About Last Night

Over the weekend both our cars were broken into. Nothing too serious, just a change box and the handful of CDs in the carrier — all the CDs, that is, except for one, which pointedly got left behind on the driver’s seat: My copy of Nilsson Schmilsson.
I love the record, Lowell hates it, and we’ve bickered about it a kazillion times the way you do when you’re married and go everywhere together and are appalled by what the other one wants to play on the stereo on the way there. You can tell Lowell feels super-vindicated that the car burglar took his side.

What a relief, The Return of Jezebel James has been cancelled. Out of loyalty to Amy Sherman-Palladino I watched the first two weeks and would have continued to watch — but it was painful. About five minutes in to the first episode it was clear the show was a bust, and after that it was just like sitting vigil. It felt like, if you had a friend who rammed her ship into an iceberg and everyone knows the boat’s sinking but you kind of owe it to her to stay on board anyway and drink with her until the whole thing goes down. Or something like that. It was bad.
So that laugh track was an abomination before God, but what else went wrong (I ask ye, the other four people who watched the show)? For me, Parker Posey seemed overly vague and drifting in her role, like she never clued in that she was a lead and had to hold the center down. Instead she played her part like a satellite character: A two-note sidekick.
And then, I think, part of the fault must lie with how her character was written, with scavenged Frankenstein-ish pieces of Lorelai Gilmore (e.g., the compulsive list-making, the fascination with girlie monstrosities like Hello Kitty) stapled on here and there, which made for an incoherent whole — again, at least as Posey played it. I hate to say this because I adore her, but these tics felt less like a return of beloved tropes, than a failure of imagination on ASP’s part*. She writes so well about neurotic, complicated, high-strung women, but I want her to push on.
* I felt the same way when Anna and April, Luke’s ex-girlfriend and daughter, were introducted in GG Season 6 — Anna with her fast-talking and her quirks, April as a bookish brainiac — and it was all a little too mirror, mirror on the wall to the Lorelai-Rory houseold.

“If tragedy elicits our compassion, comedy appeals to our self-interest. The former confronts life’s failures with noble fortitude, the latter seeks to circumvent them with shrewd nonchalance. The one leaves us momentarily in a mood of resignation, the other in a condition of euphoria.”
Harry Levin, Playboys and Killjoys

• This profile of Bret Easton Ellis is about a hundred times more interesting than you’d think. Or, than I thought it’d be. Ellis’ novels aren’t favorites but I think they’re smarter thought experiments than they get credited for (if sometimes wildly uneven in the follow through). For cultural juxtaposition, I suggest reading the profile while viewing this terrifying footage of Demi Moore talking about her “leech therapy.”
(First link via TEV.)
• Three books I’m desperate to read, with links to the why’s and wherefore’s so you can be desperate to read them too: Jiang Rong’s Wolf Totem, Roger Deakin’s Wildwood, and Richard Fortey’s Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum. I’m also already hearing great things about Jincy Willett’s new novel, The Writing Class, which comes out in June.
• From the vaults: Marianne Moore’s zealous editing wasn’t confined to her friends’ poems, she was just as active at hacking away at her own. In a 2003 essay for The Believer, Dan Chiasson writes:

“Omissions are not accidents,” was the adage, self-minted, that served as the epigraph to Moore’s 1967 Complete Poems. That book was anything but “complete,” except in the sense of “finished off.” It seemed more a tally of subtractions than additions; Moore had radically revised some poems, and radically erased others. The resulting dainty book misrepresented her, and Moore has seemed, though never less interesting, somehow less ambitious than her male counterparts, Stevens, Eliot, and Williams.
Grace Schulman’s new collected Moore, The Poems of Marianne Moore (November 2003), prints every significant poem Moore wrote, including many she later suppressed and several she never printed at all. It is not a desecration of Moore to do so; as Schulman points out, “change” was at the heart of her aesthetic, and had she lived another thirty years she most surely would have found her own Complete Poems inadequate.

This is my week: three deadlines, five shows, and a trip to Washington, D.C. tomorrow morning.
Later. Maybe.

“Unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening. I go to the theatre to be moved to laughter, not to be tickled or bustled into it.”
George Bernard Shaw, “An Old New Play and a New Old One”

• I never saw Paul Scofield on stage. Few Americans did: he performed in this country only once, in the 1961 Broadway production of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons. So his death last week failed to make much of an impression on me. On the other hand, I never saw John Gielgud, either, yet I felt a real sense of loss when he died. What accounts for the difference?

The answer, of course, is that Gielgud appeared in dozens of feature films, usually playing small but strikingly written parts that allowed him to make a memorable impression. Not so Scofield. He made very few movies, and only two of them, Robert Redford’s Quiz Show and the 1966 screen version of A Man for All Seasons, are reasonably well known to American audiences.

Time was when I might have used that fact to preach a sermonette about the cultural primacy of film over theater, a point I made in “Tolstoy’s Contraption,” an essay I published in The Wall Street Journal in 1999 and reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader:

We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies, but that is what they are–which means they can be rendered moribund by new technological developments, in the way that silent films gave way to talkies and radio to TV. Well into the eighteenth century, for example, most of the West’s great storytellers wrote plays, not novels. But the development of modern printing techniques made it feasible for books to be sold at lower prices, allowing storytellers to reach large numbers of readers individually; they then turned to writing novels, and by the twentieth century the theatrical play had come to be widely regarded as a cultural backwater. To be sure, important plays continue to be written and produced, but few watch them (unless they are made into movies).

I still stand by that paragraph. Having spent the past five years as a working drama critic, though, I hasten to point out that I never meant to suggest that live theater is less aesthetically important than film simply because fewer people see it. Nevertheless, it strikes me as both revealing and ironic that most Americans under the age of sixty–myself, alas, included–will remember Paul Scofield not as one of the greatest stage actors of the twentieth century but as the man who played Charles Van Doren’s father in Quiz Show.

• Ask Me Again, a two-CD set of previously unreleased recordings by the late Nancy LaMott, turned up on the Billboard jazz charts last week, ascending to the #15 spot, a few notches below Tony Bennett, Michael Bublé, Diana Krall, Wynton Marsalis, Pink Martini, and Queen Latifah. That is, to put it mildly, a decidedly miscellaneous group of artists, one whose makeup says much about the no less decidedly marginal place of jazz in postmodern America.

Needless to say, Nancy herself would have smiled to see herself described as a jazz singer: she was nothing of the kind, though she loved jazz and was comfortable working with those who played it. Even so, it pleased me greatly to see my old friend sharing a page in Billboard with Diana Krall. They never met, and an untimely death robbed Nancy of the chance to ride the same wave of changing taste that swept Diana to the well-deserved fame she now enjoys. If only…

• Onstage humor is a delicate plant, capable of wilting without warning. I saw Mark Morris’ staging of Purcell’s King Arthur at New York City Opera a couple of weeks ago and laughed all the way through it, but it took the rest of the audience an hour or so to catch up with me. A minute or so into the evening, a woman sitting in front of me turned around and glared when I snickered at one of Morris’ more obvious visual punch lines. If a thought balloon had formed over my head at that moment, it would have read as follows: Hey, lady, didn’t you get the memo? This is supposed to be funny!

Then it hit me: I was surrounded by operagoers, not dancegoers. Opera buffs aren’t in the habit of laughing in the theater, not even at comic operas. Dance buffs, by contrast, are well aware of Morris’ reputation as a comedian, so much so that they sometimes laugh at scenes whose beauty makes me want to cry.

As for me, I regard comedy as the highest form of art. “Human existence,” I once wrote apropos of the music of Emmanuel Chabrier, “is so indissoluble a mixture of heartbreak and absurdity that it can often be more acutely portrayed through the refracting lens of comedy.” Alas, the world is full of earnest, humorless souls, and my impression is that they usually make a better living than those of us who find life funny–though I doubt they have nearly as good a time as we do.

“The cause of laughter is simply the sudden perception of the incongruity between a concept and the real object.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea