About Last Night

Mr. Something Old, Nothing New, a/k/a Jaime J. Weinman, has found and posted a link to a YouTube clip of Little Miss Britten, Dudley Moore’s knowing spoof of a Benjamin Britten folksong arrangement as sung by Peter Pears. (It was part of Beyond the Fringe, the now-legendary 1960 revue written and performed by Moore, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller.) Jaime correctly describes it as “the greatest classical-music parody of all time.” I sent it to an opera coach who plays a lot of Britten, and she promptly wrote back, “This is the funniest thing I’ve ever, ever seen.” I might add that she loves Britten’s music. So do I–and so did Moore, who claimed that he wrote “Little Miss Britten” “out of absolute love and admiration for Britten and with no malice aforethought at all.” Alas, it won’t make any sense unless you know the original, but if you do, you’ll laugh so hard as to run the risk of self-injury.

I love parody and wish in vain that I had a gift for it. As I wrote a couple of years ago, I believe it to be “one of the most powerful and illuminating forms of criticism.” Fortunately, the complete text of the greatest of all literary parodies, Max Beerbohm’s A Christmas Garland, is now available online via Project Gutenberg, and I commend it to your attention.

The best-known of the Christmas Garland parodies is “The Mote in the Middle Distance,” Beerbohm’s lethally exact sendup of H*nry J*m*s’ late style:

It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it.

It’s splendidly wicked, but I confess to preferring “P.C., X, 36,” in which R*d**rd K*pl*ng gets his:

I had spent Christmas Eve at the Club, listening to a grand pow-wow between certain of the choicer sons of Adam. Then Slushby had cut in. Slushby is one who writes to newspapers and is theirs obediently “HUMANITARIAN.” When Slushby cuts in, men remember they have to be up early next morning.

For those of you who weren’t reading “About Last Night” back in 2004, here is Hugh Kingsmill’s parody of A.E. Housman, which is equally good–and equally cruel.

(For more about Beyond the Fringe, go here.)

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

– A Chorus Line (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

– Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

– The Drowsy Chaperone* (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

– Jay Johnson: The Two and Only (one-ventriloquist show, G/PG-13, a bit of strong language but otherwise family-friendly, reviewed here)

– The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

– The Wedding Singer (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

– The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

– Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living In Paris (musical revue, R, adult subject matter and sexual content, reviewed here)

– Slava’s Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly, reviewed here)

CLOSING THIS WEEKEND:

– Seven Guitars (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, reviewed here, closes Sunday)

“The Devil lays eggs in idle palms.”

Julian Jebb (quoted in Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir)

Here are some gems gleaned from my recent voyages into cyberspace:

– Mr. Modern Art Notes holds forth on the genius of Richard Diebenkorn, making an important point in passing:

A few weeks ago I was chatting with a chief curator about a Richard Diebenkorn painting in one of his galleries. “You know,” I said. “It’s remarkable that there’s never been a full, comprehensive Ocean Park survey exhibit.”

The curator paused. “Are you sure about that?” he said, less asking than implying I should double-check Diebenkorn’s exhibition history.

“Completely sure,” I said. “There’s never been a Berkeley show either. It’s bizarre. It’s probably the contemporary art show most in need of being done.”

The curator was still disbelieving, but allowed me my fervor. It’s true. There’s never been a museum (or gallery, for that matter) exhibit surveying the paintings, the drawings, the paintings-on-paper, or the three together….

Or, I might add, the related prints. You won’t find one in the Teachout Museum, alas–I haven’t got that kind of money to throw around–but I am the proud owner of an etching by Diebenkorn, who would be universally acknowledged as one of the greatest American artists of the twentieth century had he not made the fatal mistake of living and working in California. Even now, far too many New Yorkers suffer from the wildly mistaken notion that the West Coast is an aesthetic desert. I don’t know where they picked it up–probably from Woody Allen.

– Speaking of the West Coast, Mr. Anecdotal Evidence serves up the best capsule description of Raymond Chandler’s special gifts I’ve read, my own feeble attempts included. Here’s part of it:

Chandler’s literary conscience was bothered by the genre in which he had chosen to work. Part of him wished to write “heavy novels.” We can be grateful he never did, because the hard-boiled detective story enabled him to indulge his strengths, minimize or ignore his weaknesses and create great books that continue to give dependable pleasure to readers. “All of which is to say that gusto thrives on freedom, and freedom in art, as in life, is the result of a discipline imposed by ourselves,” as Marianne Moore once wrote in a very different context….

Read the whole thing. It won’t take long.

– The Little Professor has sailed off the deep end:

It’s official: I share the house with six thousand books…

Alas, I have also exhausted my supply of downstairs walls. (As I live in a Cape Cod, upstairs walls are in somewhat short supply. Or, rather, the upstairs walls are both short and in short supply.) My parents have already suggested building stacks–not to mention another room–but I think that there may be other, more creative, alternatives….

I especially like her idea for “floating, inflatable bookcases,” which reminds me of my favorite line from Mark Helprin’s Memoir from Antproof Case: “I had had wonderful ideas all my life–the antigravity box, the camel ranch in Idaho, artillery mail–but I had never been able to translate them into reality.”

– Why aren’t blogbooks selling? Brenda Coulter, a romance novelist who blogs on the side, offers some sensible observations, accompanied by this amusing aside:

Publishers haven’t been offering big-name bloggers contracts for novels. And rightly so, because wit and erudition on a blog aren’t reliable indicators of talent for fiction-writing….I’m an effusive admirer of Terry Teachout’s writing. But even this fangirl doesn’t assume he’d make a brilliant novelist. For all I know, he’d stink at fiction.

Alas, I would and do, as I confessed in this space two years ago.

– Ms. Light Reading draws a distinction:

In English English clever seems to be a clearer term of praise, for something like what Americans would just call “smart,” but often when I use “clever” it is not a compliment….

Ditto.

– Mr. Jerry Jazz Musician asked a cast of very interesting characters, including Ahmad Jamal, Roger Kellaway, John Pizzarelli, and Nancy Wilson, to name “the five greatest albums (LP or CD) of all time.” The answers he got are–to put it mildly–illuminating.

– By way of Ms. Althouse, here’s Alice Cooper on politics:

“You won’t find any political songs, excepted for

“I was just thinking the other day that I was born in 1939 and so, all my life, people I don’t know have been trying to kill me. The Germans dropped bombs on my house in London and I remember my mother saying: better sleep under the stairs. Then it was the Russians, then the Irish, now another lot of terrorists. I’m starting to accept that I’m a marked man.”

Alan Ayckbourn, interview, The Guardian (Oct. 4, 2006)

As I was soaring through the skies of Pennsylvania the other day, my iPod served up Leopold Stokowski’s 1937 recording of Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (not currently available on CD, alas). You may know it as the piece to which Mickey Mouse nearly drowned in Fantasia. No sooner did it start playing than I broke out in a broad grin. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice always does that to me–and did so long before I ever saw Fantasia. It’s one of the many pieces of music that has the mysterious power to make me happy.

Readers of this posting will recall that I’ve been reading Daniel J. Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. Among the many tasty tidbits of research-derived fact tucked into its pages is this delicious nugget:

The nucleus accumbens (NAc) is the center of the brain’s reward system, playing an important role in pleasure and addiction. The NAc is active when gamblers win a bet, or drug users take their favorite drug. It is also closely involved with the transmission of opioids in the brain, through its ability to release the neurotransmitter dopamine. Avram Goldstein had shown in 1980 that the pleasure of music listening could be blocked by administering the drug nalaxone, believed to interfere with dopamine in the nucleus accumbens….

The rewarding and reinforcing aspects of listening to music seem, then, to be mediated by increasing dopamine levels in the nucleus accumbens, and by the cerebellum’s conribution to regulating emotion through its connections to the frontal lobe and the limbic system. Current neuropsychological theories associate positive mood and affect with increased dopamine levels, one of the reasons that many of the newer antidepressants act on the dopaminergic system. Music is clearly a means for improving people’s moods. Now we think we know why.

To which I reply: I thought so. I’ve always found music to be one of the most potent means of attitude adjustment known to man, and now science has proved it. Ha!

All of which inspires me to pass along this list of things to which I listen whenever I feel the urgent need to upgrade my mood:

Debussy’s L’isle joyeuse

Stan Kenton’s recording of Gerry Mulligan’s “Young Blood”

Bernstein’s Candide Overture

Wild Bill Davison’s 1943 recording of “That’s A-Plenty” (turned up very loud)

Luciana Souza’s “Doce de Coco” (from Brazilian Duos)

Noël Coward’s “Uncle Harry”

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Lookin’ Out My Back Door”

The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek”

Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture

The finale to Fauré’s incidental music to Shylock (George Balanchine used it in Emeralds)

The John Kirby Sextet’s “It Feels So Good”

Buddy Rich’s 1966 live recording of “Love for Sale”

Booker T. and the MGs’ “Hip Hug-Her”

Gershwin’s An American in Paris

Shostakovich’s Festive Overture

Johnny Cash’s “Hey Porter”

Deidre Rodman and Steve Swallow’s “Famous Potatoes”

Copland’s “Buckaroo Holiday” (from Rodeo)

Jelly Roll Morton’s “Wolverine Blues” (with Baby and Johnny Dodds)

The Who’s “Shakin’ All Over” (from Live at Leeds)

The finale of Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber

Blossom Dearie’s “If I Were a Bell” (the version on Winchester in Apple Blossom Time)

The Dixieaires’ “Joe Louis Was a Fighting Man”

Donald Fagen’s “Morph the Cat”

Sidney Bechet’s 1932 recording of “Maple Leaf Rag”

Doc Watson’s “Let the Cocaine Be”

Lee Wiley’s “You’re a Sweetheart”

Sergio Mendes’ 1966 recording of “Mais Que Nada” (not the icky hip-hop remake, eeuuww!)

Wesla Whitfield’s “Lucky to Be Me”

Mendelssohn’s Rondo capriccioso

The Dominoes’ “Sixty Minute Man”

Stephen Sondheim’s “A Weekend in the Country” (from A Little Night Music)

The first movement of Mozart’s A Major Piano Concerto, K. 488

Frank Sinatra’s “Witchcraft”

Steely Dan’s “My Old School”

Walton’s Crown Imperial (as played by Frederick Fennell and the Eastman Wind Ensemble)

Flatt and Scruggs’ “Farewell Blues”

Stan Getz and Bob Brookmeyer’s “Open Country”

The first movement of Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto

R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe”

The Beatles’ “Revolution”

Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide”

The first movement of Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony

Johann Strauss’s Fledermaus Overture

Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Three little maids from school are we” (from The Mikado)

Django Reinhardt’s “Swing 42”

Pretty much anything by Count Basie, Erroll Garner, Fats Waller, Haydn, or John Philip Sousa

The sound of Louis Armstrong’s voice

I don’t guarantee results, but all of the items on this list can be counted on to give me a cheap, easy high–with no side effects.

“For of course I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the esthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails, or someone tying a Bimini hitch that won’t slip. I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player than a mediocre one, unless the latter is a friend or a relative. Consequently, most of the human race doesn’t matter much to me, outside the normal and necessary frame of courtesy and the obligation to respect human rights. I see no reason to squirm around apologizing for this. I am, after all, a cultural critic, and my main job is to distinguish the good from the second-rate, pretentious, sentimental, and boring stuff that saturates culture today, more (perhaps) than it ever has. I hate populist kitsch, no matter how much of the demos loves it. To me, it is a form of manufactured tyranny. Some Australians feel this is a confession of antidemocratic sin; but I am no democrat in the field of the arts, the only area–other than sports–in which human inequality can be displayed and celebrated without doing social harm.”

Robert Hughes, Things I Didn’t Know: A Memoir

I just added a very large number of new YouTube clips to the fine-arts/historical video-on-demand “network” about which I wrote in my recent Wall Street Journal column about YouTube. To view them–and hundreds of other equally interesting video and audio clips–go to the right-hand column and scroll down until you see Satchmo’s name. The latest links are marked with asterisks.

As always, feel free to send me the URLs of any video or audio links of comparable quality that you’d like to see me post. (Also, be sure to let me know if any of the existing links have gone dead since I posted them.)

Enjoy!