About Last Night

In case you didn’t notice, I’ve performed a bit of subtitle-augmentation surgery on this blog, and also added Our Girl in Chicago’s bio to the top module of the right-hand column. All this is nothing more than official acknowledgment of the perfectly obvious fact that “About Last Night” is written by two people. (The headlines of posts written by me start with “TT,” while Our Girl’s posts start with “OGIC.”)

I could tell you some stories about my adorable co-blogger, but I’ll refrain, since she prefers to be shrouded in impenetrable mystery. Nevertheless, the fact that she introduced me to Exile in Guyville should speak volumes to the cognoscenti….and she can cook, too!

Anyway, Our Girl is a peach, and way smart. And really good at this. And a welcome addition to “About Last Night.”

Jennifer Howard’s Washington Post review of Nell Freudenberger’s Lucky Girls is written with more conviction than any reviews I’ve seen of a very attention-getting book. She’s politely underwhelmed by it–I mean, if you consider this polite:

[Freudenberger] excels at evoking the wistfulness that’s a poetic version of low-grade depression.

But what’s most remarkable about this review is neither Howard’s critical acumen nor the persuasive way she pegs the stories as New Yorker Lite. The real news is here:

Some publishing history: The story “Lucky Girls” first appeared in the New Yorker‘s Summer 2001 “Debut Fiction” issue. This splash earned Freudenberger some nice buzz and the envy of many other twentysomething writers, but that’s another story. Check any of your favorite literary blogs for the details.

In the same week that found the New York Times tech section looking down skeptically at the blogosphere from on high, asking “more fizzle than sizzle?” Howard takes blogs’ existence, and her readers’ familiarity with them, completely for granted. This sounds to me like a new level of absorption into a mainstream cultural discourse whose center is gravitating away from the print media more quickly than many corners of the print media would like to admit.

When I read the above I had two instant reactions: Wow, she and her editors didn’t even feel the need to explain that it’s short for “web log”; and, more tellingly: Hey, no links? Which goes to show not just what my reading habits have become, but why blogs are gaining ground.

Banana Oil (bless him) reports that the first season of A&E’s now-cancelled Nero Wolfe, very closely based on Rex Stout’s much-loved detective stories, is now available on DVD. I wrote about the series in National Review shortly before it got the axe:

In addition to co-producing the series and directing several episodes, Timothy Hutton plays Archie Goodwin, and I can’t see how anyone could do a better job. Not only does he catch Archie’s snap-brim Thirties tone with sharp-eared precision, but he also bears an uncanny physical resemblance to the dapper detective-narrator I’ve been envisioning all these years. No sooner did Hutton make his first entrance in The Golden Spiders than he melded completely with the Archie of my mind’s eye. I can no longer read a Stout novel without seeing him, or hearing his voice.

Still, Archie could have wandered out of any number of screwball comedies, whereas Nero Wolfe is a far more complicated proposition. Weighing in at a seventh of a ton, he is a tireless talker endowed with a touch of Johnsonian genius. (It is no small tribute to Stout’s own brainpower that he was capable of making that characterization plausible.) At the same time, he is chronically lazy and neurotic to the highest degree, so much so that he refuses to leave his home on business, preferring to sit at his desk or tend his orchids. Like Sherlock Holmes, the predecessor on whom he was obviously modeled, Wolfe is a misogynist who will have nothing to do with women socially–food, not sex, is his sensual outlet–though every once in a while he gives off a faint but perceptible flicker of interest in one of the pretty ladies who pass through his office.

Maury Chaykin has doubtless immersed himself in the Wolfe novels, for he brings to his interpretation of the part both a detailed knowledge of what Stout wrote and an unexpectedly personal touch of insight. He plays Wolfe as a fearful genius, an aesthete turned hermit who has withdrawn from the world (and from the opposite sex) in order to shield himself against…what? Stout never answers that question, giving Chaykin plenty of room to maneuver, which he uses with enviable skill. His Nero Wolfe is gluttonous, blustery, petulant, even a bit dandyish–but he peers out at his clients through the haunted eyes of a man who knows too much.

You can order it here. And should. And when you do, take a look at Kari Matchett and tell me if she’s not the jolie-est jolie laide you ever did see.

Hilton Kramer has a great piece in the New York Observer about the Romare Bearden retrospective which just opened
at Washington’s National Gallery, and which I can’t wait to see:

What’s new to me in this exhibition is some of the early work from the 1940’s, executed in the vernacular expressionistic style that was then a common pictorial idiom for painters attempting to align themselves with the politics of social protest. As an African-American, born in North Carolina and raised in Harlem in the Jim Crow era, it was all but inevitable that Bearden would ally himself with that imperative. As early as 1934, in an essay called “The Negro Artist and Modern Art,” Bearden affirmed that alliance in declaring that “An intense, eager devotion to present-day life, to study it, to help relieve it, this is the calling of the Negro artist.”

Yet even in this early period, Bearden’s art never conformed to the simplistic conventions of the 1930’s social-realist school. Picasso was a more potent influence on his work than, for instance, the likes of William Gropper, and when Bearden hit his stride in the 1960’s, it was in the medium of Cubist collage that he found a style in which he could triumphantly integrate the demands of his modernist aesthetic aspirations with those of his embattled social conscience.

Click here to read the whole thing. Yes, I know, Kramer is the Antichrist of art criticism in certain way-cool circles, but the man knows his stuff–and he writes about what he sees, not what he thinks he should have seen.

In case you missed the news, one of my favorite character actors, Jack Elam, died the other day. He was 84 years old and hadn’t acted since 1995, but it isn’t hard to remember him in his prime, for he usually played one of two variations on the same part, that of a cockeyed, slightly screwy Western bum/drunk/loony. Sometimes he played it sinister (at which he was good), more often funny (at which he was even better), but either way he was always a pleasure to behold.

Elam’s best comic role was in Burt Kennedy’s Support Your Local Sheriff!, a Western spoof from 1969 that featured James Garner at his slyest and most charming, plus a half-dozen other ultra-familiar faces (including Walter Brennan, Harry Morgan, and Bruce Dern), all of them obviously having a ball. Blazing Saddles is the comedy Western everybody remembers, but Support Your Local Sheriff was smarter and funnier, and holds up much better after three decades. Rent it, and keep an eye out for the “town character.” It’s Jack Elam, and you can’t miss him.

“I never meant to deny the moral impact of art which is certainly inherent in every genuine work of art. What I do deny and am prepared to fight to the last drop of my ink is the deliberate moralizing which to me kills every vestige of art in a work however skillfully written.”

Vladimir Nabokov, letter to Prof. George R. Noyes (1945)

I’ve become an avid fan of the pseudonymous Cinetrix, who blogs at Pullquote, so I was pleased to get the following e-mail from her. It starts with a pullquote from my recent posting on Kind of Blue:

It’s the record Clint Eastwood (who knows a lot about jazz) puts on when he comes home from a hard day of assassin-hunting in In the Line of Fire. A whole book has been written about its history and cultural significance. Now it’s Muzak–yet it remains as vital and listenable as ever. By what strange alchemy was this transformation effected?

Somebody (me, I guess) ought to write an essay about how jazz has come to be used as a cultural signifier in films, TV shows, and ads, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness.

Yes, please. You could do worse than use Clint as a jumping-off point. Especially because he (and his son) composed the music for the extra-blue-collar “Mystic River,” which some viewers have found distracting. Is his score perhaps supposed to signify (to the members of the Academy?) that this working-class tale is tasteful and well-done and designed to be
understood and appreciated by discerning, upper-middle-class hipsters like themselves? The credits cite the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Orchestra, impeccable cultural signifiers indeed.

Alas, this isn’t the essay I sort of promised–I’ve got to write for money today, so I can’t be that discursive–but I, too, was intrigued by the fact that Clint Eastwood scored Mystic River himself. (Lennie Niehaus transcribed the music from Eastwood’s piano sketch and did the orchestrations, but the actual music is reportedly
all Eastwood, except for a couple of snippets by son Kyle.) This, mind you, in spite of the fact that he didn’t do a very good job of it. “Distracting” isn’t the word. Whatever made him think those slick, inflated symphonic sounds were even remotely appropriate to a film about working-class life in Boston?

On the other hand, I suspect Eastwood’s motives, insofar as he understood them, were pure. His interest in music, after all, is both long-standing and considerable (among many other things, he does his own cocktail piano playing–very competently, too–in In the Line of Fire). What’s more, it’s clear that he’s wanted to score one of his own films for some time now. You may not remember this, but Eastwood composed the main-title themes for several of his earlier films, most notably “Claudia’s Theme” from Unforgiven, which is actually quite a nice little tune.

I have no doubt that a lot of other directors would score their own films if they could, and some might even do a good job…if they could. Stanley Kubrick, lest we forget, dumped Alex North’s marvelous score
for 2001: A Space Odyssey and replaced it with his own “score”
made up of pre-existing pieces of classical music, some of which worked extremely well in context. His use of Gy

Dear Our Girl in Chicago:

Pursuant to our deal, according to which I agreed to go see The School of Rock if you went to see Lost in Translation, I finally got around to holding up my end of the bargain last night. What you posted about the film seems to me exactly right–it’s “a funny wisp of a premise played out with wit, sweetness, and seeming spontaneity.” In fact, The School of Rock charmed my socks off.

Since the critic in me is always on duty, I have to pass along a couple of observations:

(1) It’d be hard to conceive of a more derivative film than The School of Rock. Not only does it make seemingly unironic use of all the stock devices of the You-Can-Do-It inspirational flick, but it’s an unabashed ripoff of Revenge of the Nerds (has anybody else noticed this?), only with wonky 10-year-olds who go to a big-ticket prep school instead of wonky 18-year-olds in college. And as you rightly pointed out, Jack Black’s performance is essentially a replay of his role in High Fidelity, though I was surprised and pleased to see that he could carry an entire film playing that clever part.

(2) I felt cheated by the film’s minimalist use of Joan Cusack, the best of all possible supporting comediennes, who didn’t get nearly enough screen time. For one thing, we’re prompted to expect a big transformation scene in which she decisively sheds her priggishness…and it never happens. (The little scene in the bar isn’t nearly drastic enough.) On top of that, the script also sets us up to expect a romance between her and Jack Black that fails to occur–obvious, I know, but movies like The School of Rock thrive by doing the obvious in unexpected ways.

Enough with the quibbles. The School of Rock is a deliciously sweet nothing, just what I needed and wanted to see after a monstrous day’s work (I wrote a Wall Street Journal review from scratch in the morning, then interviewed Regina Carter in the afternoon for a New York Times profile). I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

Incidentally, I went to see The School of Rock with one of my cool young musician friends, a singer with fluorescent hair who also took it upon herself to enhance my own coolness quotient by making me listen to selections from Radiohead’s Kid A and Coldplay’s Parachutes before we went to the theater. I liked them both, a lot. (She also left me a copy of Bj