecil Taylor and knew Peck Kelley well.

17. The total nerds, who compliment me ad infinitum and then ask for the River Seine or the Warsaw Concerto.

If you want to know what manner of music this darkly sardonic wit played when he wasn’t exasperated, get a copy of The Classic Jazz Quartet: Complete Recordings, on which Wellstood figures prominently and beautifully. It’s one of my all-time favorite albums…and not even slightly angry.

– No show Monday. In addition, I spent most of the afternoon and evening playing catch-up–answering accumulated e-mail, working on my calendar, running long-deferred errands–and thus wasn’t able to spend much time consuming art. Fortunately, I did have time to start watching John Huston’s The Misfits, which I’d never seen, and I liked the first half-hour a lot better than I’d expected. (I normally can’t stand Arthur Miller, but his dialogue sounds rather more plausible when spoken by Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe.) More as it happens.

UPDATE: It got awful, alas.

– I read most of Sam Staggs’ Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard: Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream over lunch and while waiting for an appointment. Alas, it’s too campy and not nearly as detailed as Aljean Harmetz’s Round Up the Usual Suspects, but I liked it well enough.

– Now playing on iTunes: Teddy Wilson’s “Jungle Love,” featuring Bobby Hackett on cornet and Johnny Hodges on alto sax, available on this two-CD set of great Wilson sides from the Thirties and Forties. Talk about suave! Fred Astaire would have approved.

Fats Waller, after Louis Armstrong the most life-enhancing jazz musician ever to make recordings, is never very far from my iTunes player. Needing a pre-bedtime boost of spirits, I clicked on “It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie,” one of his celebrated deconstructions of insipid Thirties pop tunes, and began smiling from the first bar onward. It starts with a get-the-hell-out-of-my-way introduction, immediately succeeded by a jaunty chorus of solo piano in which Waller’s infallible left hand bounces up and down the keys like a fat man on a pogo stick.

There follows a quintessentially Wallerian vocal that goes something like this, sort of:

Be sure it’s true when you say “I love you.”
It’s a sin to tell a lie-uhhllllrrrry!
[unctuously] Millions of hearts have been broken, yes, yes,
Just because these words were spoken. (You know the words that were spoken? Here it is.)
[simperingly] I love you I love you I love you [in an orotund bass-baritone] I love you. [gleefully] Ha-ha-ha!
Yes, but if you break my heart, I’ll break your jaw and then I’ll die.
So be sure it’s true when you say “I love [twitteringly, in falsetto] yooooou.” Ha, ha!
It’s a sin to tell a lie. Now get on out there and tell your lie. What is it?

But words fail me. Go here and rejoice in the real right thing.

I was supposed to see two shows yesterday, Assassins in the afternoon and a workshop performance featuring a friend that night, but I read the invitation to the second show wrong and thought the curtain was at eight o’clock instead of five. Fortunately, I noticed my mistake at seven, just as I was getting ready to shut up shop, go downstairs, and catch a cab. Instead of making a pointless trip to the theater district, I found myself with an unplanned night off, and decided to spend part of it rehanging some of my prints.

It happens that I’ve just acquired a new piece for the Teachout Museum, a copy of Fairfield Porter’s Broadway, the 1971 color lithograph I chose at your recommendation to adorn the dust jacket of A Terry Teachout Reader. (I bought it here, in case you’re looking to make a purchase from a very nice, very reliable Chicago-area dealer.) It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll have to shift some other pieces around when it does, so I opted to do a bit of preparatory puttering. Since I’m going to hang Broadway over the mantelpiece, the place of honor, I moved the Wolf Kahn monotype that currently occupies that space to a spot over the living-room closet. That’s where I’d hung my copy of William Bailey’s aquatint Piazza Rotunda, not very happily, so I took down the Porter poster that hangs over the door to my office and put Piazza Rotunda there.

No doubt all this sounds boring, perhaps even precious, but hanging the art you own is an inescapable part of owning it, and it’s surprising–astonishing, really–how completely the look and feel of my living room have been altered simply by switching a couple of prints. It makes the prints look different, too, not just the ones I moved but all the others that hang around them. Best of all, I can now see Piazza Rotunda from my love seat, the spot where I normally sit when I’m alone, and I find my refreshed eye going to it constantly. Alas, I must make a special “trip” to the other side of the room to look at the Kahn, but it’s the first thing you see when you open the front door, and since most of my guests like it best of all my prints, it’ll be as if I’d given them a present.

As for the Porter poster, a handsome reproduction of Lizzie at the Table used to publicize the Whitney Museum’s 1984 Porter retrospective, it’s going on permanent loan to a neighbor who recently had a baby (a thoroughly appropriate gift, too, since the “Lizzie” of the painting was Porter’s own baby daughter). Meanwhile, there’s a big empty space over my mantelpiece, waiting patiently to be filled by Broadway, which is not only beautiful in its own right but also a visible symbol of my proudest professional achievement to date, the Teachout Reader.

Anyway, that’s how I spent my Sunday evening. I hope you had half as much fun.

His only weakness is a lust for power–

And that is not a weakness, people think,

When unaccompanied by bribes or drink.

Sir John Betjeman, “The Town Clerk’s Views”

• On Sunday afternoon I went to see the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins, which opens this week at Studio 54 (and which I’ll be reviewing in Friday’s Wall Street Journal).

• I’ve been watching Gone With the Wind in installments over the past few days. I’d only seen it twice before, both times in the theater (first in the Seventies, then in the Nineties), and not since I finally got around to reading the book, which impressed me rather more than I expected. As I wrote a few years ago:

“No man is a hypocrite in his pleasures,” said Dr. Johnson, right as always. As proof of his point, I offer in evidence Gone With the Wind. Never has a middlebrow bodice-ripper been more widely reviled by highbrow critics, yet ordinary folks continue to buy it, read it, and like it, no matter how often they’re told they shouldn’t do any of the above….

Gone With the Wind, on the other hand, will keep on being read and relished by the common readers with whom Dr. Johnson rejoiced to concur, for the very good reason that it’s a pretty good novel, not to mention a rather surprising one. Over and above the pure pull of plot, it has some unexpectedly shrewd things to say about the vanity of the Glorious Cause (most of which didn’t make it into the movie). Ashley Wilkes’ anguished letter to his wife Melanie is a case in point: “I see too clearly that we have been betrayed, betrayed by our arrogant Southern selves…by words and catch phrases, prejudices and hatreds coming from the mouths of those highly placed, those men whom we respected and revered–King Cotton, Slavery, States’ Rights, Damn Yankees.”

Moreover, Gone with the Wind is peopled with characters whose inconsistencies make them interesting, none more so than Scarlett O’Hara, an unattractive, inexplicably seductive anti-heroine whom Trollope himself might well have been pleased to dream up on an especially good day.

Alas, the movie doesn’t hold up nearly so well, save as a sort of apotheosis of Technicolor. The only other costume piece I can think of that uses Technicolor as vividly is John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Clark Gable and Hattie McDaniel are excellent, Max Steiner’s score is wonderful in its old-fashioned way, and the siege and burning of Atlanta are fully as effective—and unexpectedly unsentimental—as I remember them. But Vivien Leigh’s two-keyed performance as Scarlett is wearying, while the script scissors out most of the novel’s ambiguities, such as they are.

Coming as I do from a small town in the southern half of a border state, one that saw a lynching as late as 1942 and segregated schools well into the Sixties, I’ve never had much patience with those who romanticize the antebellum South, and especially now that I’ve read Margaret Mitchell’s novel, my guess is that this is the last time I’ll ever care to see the film. Sentimental period pieces only work when they evoke periods in which one might want to have lived, however briefly. I can’t think of anything more repellent than living in a land whose gentility was bought and paid for with the flesh of men.