About Last Night

I just got an e-mail from OGIC, who went to see Lost in Translation a second time (something I mean to do next weekend). Her note contained the following sentence, which I am sneakily and unilaterally sharing with you all:

That movie is a great example of what an artist knows that the rest of us don’t.

That’s Sunday night’s almanac, as far as I’m concerned.

I wrote about the arts for Time magazine from 1997 to 2001–mostly about music, though I also published a number of articles about dance. The experience was fun and frustrating in like proportions, for those were the years when Time was slowly winding down its century-long commitment to full-scale coverage of the fine arts. I didn’t realize it, but Time‘s decision to outsource its coverage of classical music and dance to a freelance writer was itself an ominous sign of things to come. It grew harder and harder for me to get pieces into the magazine, and after 9/11 it became impossible. (Watching Time walk away from the fine arts, by the way, was part of what gave me the idea to start “About Last Night.”)

Even during the good years, writing for Time could be exasperating, especially when one of my stories got bumped for lack of space, then killed outright, usually because it had gone “stale” in the preceding week. I still hold it against Bill Clinton that my 50th-birthday profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov ran only in the Latin American edition of the magazine–the U.S. edition required a couple of extra pages that week to cover the first installment of Monicagate. And even though I’m a great fan of Robert Hughes, it irked me no end that his big piece about the opening of the Guggenheim’s Bilbao branch squeezed out my own one-pager about the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

I hung onto that piece, hoping I’d be able to do something with it someday. I just returned from a Sunday matinee at NJPAC, and it struck me on the way home that today might be a good time to revisit what I wrote about the center when it opened its doors in 1997. It appears here for the first time:

On paper, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center looks like a sure thing. The 250,000-square-foot facility, built at a cost of $180 million, contains two handsome theaters–a 2,750-seat multi-purpose auditorium and a 514-seat “performing space”– and a full-service restaurant….Easily accessible via four major highways, NJPAC has a potential audience of 4.6 million people living within 25 miles of its front door. There’s just one catch: It’s in Newark.

Thirty years ago this July, two white policemen from Newark’s Fourth Precinct arrested a black cabdriver. They said he resisted arrest; he said they beat him up. The people believed the cabby, and took to the streets. Five days later, 26 people were dead, and Newark had acquired a bad name it has yet to lose. White flight was already well under way by 1967, but no sooner had the smoke of the riots cleared than the diaspora to the suburbs became multi-ethnic, and between 1967 and 1994, the city’s population shrank by more than a third, from 406,000 to 259,000. You don’t need a demographer to know something is still terribly wrong with Newark: All you have to do is take the five-minute walk from the train station to NJPAC, noticing along the way that none of the newer, post-riot buildings has street-level windows. The architecture of Newark is a fever chart of middle-class fear.

Can a stiff dose of the fine arts cure the malaise that has gripped New Jersey’s largest city for three decades? To stay in business, NJPAC must coax hundreds of thousands of nervous suburbanites back to downtown Newark, and every aspect of its operation has been planned with that uphill battle in mind. Architect Barton Myers has created a building in which beauty and practicality are shrewdly combined in a style less dazzling than comfortable: The brightly lit brick-and-glass facade is warm and inviting, while the main auditorium, done in cherry wood and copper, is unexpectedly intimate. “It feels like being inside a cello,” says NJPAC president Lawrence P. Goldman.

Perfect sight lines (even in the cheap seats) make Prudential Hall a near-ideal venue for ballet and modern dance, and as the cost of performing in New York continues to soar, touring troupes are taking note of the center’s close proximity to midtown Manhattan, a 15-minute train ride away….

Unlike more traditionally minded arts centers, NJPAC is making a highly sophisticated effort to attract the widest possible audience, a must in so ethnically diverse a community. “It’s not enough just to put artists on the stage,” says programming vice-president Stephanie Hughley. “We’ve got to figure out ways to facilitate conversations between people who think they’re different.” The center’s offerings are as inclusive as a stump speech by Bill Clinton–Andr

I mentioned in a posting
the other day that I’d been using my fancy new cable box to record episodes of an old black-and-white game show called What’s My Line? For the past few years, the Game Show Network has been airing WML reruns at 4:30 every morning. (To see a schedule, click here.)

I watched What’s My Line? as a child, and its return to the small screen inspired me shortly after 9/11 to write a piece for the New York Times of which I’m particularly fond. I didn’t include it in A Terry Teachout Reader because it didn’t seem to fit, so in the interest of boosting the show’s audience, I’d like to make this first-hand reminiscence of the Age of the Middlebrow available to the readers of “About Last Night.” Here are some excerpts:

The basic premise of “What’s My Line?,” which made its debut in 1950, was elegantly simple. The first two guests each week were ordinary people with odd jobs: professional egg-breakers, dynamite manufacturers, makers of square manhole covers. John Charles Daly, the avuncular host, invited them to “sign in, please,” whereupon they would scrawl their names on a blackboard, take a seat, and submit to yes-or-no questioning by four panelists who tried to guess what they did for a living, with each “no” answer winning them five dollars. After the middle commercial, the panelists put on blindfolds and sought to identify the Mystery Guest, a celebrity who disguised his voice in an attempt, usually but not always unsuccessful, to fox his inquisitors.

The fun came partly from the contestants, who were chosen whenever possible for their intrinsic incongruity–the dynamite maker, for example, was a distinguished-looking woman of a certain age–but mostly from the droll byplay of the panel and guests. Of the three longest-serving regular panelists, Arlene Francis, a stage actress turned small-screen personality, exuded unfeigned warmth, while Dorothy Kilgallen, a bite-the-jugular newspaper reporter and columnist, and Bennett Cerf, the gentleman president of Random House, played the game to win. The wild-card fourth panelist was sometimes a nimble-witted comedian (Fred Allen and Steve Allen both had long runs on the show), sometimes a celebrity of another sort (Van Cliburn, Moss Hart, John Lindsay, and Gore Vidal were among the more surprising occupants of the fourth chair).

As for the Mystery Guest, “What’s My Line?” was so hot in its heyday that it was able to book pretty much anybody it wanted: Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, even Eleanor Roosevelt. Stars with ultra-familiar voices would struggle mightily but vainly to disguise them (Louis Armstrong never had a chance), invariably reducing the studio audience to a puddle of laughter. Trickery was encouraged–Jack Paar lisped his answers through a bullhorn, Paul Muni played his on a violin–and on one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday evening, Bob Hope succeeded in persuading the panel that he was really Bing Crosby….

Much of the charm of “What’s My Line?” arises from the fact that it is so palpably of another era. The pace was slowish and agreeable, the repartee good-humored but unabashedly urbane. The host and panel all wore formal evening dress; John Daly addressed his female colleagues as “Miss Arlene” and “Miss Dorothy.” The set was penny-plain, the guests signed in on a dimestore blackboard, and Daly kept score by flipping cards. The contestants, who were treated with the utmost courtesy, were clearly content to earn a mere $50 for stumping the panel. Even though all 876 episodes were originally broadcast live, it never occurs to you for a moment that anyone on stage would have dreamed of saying anything naughty.

Perhaps most strikingly, the collegial bonhomie of the participants leaves you with the distinct impression that the show is taking place in a parallel universe of famous people who all know and like one another and probably stroll over to the Algonquin for a drink afterward. Or so, at least, it seemed to myself when young, sitting in front of a black-and-white TV in the living room of a small house in a small town in southeast Missouri….

To read the whole thing, go here.

After this piece ran in the Times, I received a letter from a Hollywood agent who collects old TV shows, and who through means too complicated to recount here acquired a complete set of videocassettes of every surviving kinescope of What’s My Line? From time to time he hears from aging former WML guests (or their children), and whenever possible he sends them a copy of the episode on which they appeared. He’s also dubbed more than a few WML reels for me. The world is full of lovely people who like nothing better than sharing their pleasures, and this kind gentleman (who now reads “About Last Night” regularly) ranks high among them.

Courtesy of Bookslut, an article by a black writer from Cleveland who wondered whether Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor portrayed blacks in a racist way. Then he met Pekar on the street one day:

I confronted him about his use of language, the way the black workmates he wrote about read as ghetto-style and under-educated. White people had goofy accents in his comic, but didn’t seem to get that treatment in his book. He took the criticism real well, listening attentively. Finally he interjected.

“Y’got a few minutes?” he asked. “Cuz if ya do, I wanna take ya to my job and introduce ya t’ some a’ those people. You’ll meet ’em and see for yerself — I ain’t givin’ them a hard way t’go. I just write ’em as I hear ’em.”

Off to his gig we went, and as it turns out, the people he wrote about were exactly as he wrote them, and the writer in me tuned my ears to the music in their voices. I began to hear people in a whole other way — Pekar was taking risk with the written language I hadn’t seen or heard before….

Go here to read the whole thing–which you absolutely must do.

You might be surprised to learn who wrote this (scroll down to find it). Or maybe not:

Several readers have complained about my dissing of 2001. I stand my ground. There’s one point a couple readers have made though I will concede. They say if I’d seen it when it first came out I would think differently. That is undoubtedly true. But some movies — and books and bands and art — are significant because they break new ground and some are significant because they are timeless….it seems to me that 2001 was pathbreaking but it wasn’t timeless. I feel the same way about Citizen Kane, by the way. I watched it in film class in college so I know all about the groundbreaking techniques used in the film. But those techniques have now been absorbed by the trade. What’s left is a pioneering movie which is more interesting as a historical document in the history cinema than as a movie. Just as the Model T was a great advance in the history of automotive innovation, but there are plenty of other cars I’d rather drive, there are plenty of “great” movies I wouldn’t choose seeing again over the chance to watch Road House one more time. There are plenty of music videos I’d rather watch than Un Chien Andalou, even though Un Chien Andalou is their artistic father.

What I want to know is, which Road House does he have in mind? I have a sinking feeling it’s not this one.

Speaking of letters, Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, sent me one about yesterday’s posting describing my experience with digital video recording–then decided to post it on his blog, along with some further reflections:

The remote control caused a populist revolution, I’ve long said, because once we had choice, we proved that we had taste. (I mark the golden age of TV, the real golden age, not the nostalgic vaudeville age, from the mid-80s, when viewers had choice, watched the good stuff, and let the bad stuff die; the age of the Beverly Hillbillies died; the age of Hill St. Blues emerged thanks to our control.) Seeing that is what made me such a populist; it gave me faith in the taste, judgment, and intelligence of the people….

Go here to read the whole thing.

OGIC and I weren’t able to post for most of Thursday afternoon. According to artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, the server that handles all the artsjournal blogs, including “About Last Night,” experienced “catastrophic disk failure.” Everything finally got fixed, but not before Our Girl and I went to our respective evening appointments (she to 21 Grams, I to the press preview of the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker). I just now got home, posted the backed-up items, and wrote some new stuff. We trust all will be normal from now on, or at least for a few more minutes.

The amazing thing is that even though we couldn’t update the site for much of the day, we still pulled in an impressive amount of traffic: just over 2,100 page views, twice our previously normal figure. It begins to look as if at least some of the folks who visited “About Last Night” for the first time as the result of this week’s link orgy might just be sticking around. That’s very good news indeed.

Fridays can be hectic in both New York and Chicago, but we’ll do our damnedest to give you as many piping-hot entries as possible. In the meantime, please tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, the 24/5-to-7 arts blog. It’s been a great week for us. Let’s have another.

I reviewed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s how it starts:

Ashley Judd. Jason Patric. Ned Beatty. Tennessee Williams. What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty, as you’ll learn if you visit the new Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which opened Sunday at the Music Box. But there’s nothing even slightly wrong with Mr. Beatty, who breathes fire as Big Daddy. He is as exciting as Ms. Judd and Mr. Patric are dull–and as fresh as Williams’ play is stale….

Unlike most camera-pampered Hollywood types, Mr. Beatty knows what to do in front of a live audience. His beautifully placed bass-baritone voice, complete with bottled-in-bond Kentucky accent, bounces effortlessly off the back wall of the Music Box. Though he’s the shortest man in the cast, he turns his modest stature into a towering advantage, playing Williams’ wealthy plantation owner as a shrewd, scrappy underdog who chewed his way to the top of the heap and now revels in making taller people look small. You’ll gasp when he first totters on stage, seemingly wan and yellow from the cancer that is eating Big Daddy alive–and you’ll gasp again when he breaks into a maniacal jig to celebrate the news that he isn’t dying after all. But his hope is false, and as he faces the inescapable fact of his imminent demise, Mr. Beatty seems to grow a foot or two before your astonished eyes. Such are the mysterious ways of great actors, and this is great acting.

There’s much more, including brief but pungent notices of Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour and Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home…but there’s no link, for reasons explained at length here.

What to do? Easy:

(1) Extract one dollar from your wallet.

(2) Take it to the nearest newsstand and purchase a copy of this morning’s Journal.

(3) Turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, over whose first page I’m plastered.

(4) Read the whole section, not just my review.

(5) Report back at once.

Dear artblog.net: Not only are you one of my favorite arts bloggers, but you turn out to be a damn fine painter to boot. Who knew?

Dear Jolly Days: You are very smart on Pauline Kael (whom I admire greatly, albeit with strong reservations):

She was the safe outlaw – attracted to and provoking the naturally restrained. She liked tweaking the power structure, but was securely part of it and identified with it.

Dear Laura Lippman: RSI or no RSI, God meant for you to be a blogger. Get with the program.

Dear Felix Salmon: You are the first person ever to make me think I might possibly have slightly underrated Marc Chagall.

And, finally:

Dear Old Hag: You rock. Totally.