About Last Night

I wrote a piece for the Leisure & Arts page of today’s Wall Street Journal about my recent trip to Maine. Here’s the lead:

Six months ago, I bought a Fairfield Porter lithograph. Two weeks ago, I stood at the edge of a rocky cove near the southern tip of a remote island off the coast of Maine, looking at the same scene Porter viewed when he sketched “Isle au Haut.” To get there, I hiked for two sweaty hours along a narrow woodland trail, stepping over snakes and trying not to turn an ankle. What possessed a flabby, chair-bound critic like me to make such a journey? It seemed like a good idea as I sat in the air-conditioned comfort of my home office, but I started having second, third and fourth thoughts as I trudged up the Goat Trail of Isle au Haut….

No link, alas, so if you want to read the rest, go buy a Journal. I wish you would–I’m proud of this one.

The Film Forum held over The Adventures of Robin Hood for a few extra days, so I downed tools and went to see it Monday afternoon. I didn’t expect much of a crowd, but the theater was full of painfully obvious movie buffs, some of whom brought along their kids. It always amazes me when I run across movie buffs who have kids. As I wrote in the Weekly Standard a couple of years ago apropos of a Budd Boetticher festival at Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater:

If you long to meet odd people, it’s hard to top Manhattanites who go to movies on weekdays. To be sure, I am among their number, but at least I have an excuse: I write about movies. The viewers I have in mind are the pure-hearted obsessives, overwhelmingly male and uniformly unattractive, who flock to revival houses on sunny spring afternoons to take in the latest week-long tribute to Alexander Dovzhenko, Ida Lupino, or maybe Edgar G. Ulmer–it scarcely matters, since the same folks show up every time, no matter what’s showing.

Anyway, Generation Z was out in force and we all had a terrific time, except for a few dried-up spoilsports who kept turning around in their seats and shushing the fathers who were telling their children all about Robin Hood. Sure, I like a quiet theater, but to expect a dead hush at a Labor Day matinee of The Adventures of Robin Hood is just plain silly. Me, I didn’t mind the background chatter one little bit. The newly restored Technicolor print was delicious-looking (no red is quite so red as Technicolor red), Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s score was more thrilling than ever, and–glory of glories–they even showed a cartoon, Chuck Jones’ “Rabbit Hood,” a Bugs Bunny in which Errol Flynn makes a cameo appearance. I can’t remember the last time I went to a matinee screening of an old-fashioned swashbuckler complete with cartoon. Probably not since I was a kid, and I had at least as much fun last Monday as I used to have watching Saturday-afternoon Audie Murphy double features at the Malone Theater in Sikeston, Missouri. The only thing missing was a newsreel.

Was it art? No. Do I care? No. Man cannot live by art alone. He needs a little popcorn from time to time, and the occasional Bugs Bunny cartoon to go with it. Which is how I spent my Labor Day, thank you very much.

In the general welter of confusion, I almost failed to mention that Bill Charlap, my favorite jazz pianist, is appearing through Sunday at the Jazz Standard, my favorite New York jazz club. For details of the gig, which features the Charlap Trio and a string of guest stars, go here. (Peter Bernstein is on deck tonight, Phil Woods tomorrow.) If you need coaxing, here’s a snippet of a profile of Charlap I wrote a couple of years ago for the New York Times:

Mr. Charlap can swing ferociously hard whenever it suits him, but it is his subtly shaded, quietly inward ballad playing that seems to cut closest to the core of his musical identity. “I love really slow tempos,” he says. “Shirley Horn-type tempos. I love to move around in that kind of open musical space, and not spell everything out. Like Jimmy Rowles said,

“I found that to really make money, you had to give up music. So I gave up money.”

Mel Lewis, quoted in Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men: The Bebop Years

Join with me in a little celebration, dear readers. The page proofs of A Terry Teachout Reader, the anthology of my selected essays due out next spring from Yale University Press, arrived in the mail yesterday. Yippee!

For those of you who aren’t in the lit biz, “proofs” are freshly typeset pages of a book, magazine article, or newspaper piece that the author proofreads and corrects prior to publication. Usually, that’s the first time when you get to see more than a few sample pages set up in type, and even if it isn’t your first book, it’s still thrilling.

I think I’ve been reasonably good about keeping H. L. Mencken out of your hair, but I do want to share an anecdote from The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken with you. Mencken was 25 years old when his first full-length book, George Bernard Shaw: His Plays, was published in 1905. He was still an up-and-coming young editor at the Baltimore Herald, so he brought the proofs to the office that day to show to Lynn Meekins, his boss. There followed a scene (lovingly described in Newspaper Days, the second volume of Mencken’s memoirs)
sure to warm the heart of anyone who has ever published a book:

I was so enchanted that I could not resist taking the proofs to the office and showing them to Meekins–on the pretense, as I recall, of consulting him about a doubtful passage. He seemed almost as happy about it as I was. “If you live to be two hundred years old,” he said, “you will never forget this day. It is one of the great days of your life, and maybe the greatest. You will write other books, but none of them will ever give you half the thrill of this one. Go to your office, lock the door, and sit down to read your proofs. Nothing going on in the office can be as important. Take the whole day off, and enjoy yourself.” I naturally protested, saying that this or that had to be looked to. “Nonsense!” replied Meekins. “Let all those things take care of themselves. I order you to do nothing whatsoever until you have finished with the proofs. If anything pops up I’ll have it sent to me.” So I locked myself in as he commanded, and had a shining day indeed, and I can still remember its unparalleled glow after all these years.

Me, I’m still feeling a little bit glowy today.

Needless to say, life goes on, proofs or no proofs, and I spent the greater part of yesterday nailed to my desk chair, writing my “Second City” column for this Sunday’s Washington Post, after which I scurried down to the Algonquin Hotel to hear Stacey Kent’s Oak Room opening, so you’ll have to be content with a minimalist blog. Today’s topics, from loquacious to concise: (1) The best of all possible Westerns. (2) The snarkiest blog on earth, hands down. (3) The latest almanac entry.

I’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Hosanna in the highest: The Minor Fall, the Major Lift is back from vacation and making mischief. If you don’t know why that’s good news, click on the link at once. This anonymous New York-based blogger, who may well be the snarkiest person on the eastern seaboard, says things I’d say if only (A) I were clever enough to think of them and (B) I had the nerve to post them.

A warning for prigs: The Minor Fall, the Major Lift is not for the pure of soul or clean of mouth. But it sure is funny.

“Most of the things you read in a newspaper you naturally don’t know anything about, except what they tell you. Did you ever happen to read a newspaper account of something you did know something about? It’s always more or less wrong, usually more. I’m told it’s because most stories are rewritten when they get to the office by somebody else, not the man who covered the story. They have to make them fit between the advertising. I don’t think it’s done on purpose. I don’t think they’d mind if they had it right. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

James Gould Cozzens, Guard of Honor