About Last Night

• I don’t like most advertising slogans, especially the idiot taglines used to advertise today’s movies (“The bravest place to stand is by each other’s side”). Rarely, though, has a slogan puzzled me more than the one I saw on a Baltimore billboard a couple of weeks ago. It’s the motto of the Baltimore Opera Company: Opera. It’s better than you think. It has to be. I’m not averse on principle to self-deprecation, but why on earth does the BOC think that running down opera will induce people to change their minds about it?
The fact is that when done right, opera is the most immediately exciting of all art forms, one that is more than capable of appealing to a truly popular audience. Paul Moravec and I aren’t writing The Letter for a coterie of sniffish, shiny-domed snobs. We hope to reach the same kind of theatergoers who came to see Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Consul on Broadway in 1950, an event that earned Menotti a cover story in Time. Nor do we think that to be an unrealistic ambition. As Robertson Davies wrote in The Lyre of Orpheus, “Opera speaks to the heart as no other art does, because it is essentially simple.”
To be sure, Broadway has changed greatly since 1950, as has Time, but even so, I don’t see why those who are in the business of making opera should feel any need to apologize for their product. Instead, they ought to spread the word that a well-produced opera is thrilling–and accessible. The Letter is about love, sex, vengeance, and death. It contains two murders, both of them bloody. It also contains tunes that you can hum. It is, in short, what my musical collaborator likes to call “a rattling good show,” just like the classic play to which Howard Dietz paid witty tribute in “That’s Entertainment”: Some great Shakespearean scene/Where a ghost and a prince meet/And everyone ends in mincemeat.
That’s my idea of a slogan for an opera company.
• Finally, finally, finally, the Metropolitan Museum has announced “a complete survey–the first in this country in three decades–of the career of Giorgio Morandi, one of the greatest 20th-century masters of still-life and landscape painting in the tradition of Chardin and Cézanne. The exhibition will comprise approximately 110 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and etchings from his early ‘metaphysical’ works to his late evanescent still-lifes, culled mainly from Italian collections formed by Morandi’s friends, either renowned scholars or eclectic collectors.”
I’ve been blogging about Morandi at odd intervals for the past five years, and I even bid on one of his etchings (unsuccessfully, alas) at a Sotheby’s auction, but I’ve never before had the chance to see more than eight of his exquisite paintings at a time. That was in 2004, when Lucas Schoormans Gallery put on a miniature Morandi retrospective that was one of the greatest experiences of my gallery-going life to date.
Here’s what I wrote about it in the Washington Post:

The effect of this show is wildly disproportionate to its minuscule size: six oil paintings and two works on paper, all of them still lifes and none in any obvious way imposing. Yet as you look at how the greatest Italian artist of the 20th century painstakingly arranged and rearranged a dozen bottles, bowls and boxes on a table and painted them over and over again, you find yourself whisked out of the grinding noise of everyday urban life and spirited away to a place of intense stillness. It’s as if a soft-spoken man had slipped discreetly into a small room open to the public, whispering life-changing confidences to the fortunate few who visit him there.
What gives Morandi’s paintings their near-inscrutable power? It’s partly the brushwork, at once delicate and forthright, and partly the extreme subtlety with which he varied his narrow palette of colors. I’m no less fascinated by the way in which he pushes himself to the edge of abstraction in so many of his later works. Those homely objects (some of them easily recognizable from canvas to canvas) grow increasingly vaporous, even transparent, as in the 1960 watercolor that is for me the high point of the show.
Though coveted by connoisseurs, Morandi’s tabletop microcosms have never been popular in this country, or anywhere else. None of them is currently hanging in a New York museum (though two exquisite etchings just went on the block at Sotheby’s), nor has Morandi ever been the subject of a full-scale American retrospective. Until last month, Washington was the only city on this side of the Atlantic where you could occasionally see more than one of his paintings at a time: three at the Hirshhorn, two at the Phillips. In addition, several regional museums own individual Morandis–there’s one in Princeton, N.J., for instance, and another in St. Louis–but if you want to see his work in bulk, you pretty much have to go to the Museo Morandi in Bologna, Italy, from which three paintings in this show are on loan.
So it is a boon and a blessing that Lucas Schoormans has put together this tiny, unforgettable exhibition, not for profit (only one of the pieces, a pencil drawing, is for sale) but for love. It’s worth a trip to Manhattan all by itself, and it repays frequent and repeated viewings.

I have no doubt that the same will be true of “Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964,” which goes up on September 16 and will be on display through December 14. Expect to see me there–often.

“Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”
George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Last week I discovered the show Damages and watched all 13 episodes of Season 1 over a marathon of on-the-couch dinners and before-bed cups of tea (see Top 5 at right). One of the best parts of the show is Ted Danson’s character of billionaire Arthur Frobisher, the defendant in an Enron-esque class-action lawsuit brought by the former employees of his bankrupt company. Danson was nominated for a Golden Globe for his part, and if the world were a right one, his giant block of a brow and his white, wolfish chompers also would have gotten nods.
As his case comes closer to trial, Frobisher is taking a p.r. beating in the media and, against the advice of his attorney, he arranges to have his biography written. Now Frobisher is very much Forster’s man on the golf course, and it’s clear he expects this project to be a glossy piece of hagiography, one that will chart his self-made rise to captain of industry, his triumph over childhood dyslexia, his family values, etc. etc. In due time, a biographer is procured — a nervous plug of a guy named George, “a fellow from Yale, writes fiction no one reads but he’s one hell of a biographer” — and the project commences. Yet as the interviews between writer and subject continue Frobisher’s confidence visibly wavers as he becomes more nervous about how his biographer (and hence history) will judge him. He pays a midnight visit to his biographer’s tiny city apartment to drum up camaraderie. The attempt fails, and, desperate, Frobisher tries one last sally:
FROBISHER: Tell me about your book.
GEORGE: My novel?
FROBISHER: Sorry, your novel.
GEORGE (looking pained & emo): It’s hard to describe.
FROBISHER: Just tell me what it’s about, will you?
GEORGE: On the face of it, it’s a love story. It’s about nostalgia and how that affects our core relationships —
FROBISHER (incredulous): Jesus, George! I mean, that sounds like crap! Are you kidding me? Look what you’re doing here? (motions around apartment) You’re living in — You’re sleeping on a futon. C’mon! Of course you’re writing about my life. You don’t have one!
A short scene but the “On the face of it, it’s a love story” line and the sputtering “You’re sleeping on a futon” (I do!) are killers.

“If you ask one type of man, ‘What does a novel do?’ he will reply placidly: ‘Well–I don’t know–it seems a funny sort of question to ask–a novel’s a novel–well, I don’t know–I suppose it kind of tells a story, so to speak.’ He is quite good-tempered and vague, and probably driving a motor bus at the same time and paying no more attention to literature than it merits. Another man, whom I visualize as on a golf-course, will be aggressive and brisk. He will reply: ‘What does a novel do? Why, it tells a story of course, and I’ve no use for it if it didn’t. I like a story. Very bad taste on my part, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like a story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same way.’ And a third man he says in a sort of dropping regretful voice, ‘Yes–oh dear, yes–the novel tells a story.’ I respect and admire the first speaker. I detest and fear the second. And the third is myself. Yes–oh, dear, yes–the novel tells a story . . . The more we look at the story (the story that is a story, mind), the more we disentangle it from the finer growth it supports, the less we shall find to admire. It runs like a backbone–or may I say a tapeworm, for its beginning and end are arbitrary . . . It is a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence–dinner coming after breakfast, Tuesday after Monday, decay after death and so on. Qua story, it can only have one merit: that of making the audience wonder what happens next. And conversely it can only have one fault: that of making the audience not want to know what happens next. These are the only two criticisms that can be made on the story that is a story . . . When we isolate the story like this and hold it out on the forceps–wriggling and interminable, the naked worm of time–it presents an aspect both unlovely and dull. But we have much to learn from it.”
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, as quoted and elided by Samuel R. Delany in About Writing

• David Orr’s review of Elegy, a book of poetry by Mary Jo Bang, explores the difficulties of transforming great grief into art.
• After a couple clunkers, it sounds as if Salman Rushdie’s latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence, is a return to form. Ursula K Le Guin praises it to the “brilliant, fascinating” moon.
• Once more with feeling!: Three different accounts of the recent Buffy reunion panel in L.A. Each one contains different morsels of trivia, backstage gossip, and reads on the personalities, so if you’re a fan you’ll want to read all three. If you’re not a fan, you’ll, um, just want to skip the whole thing. (Via.)

• FRIDAY Our Girl in Chicago knocks on my door at midnight, having braved a snowstorm to fly to Manhattan to celebrate her birthday. We stay up way too late talking.

• SATURDAY To Baltimore via train for CenterStage’s very sexy revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, preceded by pizza and gelato at Iggie’s. At the theater we meet fellow Sondheim buff Laura Lippman, whose new book has just come out, then pick up her husband David Simon after the show for dinner and conversation. I shamefacedly admit to David (who is incredibly nice about it) that I’ve never seen The Wire, but that OGIC is giving me the first season on DVD as a belated birthday present. Exhausted, Our Girl and I nap on the train after the show, then stay up way too late talking.

• SUNDAY Brunch at Madaleine Mae, the fancy new southern-style restaurant on my corner, whose owners hope to succeed where three previous dining establishments have failed since I moved here five or so years ago. The grits and biscuits are excellent. Our Girl gives me a big hug and a copy of Rachel Ries‘ new CD and leaves for the airport, toting a bagful of warm H&H bagels. Chicago is a great town for hot dogs, but they don’t get bagels there.

I spend the afternoon straightening pictures, listening to a new CD of Grieg and Saint-Saëns playing their own music, and reading a book about Chekhov. At seven I go to City Center to see The Four of Us, Itamar Moses’ latest play, accompanied by my new friend Rosalie Sullivan, who sang in the workshop for The Letter.

• MONDAY I spend the whole day writing an essay for Commentary about The Magical Chorus, Solomon Volkov’s new study of Russian art and culture in the twentieth century. Dinner with an old friend who has good news–she’s pregnant–followed by two hours of intensive editing on the Commentary essay. Early(ish) to bed after calling Mrs. T in Connecticut and my mother in Missouri. For some reason I’ve been waking up at six-thirty every morning, alarm or no alarm, so I figure I’d better go with the flow or pay the price.

• TUESDAY Another deadline, this one for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal “Sightings” column about my trip to Philadelphia to see the movie-house simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Peter Grimes. The column comes easily, leaving me with enough free time to work in a trip to the gym before meeting Paul Moravec at his apartment to hear him play through his sketches for the seventh and eighth scenes of The Letter.

To Broadway after dinner for a press preview of Gypsy, where I run into Chris Jones, my opposite number at the Chicago Tribune, who is in town for Gypsy and In the Heights. I quiz him about what shows I should see when Mrs. T and I come to Chicago in June. Then I spot my companion for the evening, escort her into the St. James Theatre, and discover that our seats are five rows from the stage, meaning that listening to Patti LuPone sing “Rose’s Turn” feels like sitting in a wind tunnel.

“You know what Gypsy is?” my friend says as we file out of the theater three hours later. “It’s the Platonic ideal of the golden-age Broadway musical.”

“Can I steal that?” I ask.

“I want points,” she replies.

• WEDNESDAY To Washington, D.C., via the Acela Express for the March meeting of the National Council on the Arts. I write Friday’s drama column on the train, e-mail it to the Journal from the lobby of Union Station, then take a cab to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art to see Color as Field, a touring exhibition curated by Karen Wilkin about which I’m thinking of writing a column for the Journal.

From there I go straight to the National Endowment for the Arts, where I spend the rest of the afternoon in conference, then board a bus for Kennedy Center to see August Wilson’s Jitney with my fellow council members. I arrive at the hotel at ten o’clock, check in, call Mrs. T and my mother, and fall into bed.

• THURSDAY I wake at six-thirty and spend an hour writing before going down to breakfast, then take a cab to the NEA and spend the next nine hours reviewing a thousand (count ’em, a thousand) grant applications and discussing various other arts-related matters with the council and permanent staff. Lunch consists of sandwiches snarfed down at the conference table. The meeting runs long, forcing me to sneak out to meet Megan McArdle for dinner and Macbeth at the Folger Theatre.

• FRIDAY I read today’s drama column over breakfast in the hotel restaurant, whose buffet features smoked salmon, one of my food groups. It’s the first time in months that I’ve looked at a copy of the Journal on paper (I now read newspapers and magazines online or not at all).

Back to the NEA for one more meeting, a public session at which the NCA votes on grant applications and listens to a presentation about jazz by Paquito d’Rivera and Gunther Schuller. Schuller and I have spoken briefly on the phone but never met face to face, so I spend a few minutes after the meeting chatting with him about my Louis Armstrong biography, in which he figures prominently. Then I go to Union Station and catch the next train to New York, catching up on my accumulated e-mail during the three-hour trip.

At home I open my accumulated snail mail, correct the galleys of my Commentary essay, and grab a quick nap. In the evening I take a blogfriend to a press preview of South Pacific at Lincoln Center. Afterward we wolf down burgers across the street at P.J. Clarke’s and catch up on recent events. She goes home and blogs about the performance. I call Mrs. T and fall into bed.

• SATURDAY Up at six-thirty, arrgh. I spend the morning writing a book review, working on expense reports, and running errands. At three o’clock I board a train bound for Hartford and start reading the newly published final installment of Henry-Louis de La Grange’s multi-volume Gustav Mahler biography, which is 1,758 pages long (the last volume, not the whole thing!).

Mrs. T picks me up at the station and delivers a sternly worded ultimatum: no more work until Monday, or else. I do as I’m told.