About Last Night

Among other things with which I just caught up was this posting from an anonymous blogger who seems to be suggesting (if I read him right) that OGIC and I are members in good standing of the Cool Lit Club:

Hi. Did you read a lot of books in high school, but secretly thought bullies were kinda cool? Did you enjoy watching them pummel the kids who thought they were being original, when really, they were just being stupid and annoying with their “different” dress and “underground” music? Are you now in your 20s? Fancy yourself a writer? I mean, a real writer, not those arty, navel-gazing fags who only write about their lives? Well, hey, blogging’s for you!…

Links. Oh god, this may be THE most important aspect of your blog. You must have an extensive links list. But not just any links list. You must have a CLC-approved links list. A small sample of cool links would include: Gawker; Neal Pollack; The Minor Fall, The Major Lift; Maud Newton; Moby Lives; Book Slut; The Old Hag; Moorish Girl; The Literary Saloon; About Last Night; Boing Boing; Number One Hit Song; etc….

Membership in the CLC is all about how much a—— you can chow down. Shamelessly lick the cornhole of The Minor Fall, The Major Lift. Shamelessly. Once you’ve pounded that stinky butthole down, move on to Gawker and then Maud Newton. Even though the CLC is all about criticism and snark, never EVER criticize them. They are above criticism…. praise them. Endlessly. Worship them. Pat them all on the back, even though most of what they say is not witty, clever, or even observant. That is not the point. The point is that they’re cool. And you want to be cool, don’t you?

The part I like is about how I’m in my 20s. As for OGIC, she’s the cool one around here.

“This age makes me so sick that sometimes I am almost impelled to stop at a corner and start calling down curses from Heaven.”

George Orwell, letter to Brenda Salkeld, 1934

I’m in New York for the night, en route from Washington to St. Louis, and I’m severely underslept, so I doubt I’ll be posting anything substantial until Wednesday. This is just to say that I miss the old blog–that’s why I put so much stuff up on Thursday night–and that I promise to make up for lost time with a vengeance once I get back.

I haven’t had my iBook with me (and won’t be taking it to St. Louis, either), and hence was astonished to see how widely my posting on middlebrow culture
was picked up in the blogosphere. Those in the know will recognize it as a snippet from the introduction to A Terry Teachout Reader, the collection of my greatest hits that I just finished indexing. Did I mention that it’ll be out from Yale University Press in April? I did? Several times? Well, in the immortal words of Truman Capote, a boy must peddle his book.

What have I done since you saw me last? I saw Mystic River in Washington and Golda’s Balcony in New York, and will have something to say about both in this space at some point subsequent to my return on Wednesday. I reread the first volume of Gary Giddins’ Bing Crosby biography, about which I will also be thinking out loud. I made notes for other things I want to write, here and elsewhere (including some fresh Top Fives). What I didn’t do was catch up with the blogmail–that’ll have to wait until Thursday and Friday. But as you know, I always answer everything sooner or later, even the dear-sir-you-cir e-mail (of which I don’t get much, believe it or not).

No “In the Bag,” either. I just haven’t got the steam. I have dark circles all around my eyes tonight! So I’ll leave you in the elegantly manicured hands of Our Girl in Chicago for now. I’ll seeeeeee you again….

Here’s an excerpt from a recent interview
with playwright Tony Kushner, published in Seattle Weekly:

How important is it to be political in the arts right now?

You can’t find any important work of American art, in theater or anywhere else, that doesn’t have a very powerful political dimension. [But] whatever you do with your day job–and writing plays is what I do–is no replacement for activism, which is a necessary part of being a citizen in a democracy. And not to be foolish and think that writing a political play is going to do it, because there’s only one thing that does it–organizing and voting and demonstrating and fund-raising and e-mailing and joining groups. Art is not [it]. I mean, I admire theater groups that mobilized around the antiwar effort, but I don’t think that’s essential, and it can be incredibly misleading because you wind up with everybody getting up and doing sort of a performance piece about the war. What we really have to be doing now is organizing people to get out and vote for the candidate that the Democratic party nominates for president. It’s the one thing that counts right now. And nothing else does.

I’m sure Kushner believes every word of this. But…all important American art is political? Really and truly?

Rather than belabor the blindingly obvious (though I can’t help but wonder whether Kushner is tone-deaf), I want to share another quote from you. As I was proofreading the Teachout Reader, I came across something John Sayles once told an interviewer. It struck me so forcibly that I made a point of including it in an essay I wrote last year about Sayles’ film Sunshine State. Asked why so few American directors make politically conscious movies, he replied:

It’s easier not to, and sometimes it’s really not the point of a movie. Sometimes it would really get in the way. I think more than being political or not political, it’s often the problem of being complex: The characters aren’t heroic. Sometimes they do things you don’t like, even if you may like them, and it’s hard to know exactly who the good guys and bad guys are, because everybody is a little bit compromised. And if you put that into your average adventure movie, it makes it complicated in ways that slow the movie down and really aren’t appropriate for that particular movie.

All of which goes a long way toward explaining why I love John Sayles’ movies and don’t much care for Tony Kushner’s plays, even though I doubt that Sayles’ politics are noticeably different from Kushner’s.

Close readers of “About Last Night” may have noticed that OGIC and I don’t print certain words on this blog. (I don’t know what her reason is, but I’m too genteel.)

Having said that, I must go on to confess that posts like this one, which actually caused me to laugh out loud while sitting next to an open window, also make me wonder whether I, too, ought to consider introducing a touch of vulgarity into this blog. Maybe just a little bit? A teeny-weeny pinch? You think not?

Well, Kingsley Amis introduced the concept of the “obscenity-saver” in his extremely funny novel Girl, 20. Obscenity-savers (which also have a more pungent title that I can’t print here) are cant phrases you find so irritating that it’s almost as satisfying to snarl them out loud as it is to actually talk dirty. Some of the obscenity-savers used by Sir Roy Vandervane in Girl, 20 include “school of thought,” “Christian gentleman” and “sporting spirit.” So perhaps I’ll try throwing around an obscenity-saver or two the next time I get in a mood to emulate Mr. TMFTML. Oh…stream of consciousness! Tonal nostalgia!! DIFFERENTLY ABLED!!!

I know, I know, it’s just not the same….

I just thought you’d like to know that the index to A Terry Teachout Reader is finished! So am I, almost–I swear I’ll never do anything like this again.

Now that the great task is complete, I’ve got to hit the road in two separate installments. I leave for Washington on Friday morning. I’ll be back in New York long enough to catch the Sunday matinee of Golda’s Balcony, then it’s off to St. Louis to jabber for two days at Washington University, then it’s back to New York on Wednesday to see the last press preview of The Boy From Oz. I’m not taking the iBook with me on my travels, but I promise to post a line or two on Sunday, and of course I’ll be back in the saddle next Wednesday (if my plane lands on time) or Thursday (if it doesn’t).

Thanks for your patience. This blogging thing is harder than I thought–but it’s still fun.

I reviewed two new plays in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Lisa Loomer’s Living Out
(which I liked) and Jez Butterworth’s The Night Heron
(which I way didn’t). Here’s the lead:

Clear the decks for superlatives. Of all the new plays to open in Manhattan since I launched this column six months ago, Lisa Loomer’s “Living Out,” running through Nov. 2 at Second Stage Theatre, is easily the smartest, with acting and direction to match. Dramatically speaking, it’s a dry martini, mixing crisp satire and heart-tugging pathos in exactly the right proportions, and unlike the flabby, feeble 9/11 plays currently buzzing around town, it never stoops to pretentiousness.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, since I came within inches of passing up “Living Out.” Who wants to see a play about Latino nannies in Los Angeles and the well-to-do Jewish mothers whose children they tend? Not me, I thought. I have the strongest possible aversion to heavy-handed political playwriting, and never having seen any of Ms. Loomer’s work, I expected the worst. Well, fear not: “Living Out” contains no sermons, no bumper stickers, no clunkily obvious messages of any kind whatsoever. It’s about life, not politics, and it aims its shafts of wit in all directions–including straight at the heads of the audience….

No link, so to find out more about Living Out (and to read the terrible things I had to say about The Night Heron), extract a dollar from your wallet, buy a copy of Friday’s Journal, and turn to my theater column in the “Weekend Journal” section. I highly recommend it–and not just for my stuff, either.

Unpaid advertisement: I can’t tell you how many people I know are surprised to find out that the Wall Street Journal covers the arts, and does it well. You don’t have to be rich to read it–all it takes is a buck, and I’m there every Friday.

Courtesy of artsjournal.com, my invaluable host, this story from the Guardian about a recent survey showing how little Brits know about art:

Nearly half (49%) of those questioned were…unable to identify who painted the “Mona Lisa.” One in 10 Britons cited Vincent Van Gogh instead of Leonardo da Vinci as the master behind the Louvre’s most celebrated treasure.

Meanwhile, despite the painting’s popularity with students, more than four out of five people (85%) cannot name the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch as the artist behind “The Scream.”…

The survey has gloomy news for gallery directors. It finds that more than two fifths (43%) have never set foot inside Britain’s art galleries.

Needless to say, I can’t imagine that Americans would score any better–probably worse–but my snap reaction to this grim report is not quite what you might suppose. After all, how many people can one reasonably expect to know who painted the Mona Lisa? In a well-regulated society, of course, the answer would be 100%, but our society isn’t regulated at all, meaning (among many other things, some good and some not) that we don’t “expect” anyone to know anything about high art. As a result, most ordinary people don’t know anything about it, and are perfectly happy not to–so far as they know. What surprised me, in fact, was that the number of Brits who’d never been to an art gallery was as low as 43%, not as high.

I’m not saying, however, that the capacity to appreciate high art, or at least to get real pleasure out of it, is limited to those people who currently know who painted the Mona Lisa. For it so happens that throughout much of the 20th century, ordinary Americans were regularly exposed as a matter of course to a remarkably wide variety of high art–and not by the public schools, either, but by the commercial mass media.

I grew up in the Age of the Middlebrow, that earnest, self-improving fellow who watched prime-time documentaries and read the Book of the Month. That was me, in spades. I was born in a small Missouri town in 1956, the year Dwight Eisenhower was re-elected by a landslide, and as far back as I can remember, I was eager to learn what was going on beyond the city limits of that small town, out in the great world of art and culture. Not that we were hopelessly at sea–we had a Little Theater and a Community Concerts series–but my home was hundreds of miles from the nearest museum, and it wasn’t until I went to college that I saw my first live performance of a ballet. Nevertheless, I already knew a little something about people like Willem de Kooning and Jerome Robbins, thanks to Time and Life magazines and The Ed Sullivan Show, and what little I knew made me want to know more.

Ours is essentially a popular culture, of course, but in the democratic culture of postwar America, there was also unfettered access to what Matthew Arnold so famously called “the best that has been thought and said in the world”–and, just as important, there was no contempt for it. When I was a boy, most Americans who didn’t care for high art still held it in a kind of puzzled respect. I doubt that Ed Sullivan cared much for Maria Callas or Edward Villella, but that didn’t stop him from putting them on his show, along with Louis Armstrong and the original cast of West Side Story (not to mention Jackie Mason and Señor Wences). In the Sixties, all was grist for the middlebrow mill.

Just as city dwellers can’t understand what it meant for the residents of a rural town to wake up one day and find themselves within driving distance of a Wal-Mart, so are they incapable of properly appreciating the true significance of middlebrow culture. For all its flaws, it nurtured at least two generations’ worth of Americans who, like me, went on to become full-fledged highbrows–but highbrows who, while accepting the existence of a hierarchy of values in art, never lost sight of the value of popular culture.

The catch was that the middlebrow culture on which I was raised was a common culture, based on the existence of widely shared values, and it is now splintered beyond hope of repair. Under the middlebrow regime, ordinary Americans were exposed to a wide range of cultural options from which they could pick and choose at will. They still do so, but without the preliminary exposure to the unfamiliar that once made their choices potentially more adventurous. The rise of digital information technology, with its unique capacity for niche marketing, has replaced such demographically broad-based instruments of middlebrow self-education as The Ed Sullivan Show with a new regime of seemingly infinite cultural choice. Instead of three TV networks, we have a hundred channels, each “narrowcasting” to a separate sliver of the viewing public, just as today’s corporations market new products not to the American people as a whole but to carefully balanced combinations of “lifestyle clusters” whose members are known to prefer gourmet coffee to Coca-Cola, or BMWs to Dodge pickups.

The information age offers something for anybody: Survivor for simpletons, The Sopranos for sophisticates. The problem is that it offers nothing for everybody. By maximizing and facilitating cultural choice, information-age capitalism fused with identity politics to bring about the disintegration of the common middlebrow culture of my youth. Let’s return for a moment to those unlettered folks who don’t know who painted the Mona Lisa. I assume, since you’re reading this, that you’re distressed by this unmistakable symptom of the widespread cultural illiteracy with which what Winston Churchill liked to call “the English-speaking peoples” are currently afflicted. But it so happens that a great many American intellectuals, most of them academics, would respond to your distress with a question: so what? To them, the very idea of “high art” is anathema, a murderous act of cultural imperialism. They don’t think Leonardo da Vinci should be “privileged” (to use one of their favorite pieces of jargon) over the local neighborhood graffiti artist. And as preposterous as this notion may seem to you, it is all but taken for granted among a frighteningly large swath of the postmodern American intelligentsia.

Which brings us right back to the problem of cultural illiteracy. How can we do anything about it if we can’t even agree on the fact that it is a problem–or about what basic cultural facts ordinary people should be expected to know? The answer is simple: we can’t.

What’s really sad is that most people under the age of 35 or so don’t remember and can’t imagine a time when there were magazines that “everybody” read and TV shows that “everybody” watched, much less that those magazines and shows went out of their way to introduce their audiences to high art of various kinds. Those days, of course, are gone for good, and it won’t help to mourn their passing. I’m not one to curse the darkness–that’s one of the reasons why I started this blog. Even so, that doesn’t stop me from feeling pangs of nostalgia for our lost middlebrow culture. It wasn’t perfect, and sometimes it wasn’t even very good, but it beat hell out of nothing.