I’m on the road today, freshly embarked on a week’s worth of wandering in Wisconsin, reviewing plays and visiting buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Right at this moment, I’m sitting in the Schwartz House in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, one of the three Wright houses available for short-term rental to the general public. To be exact, I’m sitting at the built-in desk in the nook shown in the top two photos, listening to Appalachian Spring on my iPod, clicking away at my iBook, and trying to persuade myself that I really do need to go to bed. It didn’t occur to me when I arranged to spend the night here that I might find it too exciting to get any sleep….

I’m writing about this trip for The Wall Street Journal, so I mustn’t give the whole show away for free, but I’ll share a little taste with you: contrary to anything you may have heard or read about Wright’s houses, this one is comfortable. Incredibly so. Who knew?

I think I’d better sign off now, since I have a very long day ahead of me. I’ll do my best to check in tomorrow night, but don’t be shocked if I drop off the scope for a day or two.

Yes, I’m having fun yet.

I’ve written quite a bit in this space about Brian Friel’s 1964 play Philadelphia, Here I Come! Currently being revived off Broadway by the Irish Repertory Theatre, it’s the raucously funny, intensely poignant story of an angry young Irishman, his talkative alter ego, and the aging, uncommunicative father who can’t put his feelings for his son into words.

If you live too far from New York to see the Irish Rep’s superlative production, there’s an alternative: Friel adapted his play for the screen in 1975, and the film version will be telecast Sunday, September 18, at 10:30 a.m. EDT on Trio. The effect is very different from that of the stage play: film, being an essentially realistic medium, lends itself less well to the portrayal of such fantastic devices as an imaginary alter ego visible only to the audience. Still, the essence of the play remains intact, and the fact that the film was shot on location in Ireland lends a different kind of “authenticity” to the results.

For more information on the telecast, go here. To order Philadelphia, Here I Come! on DVD, go here.

– Weekly salary paid in 1927 to Bix Beiderbecke for playing cornet in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra: $200

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,092.32

(Source: Jean Pierre Lion, Bix: The Definitive Biography of a Jazz Legend)

“I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.”

Wallace Stevens, notebook entry, 1904 (courtesy of Paul Moravec)

At the moment I’m somewhere en route from Washington, D.C., to here. Yes, you’ll be hearing all about it in due course, but for now, content yourselves with this capsule version of my recent explorations in the blogosphere:

– By way of Conversational Reading, a fondly remembered excerpt from an interview with Vladimir Nabokov:

INTERVIEWER: And the function of the editor? Has one ever had literary advice to offer?

NABOKOV: By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor–which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet”!

(Hee hee hee.)

– Words to the wise from Jeff Jarvis:

There is no need to define “blog.” I doubt there ever was such a call to define “newspaper” or “television” or “radio” or “book”–or, for that matter, “telephone” or “instant messenger.” A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set definition. That’s why I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about conversation than content so far. I think it is equally tiresome and useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act. Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining “blog” is a fool’s errand.

I don’t entirely agree, but I agree a lot more now than I did a year and a half ago.

– Good news from Playbill:

A new film written and directed by playwright/screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan will likely begin filming in September.

Variety reports that Lonergan’s “Margaret” will be filmed in New York with Scott Rudin, Gary Gilbert and Sydney Pollack serving as producers. Anna Paquin has signed on to the project, and negotiations are currently underway with Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, J. Smith-Cameron and Jeannie Berlin.

“Margaret,” according to the industry paper, concerns “a Gotham teen, her actress mother and the girl who tries to make amends for her complicity in a terrible traffic accident.”

Lonergan’s stage plays include The Waverly Gallery, Lobby Hero and This Is Our Youth. He also wrote the screenplays for “Analyze This,” “You Can Count On Me,” “The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle” and “Gangs of New York.”

I can’t wait.

– Speaking of good playwrights, Mr. Superfluities is smart about why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? still makes Broadway audiences squirm:

Virginia Woolf, in its unforgiving portrait of the illusions that support a long-term relationship and the hostility and envy that give the American, educated, professional upper-middle-class its fuel, is a glance into a mirror. If you’re going to take your wife or girlfriend out for dinner and a show, you may be better off with something other than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Now that Broadway is an amusement park rather than the locus of an art form, it provides escape (even excellent, thoughtful, well-crafted examples of escape like Doubt), not inward-turning dissection….

– Mr. Alicublog (who really ought to meet Mr. Superfluities) goes to Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin and draws a similarly sharp-witted distinction about one of my favorite actresses:

In Being John Malkovitch Catherine Keener’s character is a delightful surprise; in Virgin the woman Keener plays is earthy, quirky, and sweet–that is, a compilation of descriptive terms for the Catherine Keener persona, all of which I adore, but which add up to considerably less than a character….

(The last movie I watched before the levees broke, by the way, was Living in Oblivion. Ooooh, is she ever good in that.)

– Speaking of movies, Lileks has fun with a film noir…

– …while Mr. Rifftides shows what George Balanchine and John Coltrane had in common.

– Ms. Killin’ Time Being Lazy just introduced me to Cat and Girl, a webcomic “drawn” by a twenty-six-year-old wit from Brooklyn. I smell a major addiction coming on, if not a print-media essay.

– Finally, Mr. Outer Life rhapsodizes as only he can on his Favorite Restaurant:

And that’s all it was to me, that place with the best pastrami sandwich, until a few years ago when it became so much more: My Favorite Restaurant. I remember the day well, it was lunch, on a Saturday, the crowd waiting for a table spilling out into the parking lot, as usual, and while waiting I read a newspaper review posted on the window. This deli, sandwiched between a tile store and a dive bar in a non-descript strip mall across from some tenements in the middle of the sort of dystopic suburban sprawl that causes your average New Urbanist to wail and gnash his teeth in despair, was, according to the critic, not only the best deli in the city, it was one of the best restaurants.

Now I know what you’re thinking, because it’s exactly what my wife thought, namely, that seeing it so highly-rated is what elevated my esteem for it, but that’s not quite the way it happened. No, I resolved, on reading that review, to branch out, to try something other than the Number One pastrami sandwich, for what struck me more than the review’s conclusion was the review’s long list of do-not-miss items, items I’d somehow managed to miss.

So I tried the matzo ball soup…

Where? Where? WHERE?

July 2004:

No one who hasn’t written a book can know what it feels like to see it set up in type for the first time. Your own manuscript, however neatly printed it may be, simply isn’t the real thing. It’s homemade, and looks that way. You can edit it as painstakingly as you like, but you still don’t know what your words will sound like in your inner ear until you see the thing itself. It’s unnerving, half scary and half thrilling, to pull the proofs out of their package and start riffling through them, pretending to look for typos (and sometimes finding them) but mostly just gazing raptly at each page, feeling your half-forgotten sentences and paragraphs quiver to life….

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

– Price paid in 1957 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30): $30,000

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $203,881.98

(Source: Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir)

“Music that does not nourish you spiritually is not music, only aural sensations.”

David Diamond (quoted in Crisis, September 2005)