I lay down for a little nap at 4:30 yesterday afternoon, and the next thing I knew, it was nine o’clock. Yikes! In the evening, thank God, but even so, I know a warning bell when I hear it. No more blogging for me today, thank you very much.

We’ve had a couple of wild days here at “About Last Night,” incidentally. Everybody in the world seems to have linked to us for one reason or another (mostly the other). So if you’re visiting this blog for the first time and want to know more about it, click here to read an archived posting from last November that tells all. Or simply work your way down the right-hand column, which is crammed full of information about this page and its two proprietors.

Either way, I’m glad you stopped by. If you had fun, come back tomorrow…and bring a friend. The easy-to-remember alternate URL is www.terryteachout.com, which will bring you here lickety-split (as, of course, will the longer address currently visible in your browser).

Welcome. I’ll be back on Thursday. Our Girl in Chicago will keep you company until then.

P.S. Not to worry, Girl, I haven’t forgotten that you’re expecting me to come up with my own answers to those five questions. I just need some sleep first.

Insofar as possible, I’m reading everything that’s being written about my recent dustup with Bookslut, who got hopping mad at what I said over the weekend about link-poaching. Too many people have chimed in for me to link to all their comments, though you can find most of the best ones by trolling the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column, which you should be doing anyway.

It’s been especially interesting to note the sharp division of opinion between bloggers who, like Our Girl and me, believe in the concept of a blogosphere whose participants use links to “freely share ideas and readers with one another, and in so doing increase their own value” (my words), and those stalwart individualists who reject the idea of the blogosphere as virtual community. It’s odd that I should be in the former category, since I’m no kind of communitarian, but this particular aspect of the blogosphere has seemed self-evident to me ever since I first started thinking about how blogging works (which was two or three years before I launched “About Last Night,” by the way). Linking and blogrolling are what differentiate blogs from old media–and this difference, it seems to me, is the whole point of blogging.

Interesting, too, is the intensity with which certain bloggers continue to express their loathing for the way in which certain other bloggers make friendly mention of one another. Clearly, this reflects a divergence of taste that no amount of civility will narrow: some folks just don’t like it, and that’s that. Me, I like it very much, and I don’t see it as clubby or exclusionary, much less snobbish. Sure, I have my favorites, but without exception they’re people whom I got to “know” in cyberspace, solely and only through their work (though I’ve been lucky enough to meet a half-dozen of them in the flesh, and hope to meet many more). They’re my cast of characters, and I try to write about them in such a way as to make my readers want to get to know them, too. As I’ve said more than once, I think that’s part of the fun of blogging–not just for bloggers themselves, but for those who read us as well. It personalizes blogging. It strengthens the feeling of community. Above all, it encourages our readers to visit other blogs.

Finally, a few bloggers seem to disapprove of those of us who take an interest in the amount of traffic we draw. That puzzles me. I don’t write posts in order to draw traffic–it doesn’t work–but I’m always delighted when new people visit “About Last Night,” and why on earth shouldn’t I be? I think blogging is good. I want more people to do it. I think it’ll be good for the world of art if they do. What’s wrong with that? And who’s being clubby now? I’m an elitist, but I don’t believe in the we-happy-few mentality: I want everybody who can swim to jump in the pool.

At any rate, I’ll close by repeating something I can’t say often enough, which is that the regular readers of this blog are great people, smart and attentive and a joy to hear from. So are most of the bloggers featured in the right-hand column–but, then, Our Girl and I don’t add blogs to “Sites to See” because their proprietors are charming. We do it because we believe that what they write is worth reading, right or wrong, nice or nasty. Even when they dump on us.

I inadvertently erased your phone message to me. Apologies, but it was a long day, and my trigger finger got itchy.

Could you please call again?

“The gates of the one class should be open to the other; but neither to one class or to the other can good be done by declaring that there are no gates, no barrier, no difference.”

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

Mark Barry of Ionarts got to the Milton Avery exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington:

One room is dedicated to notebook entries, dry-point etchings such as Reclining Nude
or Rothko with Pipe,
monoprints, and woodblock prints. Avery was quite prolific, constantly drawing portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, always searching: it sure inspired me to get to work.

Read the whole thing here.

A reader writes:

I enjoy your reviews in the Journal even if most of the shows don’t make it to Minnesota and we don’t make it to NYC often.

My wife & I went to the Producers at the St. James on Feb 14. I liked the show (she loved it) but I was very uncomfortable throughout the show with the closeness of the seats. I’m 6’2″ and was jammed into the seat. My shins had dents from the seat in from of me and every time the woman leaned back it mashed my shins. My knees stuck over the top of her seat. My back also hurt too. I’ll never go back to that place again. The play was not worth the pain.

Here’s my questions:

(1) Are all Broadway seats that close?

(2) Did they add extra rows in the theatre to sell more tickets?

(3) Are the seats better on the floor? We sat in Mezzanine N 15 & 17.

(4) Am I the only one to complain?

I work for an airline and so don’t expect too much room but it was way too tight for comfort. Even my 5’2″ wife could not cross her legs.

Well said, sir. My answers:

(1) No–seat pitch varies widely from theater to theater–but some are way too close for comfort.

(2) I don’t know whether the St. James packed in additional seats for The Producers, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

(3) I haven’t sat in the balconies of most of the major New York houses (critics always sit in the orchestra), but I do know some houses where the upstairs seats are appallingly cramped. I nearly had to call an ambulance a few years ago after spending an evening in the back row of the Vivian Beaumont, for example.

(4) Probably not, but I’ve never seen such a complaint in print, and so am happy to post yours. Send the management a letter!

Says MoorishGirl:

I wrote in Arabic and French when I was a kid but English superseded those languages by the time I started college. When I wrote in Arabic I found it hard to keep up with the rhythm. Pick up any novel in Arabic and you’ll see that a sentence can run a page or two. I needed the finality of the period, perhaps because I had been already exposed to non-Arabic punctuation from a very early age. In French I wrote mostly poetry, long pieces that were meant to sound like Lamartine or Hugo and later like Baudelaire or Verlaine. I started learning English in high school and liked the mechanics of the language and soon I was reading almost everything I could get my hands on in English….

Read the whole thing here. As for me, I’m one jealous monoglot!

I found this in my e-mailbox yesterday morning. It’s a story from the Chicago Sun-Times:

Mel Gibson’s controversial “The Passion of the Christ,” which recounts the final hours in the life of Jesus, finally opens Wednesday, and the Sun-Times’ own Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper offered an exclusive early review of the movie on their syndicated series “Ebert & Roeper” this weekend.

Giving “Passion” their trademark stamp of approval of “two thumbs way up,” Ebert and Roeper called it “a great film.”

“It’s the only religious movie I’ve seen, with the exception of ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’ by [Italian director Pier Paolo] Pasolini, that really seems to deal with what actually happened,” said Ebert, who is the Sun-Times film critic.

“This is the most powerful, important and by far the most graphic interpretation of Christ’s final hours ever put on film,” said Roeper, a Sun-Times columnist. “Mel Gibson is a masterful storyteller, and this is the work of his lifetime. You have to admire not just Gibson for his vision and his directing abilities, but Jim Caviezel [as Christ] and the rest of the cast.”…

As it happens, I was about to leave for a screening of The Passion of the Christ when that e-mail arrived. The screening took place at the Brill Building, an address well known to show-business aficionados: A.J. Liebling wrote about it in the Thirties, calling it “the Jollity Building,” and later on it became known as the Tin Pan Alley of Sixties rock. It struck me as nicely ironic that I would be seeing a movie about the Crucifixion in such a place.

Screening rooms are dismal little affairs, comfortable enough but far from atmospheric, and in no way suited to anything remotely approaching religious contemplation. This one, not surprisingly, was full of people making calls on cell phones and conversing in notice-me voices. One fellow was earnestly explaining how Mel Gibson couldn’t possibly be a good Christian, having previously expressed his longing to impale Frank Rich’s intestines on a stick. “On a basic level,” he intoned, “it occurs to me that Jesus was a gentle guy.”

The lights went down and the film started, accompanied at first by whispered conversation, though that faded out after a few minutes. I suspect that not a few people were shocked into silence by the film’s evident high seriousness, not to mention the high quality of its craftsmanship: the actors are excellent, the production design and photography handsome without ever lapsing into picturesque self-indulgence. The one exception is the overblown music, which can’t begin to compare with Mikl