About Last Night

It’s Friday, so I’m in The Wall Street Journal with a review of Sixteen Wounded, which opened last night. I didn’t much care for it:

Whenever I hear anyone call a Broadway show “controversial,” I know there’s sucker bait dangling at the end of the line. Take “Sixteen Wounded,” in which Eliam Kraiem, a young Jewish playwright from California, makes his Broadway debut at the Walter Kerr Theatre with the story of a Palestinian refugee who invites a Jewish baker to become the godfather of his illegitimate son. Yes, there’s a sting in the tail, since the refugee in question previously blew up an Israeli bus and killed three children. But Mr. Kraiem’s stalwart attempt to humanize the face of terrorism is just the sort of thing guaranteed to please Manhattan playgoers, who like nothing better than poking smugly at the limits of their tolerance. If Satan himself were to materialize in Times Square at high noon tomorrow, you can bet that by 12:05 the streets would be crammed with Upper West Siders eager to hear his side of the story, so long as he promised to check into the Betty Ford Clinic the next day….

If “Sixteen Wounded” were about something other than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I’d be rather more inclined to praise its carefully balanced ambiguities. But, then, that’s the trouble with political plays: No matter how artful they are, most people usually end up judging them in part by whether they agree with the author’s conclusions. Theatrically speaking, Tim Robbins’s “Embedded” is a piece of trash, but it obviously charmed large numbers of viewers who cared more about its heart-on-sleeve politics than its inept craftsmanship. “Sixteen Wounded,” by contrast, frames a serious issue–the permissibility of terrorism–in slickly theatrical terms, and thus ends up seeming evasive, even shifty.

No link (but you knew that, right?). Skip your morning doughnut and buy a Journal instead. Admiring e-mail will be read with pleasure. The other kind will be…read.

I haven’t plugged A Terry Teachout Reader recently (well, not that recently) because I was waiting for the perfect moment to make this staggering revelation: the book contains a hidden clue to the secret identity of Our Girl in Chicago. Some purchasers have already guessed correctly! How can you possibly resist? Click here and order a copy.

The truth is out there.

“Opportunism is something for which intellectuals have especial talents because of their aptitude for managing vocabulary at the expense of thought.”

John Lukacs, Confessions of an Original Sinner

– Wednesday was a dark night, as we theater people say–no scheduled performance, nor did I improvise one. Instead, I wrote my Wall Street Journal column for Friday, took a nap, blogged, performed miscellaneous accumulated chores, then had dinner with an unexpected house guest who is currently asleep on my inflatable mattress. As a result, I consumed next to no art, save for a few pages of John Wayne: American read over lunch for relaxation.

– Now playing on iTunes: Dizzy Gillespie’s 1948 recording of “Manteca,” reissued on Dizzy Gillespie: Greatest Hits. I never tire of hearing Chano Pozo whack those congas.

That’s it for now–I plan to be in bed within the hour, but I’ll be posting a slew of fine links much later today.

I don’t have any, but my brother just e-mailed to tell me that he is now mayor pro tem (that is, vice-mayor) of Smalltown, U.S.A., the Missouri town where we grew up and where he still lives. That’s really something.

Don’t get me wrong–I’m proud of the course my own life has taken and wouldn’t erase a day of it–but seeing my brother’s name on the front page of our hometown paper means every bit as much to me as seeing A Terry Teachout Reader in the neighborhood bookstore. He is way cool.

The next time I go home for a visit, I plan to park my mother’s car in a no-parking zone. I have a friend at City Hall, you know.

“Mr. Chamberlain, with Lord Salisbury following steadily on behind, championed the cause of the Outlanders. On paper and for democratic purposes the case was overwhelming. But you can never persuade anyone by reasonable argument to give up his skin.”

Winston Churchill, My Early Life

I just ran across this sentence in Howell Raines’ Atlantic Monthly article about why he is God and the New York Times will never be the same without him:

The Times‘s image as a bastion of quality had become even more important as tabloid television, Britain’s declining newspaper values, and the unsourced ranting of Internet bloggers polluted the journalistic mainstream of the United States.

Perhaps they’ll carve it on his tombstone. Whoops–too late! Mistah Raines, he history…and we’re still here.

I came home from Broadway a little while ago and was too wired to go to bed, so I turned on the TV, started channel-surfing, and suddenly found myself watching a snippet from The Sound of Jazz, the famous 1957 show still widely (and rightly) regarded as the finest jazz program ever telecast. Ben Webster was playing a slow blues in F, with Gerry Mulligan nodding in the background, and as the camera panned to Billie Holiday, I realized that the song was “Fine and Mellow” and that the next face I saw would be Lester Young, sick unto death. Sure enough, he stood up, raised his tenor saxophone to his lips and blew one heartbreaking chorus of the blues, spare and fragile and a little bit flat. As he played, the director switched back to Holiday, her face aglow with memories of a time when she and her musical soulmate were at the peak of their powers, long before life ground them under its unforgiving heel. The chorus ended, the screen faded to black, and all at once I was watching a commercial for a product I didn’t want or need.

How strange it is to watch TV in the information age, skipping from channel to channel in search of momentary diversion, mostly settling for dross but sometimes stumbling across a fleeting image so simple and true that it makes you catch your breath. I wonder how many people happened to see Lester and Billie at the same moment I did, and how many knew who and what they were seeing. Perhaps I was the only person in the world who saw that flickering black-and-white picture and knew it was a kinescope of The Sound of Jazz. Perhaps there were a dozen of us, or a hundred, or ten thousand. Perhaps one of my fellow viewers will visit “About Last Night” today and read these words, and know he wasn’t alone.

UPDATE: Doug Ramsey writes:

In 1992, I toured in Germany and recently liberated