About Last Night

A reader writes:

Isn’t expecting the New York Philharmonic to be adventurous a bit like expecting a major retail chain to begin its life in Manhattan?
In other words, the stakes are so high these days in NYC that one
can’t help but be conservative with one’s choices. You go to NYC
to announce that you have arrived, not to start your ascent to
greatness. For all of its glitter and glitz, NYC isn’t terribly
interesting from some angles. Its commercial radio is mindnumbingly
conformist. Its politics are very narrow. Its major opera companies
are fairly staid. Now its flagship orchestra is becoming fusty.
No surprise, I guess. Is it a mistake? Sure, but that’s not going to
change anyone’s mind in the near term. If you want innovation you’re
going to have to hope that the smaller, second-tier orchestras come
up with something interesting. The majors can’t afford to alienate
their core constituency.

Nicely put, and quite possibly right…and it it is, then there are dark days ahead for the New York Philharmonic, and every other big-city performing-arts group of which the same thing can be said.

No names, but I went to a Wednesday matinee of a play last week, and every male head I saw was either gray or bald. I know, I know, Wednesday matinees are highly uncharacteristic, but I just got back from a Tuesday-night performance whose audience looked almost the same. Contrary to the apparent belief of a great many people in the arts world, dead people don’t buy tickets.

“All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.”

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Here’s Bob Gottlieb in the New York Observer:

Because it’s December, it’s also Alvin Ailey time–five weeks at the City Center. What is there left to say? The dancers are fabulous, the repertory isn’t. As usual, there are 20-odd performances of Revelations–it’s a ritual, the audience lapping it up from first to last. You feel they might not mind if it were done backwards. There was live music at the performance I saw, and it was so over-miked that it coarsened the whole experience.

(Read the whole thing here, including more on Ailey, New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker, and Never Gonna Dance.)

Devastating but true, and it goes a long way toward explaining why I’m not doing Ailey this year, and didn’t last year, either. I already know what good dancing looks like, and it’s not enough to get me into a theater unless it’s enlisted in the service of good choreography. Revelations is a good dance, perhaps even a great one, but the Ailey company does it so often that it’s lost its effect–I never see anything new in it anymore. Ailey’s other dances are terribly inconsistent in quality, and Judith Jamison has so far failed to give the company the kind of wide-ranging, high-quality repertory that would make its programs worth seeing on more than isolated occasions. Every once in a while Jamison manages to come up with something good (the company is doing a new dance by Lynne Taylor-Corbett, for instance, and I have no doubt that it’s worth seeing). But her batting average is far too low.

This is a fundamental problem of dance, by the way. How many modern-dance choreographers–or ballet choreographers, for that matter–have created a body of work sufficiently large and varied enough that it constitutes a working repertory all by itself? George Balanchine, Paul Taylor, Mark Morris, and maybe Merce Cunningham (and even Balanchine was smart enough to add Jerome Robbins to the mix, though he didn’t really need to). Period. As for all the others, well, you tell me: how many times can you see an all-Ailey, all-Robbins, all-Antony Tudor or all-Martha Graham program without glazing over? And why should you, for that matter? There’s no such thing as a symphony orchestra that plays nothing but Beethoven (though God knows there are times when it seems that way), an opera company that performs nothing but Puccini (ditto), or a theater company that produces nothing but No

Ed Page at Danger Blog! has excavated an old New Yorker piece in which James Thurber imagines how Hemingway would rewrite a Chirstmas classic. Here’s a small taste:

The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

“Father,” the children said.

There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.

“Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.

(Via Maud.)

The Wall Street Journal‘s column 4 has a terrific story today about Brooklyn’s last remaining seltzer truck. You know the mantra: no link, but this piece alone is well worth the buck for the paper:

Spritzed by Flatbush Avenue traffic on a wet morning, the last known seltzer truck in New York City was a double-parked apparition, its tiers of lopsided racks holding a cock-eyed pile of siphon bottles in cracked, wooden crates.

Arnold Brenner, a psychoanalyst walking to work, spotted the truck just as Ronny Beberman, the seltzerman, was wheeling a delivery toward an apartment-house door. Dr. Brenner yelled, “How much is a….” But Mr. Beberman was already inside.

Dr. Brenner stood unactualized on the sidewalk. “I was thinking I could get a case,” he said. “It’s the spritz that does it–that fizz–so soothing, so strong. Reminiscent of something, something romantic.”

Ronny Beberman has his own analysis of the spritz mystique: Because nobody wants it anymore, seltzer has become desirable.

“People, they don’t know what seltzer is,” he says. “They moved from Iowa. They ask me, ‘What’s in those bottles?’ I have people, they chase me in their cars. They’re disenchanted. They’re drinking out of plastic.”

Mr. Beberman emerges from this wonderful piece a genuinely romantic figure, the unbowed last relic of a business you’ll be amazed (and grateful) to find has not quite died out yet. Buy the paper, read the whole piece. You’ll get a Count Basie review and a profile of a fashion photographer into the bargain.

October 1938: Orson Welles strikes fear in the hearts of radio listeners everywhere with his fiendishly lifelike report of highly improbable events.

December 2003: Maud Newton strikes fear in the hearts of blog readers everywhere with her fiendishly lifelike report of highly improbable events.

Dear Terry,

You and I both are under the gun this week. I just finished writing a review of Doris Lessing’s The Grandmothers, due out in January, and it was a book that almost finished me. Going into the assignment, I didn’t have anything against Lessing particularly. I duly read The Golden Notebook as a college senior, and if my memories of it are now vague, my fat little Bantam edition bears the cracked spine and dog-ears that are reliable marks of absorption. But this new book was a tremendous slog. Several times I thought I was within an hour or two of finishing it, but an hour to two later found myself maybe 20 pages along.

I found Lessing’s writing here very mannered and schematic, and I find myself wondering about her reputation. I can’t think of any of my contemporaries who count themselves as her fans, and I know a few who don’t like her at all. Talking to the well-read, discriminating OFOB (Our Friend on the Block, from whom we’ll be hearing more in the nearish future) about the book earlier today, I said “she’s like spinach.” OFOB protested: “But I like spinach!” Is Lessing one of those writers who speaks strongly to their own generation but then does a slow fade into obscurity?

In the course of writing the review, I consulted a few references to help me get a fuller sense of Lessing’s reception. I looked at my dog-eared old Golden Notebook, the Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, and a fun, bossy, out-of-print reference book I picked up some years ago used, Martin Seymour-Smith’s Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century Literature. The Seymour-Smith is very like your and my perennial favorite, David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film, in approach, if not execution: it’s fiercely opinionated, seldom wavers, and is bracingly unapologetic about its judgments. It’s fun to disagree with.

None of these sources (of course not the paperback cover) betrays any discontentment with or doubt about Lessing at all. Seymour-Smith and the Salon reviewer, Laura Morgan Green, treat her with a rather grave and unwavering respect. But both they and folks like Irving Howe who give blurbs on the paperback tend to describe the value of her work in terms of truth-telling. Very little is said about how she tells the truth in her fiction: about, say, her style or voice. What matters, according to these accounts, is simply that she is truthful. The conspicuous silence on aesthetic questions makes me a bit suspicious of all this praise, and it definitely resonates with my experience of The Grandmothers, in which the writing was very unbeautiful (I tripped over one sentence that turned out to have eleven commas) and pleasure seemed not only out of the question, but beside the point. If important truths were told in the book, I’m afraid I was too distracted by aesthetic undernourishment to catch them.

Who knows, maybe there are some fervent Lessing fans out there who will rush to her defense, but at the moment I’m having a hard time imagining it. Even the advocates I’ve cited sound more dutiful than passionate.

Looking ahead, I have two more days in Chicago before heading off to Detroit, from which fair city (don’t believe me? see Out of Sight!) blogging will continue. It’s the meantime I’m a little worried about, since I really am going to have to move heaven and earth to get everything done that needs doing at my day job. But I’ll try to poke my head in now and again, and hope to see yours too.

I stayed up all night writing a piece (to be exact, I went to bed at 5:30 this morning), and I have to go to a play tonight, so you probably won’t hear further from me today.

I think OGIC has posting plans. Otherwise, read what’s there, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Has there ever been a better-cast Hollywood movie than Twilight,
Robert Benton’s 1998 neo-noir thriller? I’d never even heard of it until OGIC drew it to my attention, but now it’s a special favorite that I screen at least once a year, as I did last night. From the top down, here’s the star billing: Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, Reese Witherspoon, Stockard Channing, James Garner, Liev Schreiber, Margo Martindale (she’s currently doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway), and M. Emmet Walsh, and every one of them is memorably good, especially Garner and Channing. Yet Twilight wasn’t a hit and isn’t all that well remembered, presumably because its real subject matter is advancing age, a topic that doesn’t make for hits. Likewise Dick Richards’ 1975 film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, in which the nonpareil Robert Mitchum plays Philip Marlowe as much older than did Humphrey Bogart or Dick Powell–and makes you buy it.

Maybe it’s just my gray hairs talking, but I think noir and middle age go together like gin and vermouth. Disillusion, diminishing horizons, a shattered sense of the possible: that’s noir in a nutshell. Kinda goes well with the holidays, don’t you think?