About Last Night

I was dark last week (as we theatrical types say), but pick up this morning’s Wall Street Journal and you’ll find my reviews of an off-Broadway show, Paul Rudnick’s Valhalla, and an off-off-Broadway show, Melissa James Gibson’s Suitcase, or, those that resemble flies from a distance.

I liked Valhalla, with some reservations:

As I watched the hijinks ensue, I tried to figure out whom Mr. Rudnick reminds me of, and Neil Simon came to mind. Mr. Rudnick is another one of those jokesmiths who keeps throwing punchlines against the wall to see if they stick, and his jokes, like Mr. Simon’s, all have the same one-two rhythm, only with a campy twist in the tail. (“What’s an orgy?” “It’s when vicious, depraved philistines have sex in a group.” “Is it heavenly?” “Yes.”) But Neil Simon in his heyday would never have put so ill-carpentered a play as “Valhalla” on stage, and before long I realized that Mr. Rudnick is more like a gay Mel Brooks, a Catskills comic who packs his scripts with good lines but doesn’t know how to tie them into a nice, neat plot-driven package. “Valhalla” goes off the rails in the same how-the-hell-do-I-end-this way as “Blazing Saddles,” having built up just enough momentum to keep you chortling through the chaos….

Ditto Suitcase:

Any playwright who pinches her subtitle from the collected works of Jorge Luis Borges (no capital letters, please!), or whose last play was called “[sic],” really needs to consider spending a few weeks in residence at the David Ives School of User-Friendly Smart Comedy, or possibly entering a 12-step program for recovering postmodernists.

Even so, this eggheady comedy about two neurotic graduate students (Christina Kirk and Colleen Werthmann) trapped in dissertation hell and the boyfriends (Thomas Jay Ryan and Jeremy Shamos) whom they hold at arm’s length is funny, clever, and worth a trip downtown to Soho Rep, where it has just been extended through Feb. 28. The closer you listen, the more clearly you grasp that the highbrow badinage in which Ms. Gibson’s characters indulge is not so much self-regarding as self-mocking….

Would that you could read the whole thing here, but the Journal rarely provides free links to its arts coverage, so if your interest is piqued, trundle on down to the nearest newsstand or honor box, insert one (1) dollar, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and regale yourself with all sorts of cool stuff, me (I hope) included.

So I already wished Terry a happy birthday over the telephone. I hereby wish him a happy birthday publicly. I’m also going to send an e-mail, mail his birthday card, and bring him a gift when I visit New York. At that time I’ll also sing something (fair warning). It may seem like overkill, but as he points out, he’s not just any old person: he’s the Oldest Known Arts Blogger in Captivity.

In sum: HB, OKABIC!

Another good comment has arrived in the mailbox on cultural centers and peripheries:

The New York state of mind gets in the way of a great many other viewpoints and cultural takes. Popular culture (pop music, television, genre fiction, graphics and arts that are out of favor among professional, mostly NY, critics) has long been ignored by the mavens of “high culture.” But thousands of practitioners of those popular or folk arts have worked and lived and died outside of Manhattan’s sphere. Not only that, but they have created wondrous and satisfying works. There are dozens of cultures in the country, the world, and trying to put them into an arbitrary hierarchy does all artists and thinkers a real disservice….The Web and the Blog encourage the shattering of hegemonies, for better and for worse.

And this one on anonymous blogging:

Of course it’s proper to blog anonymously. Computer network users have been posting and emailing under handles and nicknames since there’ve been computer networks. As in the then-current world of CB radio, people were doing something fun, with kindred spirits, which didn’t require them to present affidavits and IDs.

Obviously these gloomy Gusses never would’ve had much fun on the BBS’s of the 80’s and 90’s. *Annoyed look*

Now, I almost always post under my own name. For me, it’s simpler. But I have always enjoyed the creativity manifested in handles. People who don’t…they worry me. People are often more themselves when they’re choosing their own names. People who see that only as an opportunity for dishonesty and juvenile behavior are obviously projecting.

Apropos of this, Terry pointed out that in my post on anonymity the other day, I neglected to say anything about why I’m undercover. My reasons are simple. Some of them are professional, but it’s not as though I’d be in danger of losing my job or anything so dire if I revealed. More important than the potential negatives are the actual positives. A new persona has all the inviting open expanse of a fresh sheet of paper. It’s interesting to engineer OGIC, endowing her with some of my interests and tics, but keeping others to myself. I also see this as a fun, educational experiment for myself as a writer. I don’t expect to stay under wraps forever, but for the time being I enjoy both the liberation and the challenge of being someone sort of else. It frees me up to write on certain topics about which I’d be more circumspect writing under my name. But it requires more discipline, too: for instance, to leave certain things out of my posts and generally cultivate a strategic vagueness about my life. Sometimes it’s hard to refrain from linking to or discussing the work I’m doing under my real name. I often feel as if I’m robbing myself of good blogging topics in these books and ideas that I’ve invested a lot of thought in, but that are already spoken for by her. Sometimes, of course, I steal her stuff anyway.

I don’t keep this a secret from anyone I know, I readily tell new people I meet (not all of them), and there are potential leaks: friends of friends of other bloggers or media people. Like I said above, it’s inevitable that I’ll out or be outed. But my guess is that it will happen gradually, and in any case it will be very much a non-event (unless I become NYTBR editor or May Queen in the meantime). For now, I’m just having fun being mistaken for Mr. Epstein. Studs Terkel, anyone?

Last night: a conversation candy heart with a message to warm the real hearts of lit bloggers everywhere:

LET’S
READ

It failed to specify highbrow or popular.

I’m late for something, but please click here for a masterful reading of a little-known but amazing poem.

That is all.

The invaluable Cinetrix, who blogs at Pullquote, has posted a neat little
tribute to one of my favorite movies, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, at the end of which she takes an unexpected swerve and revives last summer’s discussion of what your favorite Woody Allen movie says about you. Hers didn’t make the list. Neither did mine, Radio Days, which also happens to be the only Woody Allen movie I still enjoy (and I enjoy it very much). I now find most of the others unendurably smug, a seemingly endless series of object lessons in what I don’t like about New York. How could I ever have talked myself into admiring such awful films?

Over to you, OGIC.

“Driver, what stream is it?” I asked, well knowing

it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing.

“It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,”

he said, “under the green-grown cliffs.”

Be still, heart! No one needs

your passionate suffrage to select this glory–

this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing

under the green-grown cliffs.

“Driver, has this a peer in Europe or the East?”

“No, no!” he said.

Home! Home! Be quiet, heart!

This is our lordly Hudson

and has no peer in Europe or the east;

this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing

under the green-grown cliffs

and has no peer in Europe or the East;

be quiet, heart! Home! Home!

Paul Goodman, “The Lordly Hudson”

UPDATE: As Old Hag notes, this poem has been set to music–beautifully–by Ned Rorem (see yesterday’s almanac entry). She and I agree that the best recording currently available on CD is by Susan Graham and Malcolm Martineau.

Our Girl and I have been holding forth about the paradoxical provincialness of New York City, so I thought it might be worth posting some fugitive reflections on the subject of why I do live here and not in, say, Washington or San Francisco, or even my beloved Chicago.

Last night was a case in point. I met a writer friend for dinner in the East Village at one of the dozen-odd inexpensive Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, all on a single block and widely rumored to share a single kitchen as well. It’s also said that there are no cats in that neighborhood, but we had a very good meal, after which we made our way through the wintry mix to an off-Broadway theater in the vicinity, the New York Theatre Workshop, where we saw the penultimate preview of Valhalla, Paul Rudnick’s new play, which opens Thursday. (Watch this space Friday to see what I wrote about it for my theater column in The Wall Street Journal.) That’s one kind of weeknight in Manhattan.

And tonight? Well, I stuck to my own neighborhood, the Upper West Side, but the evening ended up having a downtown flavor anyway: I took a singer friend to hear Dave’s True Story
and the Lascivious Biddies at Makor. Regular readers of this blog will recall admiring references to both groups, about whom I last wrote a couple of months ago in my Washington Post column:

I ventured down to the Village to hear two hip bands, Dave’s True Story and the Lascivious Biddies, at Fez. DTS, previously praised in this space, is a volatile blend of two seemingly incompatible ingredients, the coolly kinky songs of David Cantor and the warmly engaging vocals of Kelly Flint. Hearing Flint sing about the wild side of downtown life in so comforting a voice is guaranteed to knock your dreams a bubble or two off plumb. As for the Biddies, they’re a pop-jazz quartet of clever women who yoke two similarly dissimilar styles–girl-group vocals and King Cole Trio-style instrumentals–to charming effect.

Part of what makes DTS and the Biddies two of the most interesting bands in town is that they don’t lend themselves to ready categorization. Both make music that is rooted in jazz but open to all manner of sounds, and both sing smart self-composed songs–often witty, sometimes wry, occasionally rueful–that float free of the up-with-love trap. (The Biddies’ “Famous,” for example, is a cruelly comic piece of celebrity mockery: “I wanna be famous/Tabloids will print what I eat/I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street.”) They fit no pigeonholes, not even the made-in-downtown-New-York label that accurately describes the clubs where they’re usually to be found.

What, I asked myself, were two such exotic groups doing north of Noho, working a room one block from Lincoln Center and a few doors away from Caf