Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“A Conversation with Marcel Duchamp,” an episode of NBC’s Wisdom originally telecast on January 15, 1956. The artist is interviewed by James Johnson Sweeney:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Modern art reflects the disequilibrium of modern society in that it so often springs from a blind passion vainly seeking to sate itself in form, color, or sound. An artist can contemplate sensual beauty only when he loves all that surrounds him on earth. But if all he feels is loathing at the discrepancy between what he would wish the world to be and what it is in reality, then he is incapable of standing still and beholding. He is ashamed of reflexes of love; he is condemned to perpetual motion, to a restless sketching of discontinued, broken observations of nature. Like a sleep-walker, he loses his balance as soon as he stops moving.”
Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind
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Kate Hamill has made a name for herself by writing ingeniously wrought stage versions of popular 19th-century novels that treat their source material with mischievous freedom….In taking on “Little Women,” though, she’s drawing to an inside straight: Not only is Louisa May Alcott’s 1869 novel about the four March sisters and their journey to adulthood one of the most beloved of all children’s books, but it’s been adapted countless times for both stage and screen, most famously and successfully by George Cukor in 1933, with yet another version, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, set for big-screen release in December. As clever as Ms. Hamill is, what new wrinkle can she bring to so familiar a tale?
The answer is that in this “Little Women,“ directed with fizzy energy by Sarna Lapine, Jo (played by Kristolyn Lloyd) is more sexually equivocal than the old-fashioned “tomboy” of the novel….
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Read the whole thing here.The trailer for Little Women:
An excerpt from the 1933 screen version of Little Women, directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn and Douglass Montgomery:
Betty Comden and Adolph Green appear as the mystery guests on What’s My Line? The panel includes Phyllis Newman, Green’s wife. The mystery-guest segment begins at 12:01. John Daly is the host and the other panelists are Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Kevin McCarthy. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on July 2, 1967:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.”
Cyril Connolly, “Told in Gath”
In my latest Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column, I pay tribute to Charles Griffes. Here’s an excerpt.
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This year marks the centennial of Charles T. Griffes’ sudden—and no less suddenly brief—ascent to musical stardom. A small-town music teacher at a boys’ prep school in suburban New York, he was catapulted into celebrity when Pierre Monteux and the Boston Symphony gave the world premiere of “The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan,” his first large-scale orchestral piece, inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1797 poem about an opium dream.
Born in 1884, Griffes had labored for years in semi-obscurity, turning out art songs and piano pieces that were modestly popular but didn’t sell well enough for him to quit the day job that he despised. The premiere of “Kubla Khan,” which was greeted with wild enthusiasm in Boston and New York, promised to change that in a single stroke….
Four months later, he was dead, a victim of the worldwide Spanish flu pandemic. He was 35….
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Read the whole thing here.Myra Hess performs Charles Griffes’ “The White Peacock” in 1928:
Barbara Bonney and Malcolm Martineau perform Griffes’ “The Lament of Ian the Proud”:
“Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.”
Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave
For those of you following Mrs. T’s transplant-related adventures, here’s an update on her condition and prospects.
The clock, in short, is running.
Would that there were enough donor lungs to go around! But there aren’t, which is the reason for the organ allocation list, which divvys up donor organs in the United States according to a complex formula that weighs the comparative needs of their potential recipients. For the past month or so, Mrs. T’s allocation “score” has been hovering above 50 (out of 100). This means she’s sick enough to start receiving organ offers as soon as a suitable pair of lungs becomes available—so long as it isn’t equally suitable to someone who outscores her. Because her condition deteriorated in the past week, the New York-Presbyterian transplant team was able to have her score raised somewhat higher.
And what if no lungs become available right away? Unless Mrs. T’s condition improves very significantly, she’ll have to wait at New York-Presbyterian instead of going home to stand by for the Big Call alerting her that donor lungs are en route to the hospital. The problem is that she needs more supplementary oxygen than can be administered at home, on top of which she’s still being treated with intravenous antibiotics for her sepsis. Fortunately, we live just thirteen blocks from the hospital—that’s why we moved to this neighborhood—and it’s possible that she’ll improve enough to be able to wait for the call at home. She won’t be going anywhere else, though, until it comes.
Many of you have asked about visiting Mrs. T. She’s not quite ready just yet, partly because she’s still worn out from the events of the week just past and partly because she’s temporarily deaf. She had to wear a high-pressure BiPAP mask for several days last week to force oxygen into her lungs, and her Eustachian tubes are so clogged as a result that she can’t hear anything anyone says unless they shout. No cards or flowers, either: Mrs. T knows you care from the explosion of support for her on the social media, which she’s following with amazement.
(Incidentally, Mrs. T had never flown in a helicopter prior to being airlifted to New York. I regret to say that it was a letdown. “It was like riding in a station wagon lying down,” she says. “The cabin was so small that there wasn’t room in back for anyone but me and the nurse, and there weren’t any windows I could see out of, either.” Sorry to disappoint you!)
So that’s where we stand as of today. While Mrs. T is resting more or less comfortably, she can’t go on like this forever. Sooner or later, she’ll have to have two new lungs to stay alive. Which is why I’ll end, as always, with a plea: if you haven’t yet signed up to become an organ donor, please go here to do so.That’s always been a fine and caring thing to do, but for Mrs. T and me, it’s never been more urgent than it is right now.