Friday again, and time for my Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser (posted by the grace of Our Girl–I’m down in Alabama, sans computer). Allow me, if you will, to dangle in front of your nose tantalizingly brief excerpts from my reviews of three shows.

First, Alan Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places, now playing at 59E59 Theaters:

Mr. Ayckbourn’s entry in the “Brits Off Broadway” festival currently underway at 59E59 Theaters is a more or less typical piece of Ayckbournian plot-juggling in which the lives of six lonely Londoners are made to intersect in a variety of unpredictable ways, some funny and others desperately sad. I can’t come any closer to describing the effect of “Private Fears in Public Places” than to say that it suggests Terence Rattigan revised by David Ives. Written in 54 crisp scenes (some of them wordless) and acted on a small stage divided into five playing areas, it moves with whirligig speed, glittering craftsmanship and an exhilarating dash of craziness…

Second, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Euripides’ Hecuba, playing through Sunday at Brooklyn’s BAM Opera House:

Tony Harrison, the translator, decided that Euripides’ ever-modern Trojan War tale of slavery and vengeance was in need of updating. I bet you can see the punch line coming: He’s set the whole thing in Iraq, jerking around the original Greek in order to make it more “relevant.” (Among other overbearingly vulgar touches, he’s rendered “the army of Hellas” as “the coalition force.”) The set consists of five tiers of olive-drab American-style tents, the enslaved Trojan women are dressed in Muslim-style garb and sing Arabic-style chants, the sound effects…oh, the hell with it.

Last but not least, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan, now playing at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, D.C.:

If the actors would tighten up the screws a half-turn and knock five minutes off the running time, I wouldn’t have a single nit to pick. Dixie Carter is devastatingly sexy as Mrs. Erlynne, the Lady in Red whose deep, dark secret sets the plot in motion, and everyone else in the almost-all-American cast supports her with the utmost aplomb, flinging epigrams into the breeze like lit firecrackers….

Guess what? The Journal has posted a free link to this week’s column! It’s an experiment–the powers-that-be have decided to try making selected drama columns available from time to time and see what happens. To read the whole thing on line, go to the Online Journal’s Today’s Free Features page and click on the appropriate link (it’ll be obvious).

As always, you’re welcome to pick up a copy of today’s Journal at your corner newsstand, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal. You’ll be glad you did.

UPDATE: Here’s a permalink to my review.

“Form is everything. Without it you’ve got nothing but a stubbed-toe sort of cry, sincere maybe, for what it’s worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance, but you don’t have grief.”

Tobias Wolff, Old School (courtesy of in the wings)

“The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.”

G.K. Chesterton, “The Riddle of the Ivy”

I’m off again, this time to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where I’ll be seeing five plays in three days and (presumably) eating some grits. Our Girl will post the daily almanac and my regular Friday-morning drama-column teaser by remote control from her top-secret headquarters in Chicago, but otherwise I’ll be incommunicado until Monday. Any additional postings that materialize between now and then are strictly her doing.

Have a nice weekend!

I was taking a much-needed nap yesterday afternoon and missed an important milestone in the history of “About Last Night”: we received our one millionth page view since going live on July 14, 2003.

To all of you who’ve visited us in the past two years, many thanks. The pleasure is ours.

Well, I did it: I bought another piece of art, a 1965 hard ground etching and drypoint by Richard Diebenkorn. You can see it by going here, and you can find out more about Diebenkorn here.

Please don’t tease me too much! I’ve loved Diebenkorn’s work for years, and I never thought I’d be able to afford a prize specimen like this one (his “Ocean Park” color lithographs and aquatints are already way over my financial head, alas). Then I ran across #32 last week on the Web site of a Seattle gallery and struck a mutually satisfactory deal with the very nice owner. Now it’s en route to the Teachout Museum, where it will be well and truly cherished.

I know, I know, where am I going to hang the damn thing? Er, ask me later–I’ll figure something out. I guess that makes me a real art collector, huh?

If you follow media news at all closely, you’ve read about the Los Angeles Times editorial page’s abortive experiment with creating wikitorials. I knew it was doomed from the start, as did everyone who knows anything about how new media work, and I’d planned to post something about it at some point. Now Jeff Jarvis has done it for me.

Here’s the gist:

Here is the Times’ worst mistake and its most predictable: They think everything is about them. I’ve sat in meetings with newspaper editors who earnestly think that the best use of internet interactivity is to let the people talk about what they have written, to discuss them, to keep them in the spotlight they built for themselves. There is no bigger institutional ego than a newspaper’s. Presidents and popes get humbled more often than editors. Well, at least they used to.

No, guys, the best use of a wiki would have been to have the public create wikis to share their knowledge and viewpoints with you. I don’t know what the big issues are in LA, but here in New York, it might work better just to open the gates to watch people create pro and con wikis on the Olympics and a new Manhattan stadium and 10 ways to improve the schools….

But even that is an exhibition of media ego. For the truth is, if people wanted to do that, they could go to any number of places and do it on their own. They don’t need newspapers to give them technology. And they certainly do not need newspapers to tell them what to talk about.

If newspapers would just listen–and use this technology to do that–they’d find that the people don’t want to talk about what the editors talk about. And they certainly don’t want to talk about the editors.

Let’s take it up a notch:

What this really points toward is the death of the editorial page. Why the hell do we need editorials anymore? In their day, they were the voice–the bully pulpit, as Rupert Murdoch says–of one person: the publisher, the guy who had the ultimate conch, the printing press. We, the people, never said we gave a damn what he thought, but we had no choice but to listen. And so over the years, he convinced himself that we cared. What if we don’t?

The truth is that an editorial is just another blog post written by one person witih one viewpoint. Here’s a case where you can’t argue that it makes a difference having a journalism degree and a newsroom. Editorialists and columnists get to read the same stuff we do and they put on their pants and opinions just the way we do. So why should they have rights to the mountaintop? Who died and made them Moses? Let the people speak….

I couldn’t agree more, nor could I have put it better–and I spent several years writing editorials for a major metropolitan newspaper, the New York Daily News. It was a great job and I’m glad I did it, but those days are soooo over.

If you haven’t looked at my Commentary essay on artblogging, let me point you to this paragraph:

When newspapers do become obsolete–which will happen sooner rather than later–it will be because their functions have been taken over by a variety of web-based media that can do them better. (Blogs, for example, are already superseding op-ed pages.) A few existing papers will rise to the challenge and transform themselves into online publications, reconceived in such a way as to take advantage of the unique properties of the web. Most, however, will not, since established institutions rarely if ever transform themselves, least of all in response to external threats to their survival. Instead, they are replaced by new institutions that spring up in response to those same threats, seeing them as opportunities for long-overdue change.

The Times just made my point for me–unintentionally.

– A fact checker for Vanity Fair sent me the following e-mail yesterday:

I can’t get a line on this quote by H.L. Mencken, if indeed that’s what it is. In referring to Dixie, Mencken apparently said it was “the hook-worm and incest belt of Anglo-Saxondom.” Have you heard this? If not, do you have any suggestions on where next I should look?

As I mentioned last month, I’ve been getting queries like this ever since The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken was published. The funny thing is that the quotes in question always turn out to be phony, usually obviously so. This one looked phony, too, but it did have a slightly cracked ring of plausibility, as if it were an imperfectly remembered version of something Mencken had really said. What made me suspicious was that Mencken’s verbal humor usually arises from elegant variation: I had no trouble imagining his having coined the phrase “hook-worm belt,” but I couldn’t see him settling for so commonplace a word as incest. (His preferred euphemism for homosexuality, for instance, was “non-Euclidean sex.”)

I rolled up my sleeves and started Googling, and within a matter of seconds I’d found the answer, courtesy of Michael D. Goldhaber, a religion columnist for the Dallas Morning News:

The first use of “belt” to describe a region, identified by the Oxford English Dictionary, was by the poet Robert Southey in 1810: “A level belt of ice which bound…the waters of the sleeping Ocean round.” By Mencken’s time, the phrases Cotton Belt and Corn Belt were so widely spoken on this side of the Atlantic that he thought the locution was American.

“I began experimenting with various Belts in 1924 or thereabout,” Mencken later wrote, “the Hookworm Belt, the Hog-and-Hominy Belt, the Total Immersion Belt, and so on.” Also the “Mail-order Belt.” “Finally,” Mencken continued, “I settled on the Bible Belt.”

Of course I knew he’d coined the phrase “Bible Belt,” but I didn’t know that “Hookworm Belt” had been an earlier version of that indelible expression. And incest, as I’d suspected, had nothing to do with it.

Once a scholar, always a scholar….

– A reader writes:

On a topic related to a music recommendation you made to me, I bought Jim Hall and Ron Carter’s Alone Together some time ago. It is as good as you said. Hall’s lines are beautiful, flowing, yet genuinely inventive and surprising. However, the only reason I know that is that I sat myself down in a dark room and really listened carefully. I don’t know what it is with me, but unless I concentrate, jazz guitar seems to reach into my brain and trip the “no critical thinking allowed” switch. I took a car trip the other day–pleasant country driving, usually ideal for listening carefully to music. I had on a mix of Hall, Grant Green, Kenny Burrell. Beautiful music, nice drive, no distractions. But I went for long stretches with no awareness of who was playing, no memory of what the songs were. Wouldn’t happen to me with piano or sax players. With guitar it’s just pure pleasure, non-cognitive. Don’t understand it, really.

I’m fascinated by this problem, though I’m not entirely sure it is a problem. (What’s wrong with pure pleasure?) Nevertheless, I thought it interesting enough to pass on to all of you out there in the ‘sphere for further reflection.

By the way, Alone Together is one of the most beautiful records ever made. If you’ve never heard it, go here (or download it from iMusic). You won’t be even slightly sorry.