About Last Night

I’ll be appearing Tuesday on National Public Radio’s Performance Today to talk about the opening of Zankel Hall, as part of a broadcast from the new hall of a concert by Emanuel Ax and the Emerson String Quartet.

Performance Today airs at different times in different cities. To find out more about the show, including where and when to tune in, go here.

Time again for “In the Bag,” the game that challenges you to put aside pride and admit what art you really like. The rules: you can put any five works of art into your bag before departing for a desert island, but you have to choose right now. No stalling or dithering–the armies of the night are pounding on your front door. No posturing–you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how uncool they may sound. What do you stuff in the bag?

Here are my picks, as of this second:

PAINTING: Arthur Dove, Rain or Snow (scroll down to see it)

MUSIC: Maurice Ravel, Piano Concerto in G (slow movement, performed by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli)

NOVEL: James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson

FILM: Roman Polanski, Chinatown

POP SONG: Lucinda Williams, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road

Your turn.

(1) I ordered a copy of this Alex Katz lithograph from a London print dealer three weeks ago. It hadn’t reached me as of last Thursday, so I sent the dealer an e-mail asking if anything was wrong. He wrote back to say that he’d been having quite a bit of trouble of late with slow deliveries to the United States, adding that the reason must be that the U.S. Postal Service had been “Bushed.”

(2) When I arrived at Washington’s Union Station on Friday, I jumped in a cab and asked the driver to take me to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. He looked puzzled, asked me if I knew where it was, scratched his head, then had an epiphany. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I believe I do know that one, but nobody ever wants to go there–I take somebody there maybe once a year.”

“During a technically very complicated recording at Goldwyn Studios, one of the playback machines broke down time and time again, causing endless delays. Finally I succumbed to the luxury of pointless anger.

I’m out of here for a couple of days. Tonight I’ll be seeing the premiere of Ken Ludwig’s Shakespeare in Hollywood at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. (I’m reviewing it for next Friday’s Wall Street Journal), and on Saturday afternoon I’ll be giving the annual Mencken Day lecture at Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library. Stop by if you’re in town–the Mencken Room, where Mencken’s private papers are stored, is open to the public from 10 to 5. I’ll be speaking at three o’clock and signing copies of The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken afterward.

Needless to say, none of this will interfere with the clock-like regularity with which “About Last Night” is published–24/5 as per always, unless I’m in Maine or jail. I’ll be here on Monday, and I’m here now with today’s topics, from functional to frivolous: (1) Of concert halls, museums, and fancy houses. (2) Is blog smog choking the Web? (3) A going-away party for a jazz giant. (4) The latest almanac entry.

Yesterday’s posting about Zankel Hall was picked up by my host, artsjournal.com, thus bringing me a heap of new visitors. (Hi, y’all.) Allow me to return the compliment. Click on the artsjournal.com logo at the top of this page and you will be magically transported to one of the best sites on the Web, a daily digest of news stories and commentary on the arts from throughout the English-speaking world (not to mention the host for a half-dozen wide-ranging arts blogs, of which “About Last Night” is but one). I look at artsjournal.com every morning. So should you.

Not to belabor the obvious…so I won’t. Have a nice weekend. Come back Monday–and bring a friend. (Whoops, I did it again!)

As I think about my first visit to Zankel Hall, and what I wrote about it yesterday, I’m struck by something that ought to be more obvious than it is: I took for granted that the architectural design of the hall ought to be of subordinate interest to its function. Beyond a description of the hall’s appearance and a succinct expression of my reaction to it (“I found the results to be attractive enough but somewhat sterile-looking, a typical exercise in safe concert-hall modernism”), I devoted myself exclusively to practical matters. How did the hall sound? Were the public areas comfortable? What about subway noise? Short of talking about the bathrooms (which I didn’t visit), I couldn’t have been much less aesthetic-minded than that.

I know what you’re thinking, and quite rightly, too: It’s a concert hall, for God’s sake. If the acoustics are lousy, who cares how it looks? Of course it isn’t quite that simple. The eye can fool the ear into thinking that an ugly hall “sounds” bad (this was part of the problem with Lincoln Center’s old Philharmonic Hall). Still, the basic premise holds true under most circumstances. First and foremost, a concert hall must sound good. After that, it must be congenial, meaning that going there should be a pleasant experience rather than an oppressive one. If the seats are uncomfortable, you won’t notice the acoustics–you’ll be too busy squirming. Once these enabling conditions are met, you start thinking about the visual appeal of the building, if then.

I mention all this because of the recent intramural squabble over the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, which some arts bloggers like and others loathe. Now I’m a dyed-in-the-wool aesthete who would dearly love to live in an exceptionally beautiful house and would willingly put up with a significant amount of nuisance value (i.e., leaky roofs) in order to do so…but not an unlimited amount. To put it as drastically as possible, I wouldn’t want to live in Fallingwater if it didn’t have indoor plumbing–and I might well think twice about it if there wasn’t a good place to hang my John Marin etching, either.

Clement Greenberg, the great art critic whom I not infrequently have occasion to quote, said something highly relevant in this connection:

There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

I think these words ought to be done in cross-stitch and hung in the homes of artists and art-lovers everywhere, if not necessarily in the living room. Art is not the most important thing in the world. Earthly beauty is not an absolute value. (Among many other things, it isn’t worth killing for.) I may disagree with City Comforts about whether or not Frank Lloyd Wright was a genius, but I think we’re all basically dealing from the same deck when it comes to this larger question, and I suspect you are, too, whether you’ve thought about it or not.

If you haven’t, try it the very next time you find yourself sitting in a concert hall or theater. Sure, the very best auditoriums are both beautiful and functional. These two qualities need not be incompatible. But if you have to choose, and if the choices are mutually exclusive, there’s really no choice, is there? The trick is to keep them from becoming mutually exclusive–which is one of the many reasons why arts bloggers blog.

I close with these thought-provoking words
from City Comforts:

The two cultures which concern me are the one of people who carefully observe the built environment and the…what do I call it?….rest of our society. I haven’t quite figured out how to term it but I know that there is such a lack of knowldge and sophistication as to be quite remarkable. And mind you, this is amongst otherwise very bright people, all of them alive and living inside the built world. Yet, to my ears, they seem blissfully unaware of it or if somewhat interested, then often somewhat lacking in knowledge, compared to their general knowledge of other aspects of society. At least that’s my take. The built world is just a given, part of the background of their lives and over which, perhaps, they have so little control that understanding seems a pointless endeavor. I honestly don’t know. But I find it interesting, appalling and a bit confusing….

Are many intellectuals scared of it because it is so vast and complex? Maybe all. And that, if I dare suggest it, is why we have starchitecture running riot: there are far too few intellectual police with the confidence to put such work in its proper place.

We don’t agree about everything, but about this we are in perfect sync.

A reader writes:

I’m afraid that as blogs proliferate, the medium threatens to become as “oceanic” and inefficent as the myriad other venues on the net–and off. Not enough time is allotted to us in our lifetimes to paddle through this immense and ever-increasing expanse of random opinion. And I fear that the super-high SQ (Snark Quotient) threatens to trivialize the medium, sapping it of real serious intent. I suppose it may be contrary to the essentially free-wheeling nature of the medium, but is there a way to counteract “blog smog”?

I know exactly what my correspondent means, but I also think it’s in “the essentially free-wheeling nature of the medium” for arts bloggers (and all other kinds of bloggers, for that matter) to write whatever the hell they want and let their readers sort it out. This is, after all, a market, and a fairly efficient one, too. Given a certain amount of effort, it quickly becomes apparent which arts blogs are worth reading daily, which ones weekly, and which ones not at all.

Even more interesting is the fact that bloggers also tend to link to one another, meaning that we do the sorting, and my guess is that it is in this manner that the Web will gradually become less random and more accessible–through organic evolution rather than central planning, so to speak. It used to be widely said that what the Web lacked were “gatekeepers” who could sort through everything out there and tell the great unwashed public what was worth reading–sort of like, oh, print-media editors. But then the great unwashed public started noticing that more than a few of the existing print-media gatekeepers were doing a rotten job of keeping their gates, and shortly thereafter, the blogosphere started to pick up speed. Coincidence? I suspect not.

As for the snarkiness, well, I kind of like it, at least when it’s wicked clever, as Mainers say. “Serious intent,” after all, comes under many different covers. I won’t blow the cover of my correspondent, but I will tell you that he is the very distinguished classical composer whom I mentioned
in this space a few weeks ago–the one who sings Emily Dickinson poems to the tune of the Gilligan’s Island theme at drunken parties, and who has also been known to emit the odd snarky remark from time to time.

Lest we forget, blogging is a fairly new phenomenon, one still in the process of finding its footing. Frankly, I think we need more arts blogging, not less. For openers, I know I’d love to read a blog about the daily life of a classical composer. Any takers?

A memorial service will be held this coming Monday in Manhattan for Benny Carter, the great jazz musician who died July 12 at the age of 95. It’ll take place at St. Peter’s Church (619 Lexington at 54th St.) starting at 7:30. The service is open to the public, and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the joint jumps, albeit decorously–jazz musicians like to send one another off in style.

I have to give a short speech elsewhere in the neighborhood at almost exactly the same time, but I plan to drop by if I possibly can. You come, too.