I’m so busy that I wasn’t planning to blog again until Tuesday at the earliest, but I couldn’t wait to tell you about my very first visit to Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Columbus Circle nightclub, from which I returned a few minutes ago after hearing a breathtaking set by Jim Hall and his quartet. As regular readers of this blog know, I consider Hall to be the greatest living jazz guitarist, a tersely lyrical magician who gets more and more music out of fewer and fewer notes. He outdid himself this evening, playing a version of “All the Things You Are” so spare and elliptical that Count Basie might well have thought it understated. If you haven’t heard his latest CD, Magic Meeting, go here and buy it at once.

As I say, this was my first peek inside Dizzy’s Club C*c*-C*la (I henceforth refuse to spell out the loathsome name in full), and I was impressed. Aside from everything else, it’s the most attractive jazz club in New York, with a bandstand placed directly in front of a glass wall that looks out on the Manhattan skyline. The blond bentwood walls are acoustically gratifying. The service is discreet, the food good. If you’re there strictly for the music, the bar is both unusually long and strategically placed so as to supply a clear view of the musicians. The cover charge is $30 a head, neither cheap nor unprecedentedly high. I’ll be back.

That’s all for now–Louis awaits. See you a bit later in the week. Go get ’em, OGIC!

P.S. No, I didn’t watch the Oscars. Why bother? Did anything even remotely surprising happen there? My trainer will testify that I called it for Million Dollar Baby last week….

Here’s yet another plug for the two lectures I’ll be giving in Washington, D.C., next week:

– I’ll be delivering a Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute at 5:30 on Monday, March 7. The topic is “The Problem of Political Art.” For more information, go here.

– I’ll be delivering a Duncan Phillips Lecture under the auspices of the Phillips Collection at 6:30 on Wednesday, March 9. The topic is “Multiple Modernisms: What a Novice Collector Learned from Duncan Phillips.” The lecture will take place at the Women’s National Democratic Club, and reservations are required. Five pieces from the Teachout Museum (by Milton Avery, Jane Freilicher, John Marin, Fairfield Porter, and Neil Welliver) will be on display. For more information, go here.

If you’re an “About Last Night” reader, come up afterward and say hello. All requests to autograph books will be happily honored!

“A work in progress quickly becomes feral. It reverts to a wild state overnight. It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch. It is a lion you cage in your study. As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength. You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it. If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.”

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Currently making the rounds of the blogosphere are lists of Things I’ve Done That You Probably Haven’t (I got the idea from Eve Tushnet). So here goes. In no particular order, I’ve:

• Watched an opera singer drop dead on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House, run to the nearest pay phone, called the city desk of a newspaper, and shouted, “Get me rewrite!”

• Taken part in a bottle-rocket duel in the middle of a bean field (I have a scar on my right hand to prove it).

• Fallen all the way down a spiral staircase.

• Stolen a city-limits sign and used it as a prop for a dust-jacket photo.

• Shaken hands with Bill Monroe, father of bluegrass, backstage at the Grand Ole Opry.

• Taken a three-hour ride in the back of a hearse.

• Read and reviewed a full-length book between nine a.m. and one p.m. of the same business day.

• Been mugged at gunpoint on New Year’s Eve.

• Barely escaped serious injury from a falling chandelier.

So I finally, finally watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller over the weekend. I thought it was beautiful. Strangely for a movie I’ve been hearing about almost all my life, it struck me as an entirely new thing in the world–I realized nearly as soon as it started that I’d never seen so much as a scene or a still from it. That’s odd, isn’t it?

Some plot points, I think, escaped me. Didn’t bother me much. What will stay with me is the killer combination of those achingly lovely vistas (was ever a film better served by letterboxing?) and the Leonard Cohen soundtrack, so anachronistic and yet so fitting. Why “achingly” lovely? Because as the characters go about their work against these gorgeous backdrops, you realize, first, that the beauty is ordinary to them and, second, that their work is the beginning of the process of deleting it.

I still like The Long Goodbye best among Altmans–no contest–and California Split second. But I think there’s a place after that for McCabe.

Bart Schneider’s new novel Beautiful Inez is about a troubled classical violinist and her affair with a younger woman. It should be of special interest to ALN readers–its treatment of music is knowledgeable, intricate, and intense. My review of the book appears in today’s Chicago Tribune; here’s a taste of what I say:

Inez’s implacable depression is this novel’s true subject, and Schneider turns out one of the least reductive literary representations of the malady I’ve encountered. He recognizes that a simple logic of cause and effect cannot satisfactorily account for a full-blown case of depression like the one that oppresses Inez. Hers has specific causes, to be sure, some of them acute. But, true to reality, no more can one or two of them be isolated and called determining than the string section can take primary credit for the impact of an orchestra concert. By the time we know her, Inez’s depression has hardened from a condition to be diagnosed into a fact to be assimilated. And there is–blackest irony–something symphonic about it.

…Schneider drew much of the new novel’s passionate, detailed–and hauntingly ambivalent–evocations of music from his father, a concert violinist with the San Francisco Symphony. If depression is this novel’s subject, music is the sine qua non in which it’s steeped. Entwined in some enigmatic alliance with madness, music confers great blessings and takes enormous tolls here. In the book’s amazing pivotal scene–Inez’s impromptu solo concert at a mental institution–the blessings and the tolls become indistinguishable.

Read the whole thing here.

It’s Friday, meaning that you’ll find my weekly drama column in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Today it’s a triple-header–an import, a revival, and a new play.

First up is Shockheaded Peter, in which I took extreme delight:

An actor who looks not unlike a freshly exhumed corpse strolls onto the stage of what looks very much like a blown-up toy theater. He fixes a fishy-eyed stare upon the hushed audience…and stands there. And stands there. Finally, to the sound of nervous titters, he speaks. “Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” he intones in a voice of ripest ham, “I am the grrreatest actor that has ever existed!” Then he leaves.

Welcome to “Shockheaded Peter,” now playing at the Little Shubert for what I hope will be at least a year. This homicidally hilarious British import is a musical version of the “Struwwelpeter” stories of Heinrich Hoffman, the 19th-century German author famous for his cautionary tales of ill-behaved tots who get what they deserve, and then some. (Guess what happened to little Conrad when he kept on sucking his thumbs after Mommy told him to stop?) It is, in theory, a children’s show, though the only child I can readily imagine appreciating “Shockheaded Peter” to the fullest would be Wednesday Addams….

Next up is the Irish Repertory Theatre’s splendid production of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame:

If you were bothered by the twitchy excesses of the Worth Street Theater Company’s “Happy Days,” rest assured that “Endgame” is played straight down the middle. You couldn’t ask for a stronger cast (Alvin Epstein, amazingly enough, appeared in the American premieres of “Endgame” and “Waiting for Godot”). Nor do I see how Charlotte Moore’s simple, self-effacing staging could possibly be improved. To see it in a house as intimate as the Irish Rep is more than a pleasure–it’s a privilege….

Last is On the Mountain, about which I had substantial but not necessarily fatal reservations:

The first 15 minutes of Christopher Shinn’s “On the Mountain,” now playing through March 13 at Playwrights Horizons, contain references to AA, Ashton Kutcher, iPods, Radiohead, Tori Amos, group therapy, cell phones and Prozac. At the mention of the last of these, I snuck a peek at my watch, turned to my companion for the evening and whispered, “This isn’t a play, it’s a magazine article.”

Fortunately, I was wrong. “On the Mountain” really is a play, albeit one of a very particular kind: It’s a Gen-X kitchen-sink drama, right down to the kitchen sink….

No link. To read the whole thing (of which there’s much more), get thee to a newsstand, or go here and proceed as instructed.

“Take that Kreutzer Sonata, for instance, how can that first presto be played in a drawing-room among ladies in low-necked dresses? To hear that played, to clap a little, and then to eat ices and talk of the latest scandal? Such things should only be played on certain important significant occasions, and then only when certain actions answering to such music are wanted; play it then and do what the music has moved you to. Otherwise an awakening of energy and feeling unsuited both to the time and the place, to which no outlet is given, cannot but act harmfully. At any rate that piece had a terrible effect on me; it was as if quite new feelings, new possibilities, of which I had till then been unaware, had been revealed to me.