About Last Night

I’m blogging from the apartment of Our Girl in Chicago, who is sitting in her Eames chair (yes, she has an Eames chair!), looking shockingly beautiful as Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two twang away on the stereo (didn’t I tell you she was cool?).

I arrived in Union Station this morning after a deeply satisfying trip on the Lake Shore Limited, spent the day looking at paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago (about which more later), and now am making ready to go eat tapas and see a performance of A Little Night Music, chauffeured and accompanied by OGIC. One or both of us will report later tonight, or maybe tomorrow. In the meantime, it’s nice to be in the same room as my superlative co-blogger.

More anon. Hope you’re all having a Happy New Year.

Is anyone else out there finding themselves driven headlong from the nice, easy, addictive comforts of Law and Order reruns by TNT’s unbearable new ad campaign for its forthcoming remake of The Goodbye Girl? In case you haven’t been exposed (i.e., you aren’t one of the cult), the advertisement comes in the guise of a full-length music video in which Hootie and the Blowfish (an act I’d managed until now, through sheer dumb luck, to overlook entirely) perform the regrettably catchy title song from the original 1978 movie in painfully bombastic fashion.

I haven’t had the stomach to actually count, but the video-ad seems to appear two or three times per episode of L&O, including once at the pivotal moment before the verdict is read. To quote a more quotable show (L&O is many things, but a fount of witty repart

Happy new year to all! Back in Chicago after a long, pleasant visit with my family, I am sizing up the obstacle course of duffels, overnights, and shopping bags spanning my apartment, and reluctantly accepting that these items aren’t going to unpack themselves and scurry under the bed in an organized fashion. I have my work cut out for me before this place will be fit for the likes of my illustrious co-blogger, who arrives in mere hours.

Christmas was lovely (I’m wearing one of my favorite gifts as I type this, and in fact have barely taken it off for seven days now) but my aesthetic intake was pretty much limited to picking from among the sorry array of holiday wrapping paper on offer this year. Yep, I do consider myself a connoisseur of the stuff. Someday when life is perfect, somebody will pay me money to make up designs for wrapping paper and neckties. In the meantime, my personal cultural drought comes to an end tomorrow, when Terry rolls into town and lets me tag along with him to see a lot of plays and, who knows, maybe some art and cinema into the bargain. However we end up occupying ourselves, it’s a good bet you’ll read about it here.

As you know, I’m headed for Chicago tomorrow via an Amtrak sleeper, there to see plays for The Wall Street Journal and revel in the company of Our Girl in Chicago, whom I’ve known and adored for years and years, even though she insists on living in another city, damn her. I probably won’t be posting again until I get where I’m going. OGIC has been fearfully busy with her day job, which is why you haven’t heard from her lately, but I’m hoping that she’ll take up some of the slack in my temporary absence. Once I arrive at her place on Friday, I expect we’ll have at least a few amusing things to report, but don’t be surprised if nothing new turns up in this space for the next couple of days.

To all those who read us regularly, I send our affectionate and appreciative regards. Much to my surprise, “About Last Night” has become one of the most widely read arts blogs in the world. You have made us so. We thank you most humbly, and we promise to do our best to be as readable in 2004 as we were in 2003.

May the New Year bring you joy and love. May it bring us all peace. And should it fail on either count, may you find comfort in the blessed world of art.

Next year in Chicago!

“Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done–so I feel for you. 1st. Live as well as you dare. 2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75 degrees or 80 degrees. 3rd. Amusing books. 4th. Short views of human life–not further than dinner or tea. 5th. Be as busy as you can. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you. 8. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely–they are always worse for dignified concealment. 9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you. 10th. Compare your lot with that of other people. 11th. Don’t expect too much from human life–a sorry business at the best. 12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence. 13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree. 14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue. 15th. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant. 16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness. 17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice. 18th. Keep good blazing fires. 19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.”

Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Georgiana Morpeth (1820)

A reader writes:

A small request, hmmm? Howzabout, on 12/31, you (pretty please with sugar on top) mention Milstein on the blog? Something like: “Today is the 100th birthday of the greatest violinist of the 20th century – Nathan Milstein. So, get out there and buy one of his albums today!” You could also put in a plug for your upcoming article on Milstein and Kaufman (heh, heh).

I’m delighted to oblige. The “Milstein” in question is Nathan Milstein, whose name is now remembered mainly by aging violin connoisseurs–Jascha Heifetz got much better press–but who was, if not the greatest violinist of the 20th century, certainly one of the half-dozen greatest ever to make recordings. He never became as big a celebrity as Heifetz because his playing wasn’t as idiosyncratic: his tone was lean and focused, his interpretations poised and patrician, not exactly restrained but not exhibitionistic, either.

Such a musician isn’t for everyone, any more than a singer like Nicolai Gedda or a painter like Vuillard suits all tastes. Milstein lacked that slight touch of vulgarity–the common touch, if you like–that so often helps to bridge the emotional gap between artist and audience. Yet those who responded to his playing did so passionately, and there were more than enough of them for Milstein to have a long and satisfying career. He even wrote a wonderful memoir, From Russia to the West, in which he speaks with occasionally hair-raising candor about colleagues and contemporaries (among them his good friend George Balanchine, whose personality Milstein evokes with remarkable vividness).

Milstein made a lot of records, and most of the best of them have been transferred to CD and are fairly easy to find. If you want to jump in head first, The Art of Nathan Milstein,
a budget-priced six-disc boxed set, contains a good-sized chunk of his working repertoire. If you’d rather start with a smaller taste, I recommend a CD that couples his early stereo recordings of the Tchaikovsky and Brahms concertos, available from amazon.com for the preposterously low price of $3.98. (Both performances are also included in The Art of Nathan Milstein.) You might also try his superb remake
of Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin–the best complete set ever recorded, as far as I’m concerned.

As my correspondent notes, I’m planning to publish an essay about Milstein and Louis Kaufman in Commentary some time in 2004. But why wait? At the very least, give that Tchaikovsky-Brahms CD a spin. I don’t promise to refund your money, but if you aren’t won over by Milstein’s soaring performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, I’ll be amazed.

“Everybody who lives in New York believes he’s here for some purpose, whether he does anything about it or not.”

Arlene Croce, Afterimages

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m afraid to fly, a mild but nonetheless persistent phobia that came calling from out of nowhere a few years ago and settled in for an extended visit. I’m gradually getting better at it, thanks in large part to the patient counsel of a psychotherapist (she’s the one who talked me into riding a roller coaster this past summer), and now I can fly with minimal discomfort so long as the plane doesn’t bump around too much.

Last night I flew from St. Louis, the city closest to Smalltown, U.S.A., to LaGuardia Airport. I try not to fly at night, but this time I decided to give it a go, and at the end of 45 anxious minutes spent pushing through a cold front, our smaller-than-usual jet popped out of the clouds and started its descent into the New York area. Suddenly the once-invisible earth below me was lit by a million glittering pinpoints of copper, gold, and chilly blue-white. Not for the first time, I wondered why no painter has ever taken for his subject what one sees from the window of an airplane. Surely Whistler would have known what to do with the lights of a city, just as Constable might have reveled in the spectacle of clouds seen from above. I remembered, too, that as much as I dislike flying, it allows me to gaze as long as I want at a sight that can be seen nowhere else.

The captain told us to look out the right-hand windows, and all at once they were filled with Manhattan. I thought of flying past the southern tip of my adopted island home on the Sunday after 9/11 (I always think of that terrible day whenever I fly back to New York), but the red-and-green Empire State Building swept the unwanted, unforgettable picture out of my head. The plane swooped and dipped, Manhattan vanished from view, and I found myself staring down at Riker’s Island, so close I could have tossed a bag of pretzels out the window and hit a guard tower. Then I was on the ground, my fears forgotten, almost home and happy to be.

I’ve lived in New York for the better part of two decades now, and you’d think I’d have gotten used to it. In a way, I suppose I have, but even now all it takes is a whiff of the unexpected and I catch myself boggling at that which the native New Yorker really does take for granted. As for my visits to Smalltown, U.S.A., they invariably leave me feeling like yesterday’s immigrant, marveling at things no small-town boy can ever really dismiss as commonplace, no matter how long he lives in the capital of the world.

My cab swept me across the Triborough Bridge and the Upper East Side, past the Guggenheim Museum and through Central Park, straight to the front door of my building. I trotted up the steps, unlocked the door to my apartment, and turned on all the lights. A quick look at the walls assured me that all my prints were present and accounted for: here an Avery, there a Marin, Frankenthaler over the couch, Wolf Kahn over the mantelpiece. I dropped my bags, locked the door, and sighed deeply. Once again I had made the impossible journey from Smalltown to New York, from home to home.