Lileks
held forth the other day on A.J. Liebling, one of my favorite writers:

I suppose I should blush for not reading him sooner, since he’s one of those names journalists throw around to prove that the scribbler’s craft can produce true artists. He wrote for the New Yorker in the 30s, 40s and 50s, and was one of those chroniclers of the demi-monde of gyms and bars. Or so the reputation has it. Well, I’ve been dipping through Just Enough Liebling,
and I don’t get it. I just don’t. Part of the problem is that he writes long detailed pieces about food, and food writing bores me. (Unless I am the one doing the writing.) The attention to gustatory detail can seem unseemly, after a while. All that talk of sauces and obscure drizzles and precious pates and brash herbs – please. It’s just dinner. There’s a difference between describing the charms of one’s first love and going on and on about the interesting pattern of moles on a hooker’s back….

Not so, not so! But I can see how he was led astray: Just Enough Liebling, the just-published anthology of Liebling’s essays, leaves out much of his best work and includes too much of the other kind. I filed a review for next week’s Weekly Standard a couple of days ago, so I don’t want to jump the gun on myself, but to Lileks and any other skeptics out there I say: wait until my piece comes out, then make up your minds.

I’ll post a link if there’s a free one. Otherwise, I’ll tell you what I said when the time comes. In the meantime, keep your Lugers holstered.

The Lascivious Biddies, whom I recently had occasion to describe as “New York’s hippest girl group” (watch this space for details), will be throwing a CD release party at Joe’s Pub on Saturday, October 9, at 9:30. I wrote the liner notes for their new album, Get Lucky (nice title, huh?), and here’s a tantalizing snippet thereof:

I like smart music, the kind that doesn’t tell you everything it knows the first time you hear it. I like uncategorizable music that can’t be squeezed into smug little pigeonholes. I like serious music that isn’t afraid to be funny–and vice versa. If that’s what you like, too, then you’ve come to the right band, and the right album. Or, to put it another way, you just got lucky.

Start with the witty sound of the Lascivious Biddies, a knowing blend of chirpy girl-group pop and the smooth swing of a King Cole-style jazz trio (piano, guitar, bass, no drums). Lee Ann Westover’s sly, edgy lead vocals ride atop a chiming cushion of close harmony, with Deidre Rodman and Amanda Monaco weaving piano and electric guitar together so deftly that you can’t always tease them apart, and Saskia Lane laying down shapely bass lines that tie each song together like a well-wrapped Christmas package. On paper, it’s a quirky, unexpected mixture, but when you first hear it for yourself, the results sound so utterly natural that you never stop to wonder why nobody ever tried it before.

The songs–most of them by the Biddies themselves, with a couple of shrewdly chosen covers thrown in for contrast–are as unobtrusively unpredictable as the way in which they’re performed. Some, like “Famous,” take a coolly detached look at the idiosyncrasies of New York life (“I wanna be famous/Tabloids will print what I eat/I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street”). Others offer wry reminders that many New Yorkers, including two of the Biddies, hail from points west, and know better than to write them off as flyover country: “I know a girl named Betty who wears patent-leather shoes/She just moved from Missouri and she’s feeling kinda bruised.” Ever and always, their collective point of view is that of four big-city women who take a tough-minded, sharply contemporary view of men: sometimes affectionate, sometimes dismissive, always disillusioned….

If any of that makes you curious, go hear them, and tell ’em I sent you.

To hear samples from Get Lucky, go here.

For more information about Joe’s Pub, go here.

“Revision is just as important as any other part of writing and must be done con amore.”

Evelyn Waugh, letter to Nancy Mitford, March 31, 1951

“There is a simple law governing the dramatization of novels: if it is worth doing, it can’t be done; if it can be done, it isn’t worth it. Trash can be just as trashy on the stage as in an armchair, but when an artist has conceived of something as a novel, let those who think they know a reason why his matter should not be married to his manner forever hold their peace.”

John Simon, Acid Test

I’ve been meaning to say something about Galley Cat, Nathalie Chicha’s new blog about the book business, which went live a week or two ago and was promptly installed on “About Last Night”‘s “Sites to See” list. Nathalie is, of course, the mastermind behind Cup of Chicha, long one of my daily stops in the ‘sphere. Now she’s relocated from Iowa to New York and launched this new for-profit blog, which I read no less faithfully–it’s a super-smart piece of work. For now Cup of Chicha is in a state of semi-suspended animation as Nathalie gets used to the daily deadlines at Galley Cat, but I have no doubt that she’ll soon be back to her usual sharp-tongued, quick-witted business at the same old stand. In the meantime, check out her new digs.

I’ve also been meaning to note with unsnarky sadness that The Minor Fall, the Major Lift, better known as Mr. TMFTML, has logged off for good. Why, I don’t know, though he claims (sort of) to have burned out. Whatever the real reason, his decision to stop blogging has severely diminished the gaiety of nations. For all his self-imposed anonymity, he was one of the blogosphere’s strongest and most distinctive personalities, and I can only hope that he decides in due course to re-emerge in the Old Media under his own name, there to wreak havoc on the slow-witted, make flattering accusations about innocent bystanders (we still get hits from that damn posting), and generally punch holes in the envelope of polite discourse.

Me, I miss him already. A lot.

As of ten minutes ago, I’m deadline-free. The last of my outstanding pieces is finished and e-mailed. I still have urgent pre-Chicago errands to run this afternoon, but I should be back in time to do a little blogging before heading off to the opera with Sarah. If not, I’ll post after I get home tonight.

Later.

I haven’t said this for ages, so I will: if you’re a regular reader of “About Last Night,” tell a friend about us. We had a good year, and we’d like to have a better one.

I can’t help but think that there are lots of people out there who’d enjoy reading a blog like this, but don’t yet know that it exists. For that matter, there are still lots of people out there who don’t know what a blog is. What better way for them to dive into the pool than to become daily communicants of “About Last Night”? (Besides, I’ve got a new book coming out, and I need all the help I can get.)

Spread the word, if you would. Our Girl and I will be more than grateful.

Yes, I’m still knocking out pieces–on tap for today is a review of Robert McCrum’s Wodehouse–but the post-vacation me is keeping an even strain, and so far I show no immiment signs of blowing any fuses prior to my departure for Chicago on Friday. Keep your fingers crossed.

When I’m really busy, one of my cunning new sanity-maintenance techniques is to spend my off hours (or, in this case, minutes) reading a book that’s totally unrelated to the pieces I’m writing. This time around it’s Richard Osborne’s Herbert von Karajan: A Life in Music, the best biography ever written of an orchestral conductor, and an incredibly good read even if you’re not a Karajan fan. It’s full of tasty nuggets, two of which I want to pass on to you before I return to the grindstone. First, a snippet that will be making its way sooner or later into my next book:

Karajan was obsessed by rhythmic accuracy. He once told the Vienna Philharmonic that he was going to hear a concert by Louis Armstrong. “Imagine!” he exclaimed. “Two hours of music, and never once will it slow down or speed up by mistake.”

The second is a remark about Karajan made by his first wife: “Certainly, he was not a man who would do anything foolish for a woman.”

You can say a lot about Herbert von Karajan, and Osborne does–his book is 851 pages long–but in the end, I doubt you could say anything about his personality more revealing than that.