No sooner did my train pull into Penn Station two days ago than I jumped back on the merry-go-round of my New York routine, discovering to my dismay that some prankster had sped it up while I was out of town. I barely had time to pry open my suitcases before I found myself in a cab again, racing downtown to see Neil LaBute’s This Is How It Goes with Galley Cat. On Sunday afternoon I took an actress friend to a matinee of Moonlight and Magnolias, and now I have five more shows and three deadlines gurgling down the pipeline, not to mention a chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong that’s crying out to be finished. I’m not going to blog at all for the rest of the week, so don’t ask me.

Before I vanish into the not-so-distant future, though, I want to record some fugitive impressions of the time I spent playing tourist in the nation’s capital. I go to Washington, D.C., mainly to spend time with friends and look at paintings and plays. It had been twenty years since I’d last seen the sights of the city other than through the window of a cab. For that reason, I thought it might be interesting to accompany my brother on his first visit to Washington, seeing whatever he cared to see. So instead of going to the National Gallery and the Phillips Collection, we rode a Tourmobile to Arlington National Cemetery, the National Air and Space Museum, the National Archives, and the Smithsonian Museum of American History, with brief side trips along the way to the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam Memorials. We didn’t actually go to the Capitol, but since we were staying in a hotel only a few blocks away from Capitol Hill, we didn’t have to. The great dome was omnipresent, visible from wherever we happened to be at any given moment.

That’s a lot of stuff to cram into two days, and I was in grave need of sleep by the time I boarded the Acela Express on Saturday afternoon. Still, I wouldn’t have willingly passed up a single sight. Like all small-town boys, I’m a gawker at heart, and Washington offers endless opportunities for high-class gawking. Among other things, I saw the Wright Flyer that took to the skies at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and the American flag that flew over Fort McHenry in 1812, the same one that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I saw a uniform that was worn by George Washington. I saw the stovepipe hat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theatre the night he was assassinated–and, a few steps away, the nuclear “football” carried by Bill Clinton’s military aide.

Best of all, I saw the Declaration of Independence (not to mention the portable wooden desk on which Thomas Jefferson drafted it), the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. If the Museum of American History is the national attic, then the rotunda of the National Archives is the reliquary of our civic religion. It’s fun to see little Judy Garland’s ruby-red shoes, but it’s something altogether different to look upon the original founding documents, faded to near-illegibility but still recognizable at a glance. To have beheld these fragile pieces of parchment mere hours after having taken an oath administered by a Supreme Court justice was…well, awesome.

As for Arlington National Cemetery, my brother and I spent a whole morning there, and could easily have spent a whole day if we’d had more time to spare. It’s no place for the flippant–Arlington has a way of making the overheard remarks of ironically inclined visitors sound shameful–but it has much to offer the aesthete, even the soul-deadened kind to whom patriotism is no more than gold-braided bigotry. The simple marble headstones that mark most of the graves are at once ruthlessly functional and timelessly handsome, both individually and en masse, just as the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns is all but balletic in its poised, precise clarity. Next to such pure classicism, the bronze plaque that honors the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion seems almost sentimental, as much a symbol of its times as the marble tablets are of theirs.

For the most part, though, Arlington is a place of sobering beauty, which is one of the reasons why so few visitors require the reminders provided by the discreet circular signs placed at strategic points along its paths: ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY. SILENCE AND RESPECT. Of course you hear the occasional idiot twitter of a ringing cell phone, or the shouts of children too young to understand what it means to be surrounded by the corpses of a quarter-million of their fellow Americans. Airplanes are constantly roaring overhead, and the lawnmowers pause for no man, dead or alive. Arlington isn’t exactly quiet, just serious. Some of its permanent residents are well known, including two presidents, eleven Supreme Court justices, and a couple of movie stars (Lee Marvin and Audie Murphy, both of whom fought in World War II, are buried there), but most were and are obscure, while thousands more are, as their headstones explain, known but to God. All served their country in one way or another, and tens of thousands of them died violent deaths while doing so.

Most tourists go out of their way to visit the graves of John and Jackie Kennedy. I did, too, but once I’d paid my respects, I wandered down the hill where the Kennedys lie, looking for a white headstone that says HOLMES. It’s not hard to find, though I doubt that many people seek it out, the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., now being known for the most part only to students of American constitutional law. Once upon a time, though, Mr. Justice Holmes was famous enough that Hollywood made a movie about him, a foolish film about a remarkable man. A friend of Henry and William James, Holmes fought for the Union in the Civil War, was wounded in battle three times, became a lawyer and then a judge, was nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, and served as an associate justice for nearly three decades, retiring in 1932 at the age of ninety-one, three years before his death.

An eminent Victorian who lived long enough to read and comment on Proust and Hemingway, Holmes looked upon the world with an ice-cold eye, unconsoled by faith and certain only that “[o]ur business is to commit ourselves to life, to accept at once our functions and our ignorance and to offer our heart to fate.” I’m not sure how great a jurist he was, and there are any number of things about which I disagree with him passionately, but he was beyond doubt the high court’s greatest writer, both of judicial opinions and personal letters (Edmund Wilson wrote an admiring New Yorker essay about his correspondence), and he was by way of being a great man as well.

As a Civil War veteran, Holmes was entitled to burial in Arlington National Cemetery, and when his beloved wife Fanny died in 1929, she was laid to rest there. A month later he wrote to a friend:

I have a lovely spot in Arlington toward the bottom of the hill where the house is, with pine trees, oak, and tulip all about, and where one looks to see a deer trot out (although of course there are no deer). I have ordered a stone of the form conventional for officers which will bear my name, Bvt. Col. And Capt. 20th Mass. Vol. Inf. Civil War–Justice Supreme Court, U.S.–March, 1841–His wife Fanny B. Holmes and the dates. It seemed queer to [be] putting up my own tombstone–but these things are under military direction and I suppose it was necessary to show a soldier’s name to account for my wife.

Six years later he joined her beneath the pine trees, and seventy years after that I stood by their graves, silent and respectful, hearing the words of the psalmist in my mind’s ear: Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, what it is: that I may know how frail I am. Somewhere in the middle distance I overheard a young boy saying, “I wanna be buried here!” All at once I recalled something else that Holmes wrote: “I believe that force, mitigated so far as may be by good manners, is the ultima ratio, and between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world I see no remedy except force. I may add what I no doubt have said often enough, that it seems to me that every society rests on the death of men…”

With both quotations uneasily commingled in my head, I boarded the Tourmobile that would return me to the land of the living. For all its myriad beauties, Arlington National Cemetery is not a place where one can comfortably tarry, at least not for very long. The next day I was back in New York, sworn in, worn out, and grateful above all things merely to be alive.

“You look really happy,” Galley Cat told me at dinner that night.

“I am really happy,” I replied.

So I was, and still am. My life is far from perfect, and there are many things about it that I would gladly change, but nobody could hope for a better or more blessed one. May you all have such good fortune, and know it for what it is while it lasts.

See you next week.

“‘Why, she isn’t even crying!’ she heard people say at her mother’s funeral, as if it was for this moist tribute that people died. People were always wanting children to cry and prove again and again their helplessness, so that they might take advantage of it.”

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born

“Before he came I also had read Henry James’ The Ambassadors. All the characters as usual talk H. James, so that I regard it rather as a prolonged analysis and description than as a drama. It brought up Paris to me; but more especially, by a kind of antagonism that it provoked, made me reflect, contrary to M

We like to think positive at About Last Night, so we don’t have a “Bottom Five” sidebar. But the worst movie I have seen in a long time is The Upside of Anger, which had an inexplicably easy time of it with the critics. It’s true that, as almost everyone reviewing it has noted, Joan Allen is a witty and engaging performer. But that’s not enough when a script is this terrible; in my book, Allen’s goodness should count against the movie rather than for it, making us wish for her better material. If I had known that the movie was written, directed, and acted in by the man responsible for the dismal HBO comedy The Mind of the Married Man, which aired a few years ago during the six months I had free HBO, I would have steered clear. Having failed this, I apply my efforts now to sparing you.

To a large degree, I hated this movie because I hated its characters. I didn’t like this sort of criticism when it was applied to Sideways recently by some of that movie’s detractors. But then I didn’t feel the charge stood up that Payne glossed over, okayed, or played as a mere joke, say, Miles’s pathetic thieving from his mother. On the contrary–when, at the truly painful end of that scene, she offers him as a gift what he has just stolen from her, it puts him in the worst possible light. Sure, the movie asks us to like Miles warts and all, and I did, but this scene is one instance of the writers not letting him off easy, and one reminder that some of his warts are more than just cosmetic. Another critique held that the movie glamorized the characters’ alcohol abuse by presenting the wine culture they’re steeped in as attractive. If it didn’t look at least externally attractive, though, would we have half so good an understanding of Miles and his problems–and his virtues? What do you want, a movie or a public service announcement?

In The Upside of Anger, there’s so little understanding of people on the writer-director Mike Binder’s part, I couldn’t help wondering: does this guy know any? The charmless ones in his movie are more akin to (affluent) bundles of symptoms and psychoses who occasionally spit out a cue to the audience to laugh or “ooh” or cry. Kevin Costner is something of an exception insofar as his presence in the movie has a casual quality, almost as if he had wandered in off a different set entirely. I’m by no means a Costner fan, and the figure he plays here is more or less stolen outright from Terms of Endearment, but his air of just hanging around provided some relief in a film that’s contrived everywhere else you look, and whose plot, even so, doesn’t always make logical sense.

This shell game of a movie pulls its first cheap trick early: In the first scene we’re shown the funeral of some unidentified person. Then we’re yanked three years into the past, left to wonder which of the characters will meet an untimely end and, in due course, served several red herrings. Ho-hum. Let ’em (as Hannibal Lecter once advised Francis Dolarhyde) kill them all. Save yourself: skip this movie.

“Maybe that was just it, he thought; maybe you just got to a point where everything around you was strange, where the world had changed sufficiently that you no longer fit in. None of the music sounded like music anymore. None of the dancing looked like dancing. The satin-and-powder fancy world that he saw in the movies–where was it? He had grown up expecting to inhabit that world, and now even the memory, the fancy of that world was disappearing from the earth and he had still not slept with Carole Lombard or Barbara Stanwyck.”

Kevin Canty, Winslow in Love

(We children of the seventies and beyond, of course, will experience this particular species of superannuation over the marketing industry’s cold, dead body.)

Friday again, and my drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal covers three Broadway openings, The Glass Menagerie, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and All Shook Up. None passed my muster:

Two of the greatest American plays of the 20th century were revived on Broadway this week. Both feature familiar faces: Jessica Lange and Christian Slater in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie,” Kathleen Turner and Bill Irwin in Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Both were directed by Brits, David Leveaux and Anthony Page–and both productions are crash-and-burn disasters.

By far the worse of the two is “The Glass Menagerie,” now playing at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, for which Mr. Leveaux (“Fiddler on the Roof”) wins the Eurotrash Award of 2005 by inserting a spectacularly gratuitous subtext into Williams’ fragile tale of a dysfunctional family caught in the choking web of genteel poverty. Did it ever occur to you, even for a millisecond, that the shy, crippled Laura Wingfield (Sarah Paulson) might want to have sex with her sensitive brother Tom (Mr. Slater)? No? Well, it did to Mr. Leveaux…

Similarly misguided things are happening at the Longacre Theatre, but at least Mr. Page’s version of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” spares us the interfering touches beloved of so many postmodern directors. His blunder was a simpler one, if no less devastating: He cast Bill Irwin as George, the small-time college professor whose marriage to Martha (Ms. Turner), the boss’ drunken daughter, has turned him into a monster of passive aggression. I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Irwin’s great gifts as the tragic clown of such self-written extravaganzas as “The Regard of Flight,” but his flip, flat readings of George’s blood-soaked quips are as far off the mark in one direction as Mr. Slater’s regular-guy Tom Wingfield is in the other….

As for All Shook Up, well…

Think of it as an exercise in commodities trading. The jokes are strictly from Bob Hope’s 1955 reject pile (“Hey, you’re wearin’ blue suede shoes!” “Nobody step on ’em”). The dances, mysteriously credited to two different choreographers, are as memorable as a stump speech by Michael Dukakis. Stephen Oremus’ musical arrangements are loud and anonymous….

The rest of “All Shook Up” is theme-park trash, a Broadway musical for people who don’t like musicals, or Broadway. Or music. If you found “Mamma Mia!” too intellectually demanding, you’ve come to the right place.

No link, so if you want to read the whole thing–and there’s plenty more where that came from–pick up a copy of this morning’s Journal and look me up in the “Weekend Journal” section. Or go here, pull out your credit card, and start clicking.

“I think the reason gamblers habitually gamble is to lose. Because they know they have to lose, it’s the law of averages. I’m not talking about bookies or gentlemen gamblers. I’m talking about the compulsive, neurotic gambler. Pain is what he’s searching for. The emotion of pain. It’s much greater than the emotion of pleasure. Bigger, larger, stronger. Therefore more interesting.”

Walter Matthau (quoted in Rob Edelman and Audrey Kupferberg, Matthau: A Life)

“‘She still has no taste, thank God,’ Ethel thought, comfortingly, but the truth was that Amanda was too successful, too arrogantly on top, to even need good taste. Good taste was the consolation of people who had nothing else, people like her own self, Ethel thought, inferiority feelings leaping back at her like great barn dogs trying to be pets.”

Dawn Powell, A Time to Be Born