About Last Night

This is the week I answer my post-vacation mail–I promise. Really. Last week I had to write and write and write, but this week I only have to write and write, so be patient and watch your mailbox for further details. In the meantime, welcome back to “About Last Night,” the 24/5 arts blog. I took yesterday off and planned not to write a lot today, but as usual the bit got caught between my teeth, so here are today’s topics, from peculiar to commonplace: (1) Will the real Harvey Pekar please fess up? (2) Another round of “In the Bag,” with a tip of the hat to my fellow baggers. (3) A date which will not live in infamy. (4) The latest almanac entry.

For those of you who were gone last week (and I know some of you were, lucky stiffs), much of what appeared on “About Last Night” during your absence is still visible–just keep scrolling down. If you’ve been gone longer than that, jump over to the top of the right-hand column and click on the archives link and you can browse and sluice at your leisure.

More tomorrow, as always, but in the meantime, let’s get that site meter bouncing, O.K.? Tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, one at a time or en masse–the choice is yours.

I saw, and loved, American Splendor, not least because of Hope Davis’ pitch-perfect performance as Joyce, Harvey Pekar’s penny-plain sourpuss of a wife. (It happens that I’d also seen Davis the night before in The Secret Lives of Dentists, and seeing two of her films back to back left me more sure than ever that she is the finest actress to come out of the indie-flick world–better even than Parker Posey, though I hate to admit it.)

What makes American Splendor so good is not its postmodern switching between “Harvey Pekar” the character and Harvey Pekar the bonafide on-screen weirdo himself–that aspect of the film borders on the cutesy–but the clarity and humor with which it portrays the grubby melancholy of lower-middle-class urban life. In that respect, the films it most reminded me of were Ghost World (no big surprise there) and (here comes the curve ball) One Hour Photo, a considerably more thoughtful movie than was generally realized when it came out last year.

At the same time, I think it should be pointed out that the “Harvey Pekar” of American Splendor is a semi-fictional character, and that a movie about the real Harvey Pekar might well have been even more interesting than American Splendor, if less touching. Yes, Harvey the celebrated author of autobiographical comic books and “Harvey” the fictional author of autobiographical comic books both spent a quarter-century working at crappy jobs at the Cleveland VA hospital, survived cancer, razzed David Letterman on camera, found love, and started a family. But the real Harvey Pekar is not simply some hapless record-collecting schlub from Cleveland who decided one day to write comic books about his working-class life. He is also a full-fledged left-wing intellectual–homemade, to be sure, but the shoe still fits–who reviews books for the Village Voice and does regular commentaries on NPR. (Search his name on Google and you’ll find, among many other things, his thoughts on Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which is about as eggheady as it gets.) You’ll learn nothing of this from watching American Splendor, or even from reading Pekar’s slightly faux-naif blog.

None of which invalidates the movie–it has its own expressive validity independent of the man whose life it purports to portray. Still, it should be kept firmly in mind that in creating “Harvey Pekar,” the makers of American Splendor–not to mention Harvey Pekar himself–scissored out inconvenient biographical details whose inclusion in the film would doubtless have caused it to make a radically different impression on many people. “Harvey” is a weird but nonetheless convincingly common man whose plight really does come across as more or less universal. Harvey is…well, something else again. To put it mildly. And then some.

Bloggers all up and down the right-hand column have been playing “In the Bag” lately. Modern Art Notes seems to have been first to take up the cudgel, but after that it spread like kudzu throughout the blogosphere. Since imitation is supposed to be the sincerest form of flattery, I’m flattered–so here we go again.

First, a quick review of the rules for those of you just joining us. “In the Bag” is my private variation of the old desert-island game. In this version, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can stuff five works of art into your bag before departing for that good old desert island, but you have to decide right this second. No dithering–the secret police are banging on the front door. No posturing–you have to say the first five things that pop into your head, no matter how dumb they may sound. What do you put in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks:

NOVEL: W. Somerset Maugham, Cakes and Ale

PAINTING: John H. Twachtman, Winter Harmony

PAINTING: Edward Hopper, Sun in an Empty Room

POP SONG: Aimee Mann, Deathly

FILM: Nicholas Ray, On Dangerous Ground

Over to you.

P.S. If you’re wondering why I put two paintings in the bag this week, by the way, the answer is, I just felt like it.

I have now gone an entire calendar year without listening to any minimalist music whatsoever.

Go thou and do likewise.

“The amateur painter is in general a cultivated man who has discovered the pleasures of painting and pursues it as recreation and sport. The approach he adopts may be a form of Impressionism, or even of Abstraction, depending on his age group and education, but it will necessarily be a thoroughly familiar one. He is interested in playing a fascinating game, not in making up new rules. He is visiting a world already explored by other painters rather than creating and imposing a world of his own. His real originality has already found its expression elsewhere. Otherwise he would long ago have quit his own profession for that of painter, as Gauguin gave up a career on the stock exchange in his pursuit of art. The price of originality is undivided love.”

Maurice Grosser, Critic’s Eye

I reviewed The Thing About Men, an off-Broadway musical that opened Wednesday at the Promenade Theatre, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s the lead:

I didn’t go to “The Thing About Men” expecting to have my mind changed about the diminished state of American musical comedy. The posters for the show, which opened off Broadway at the Promenade Theatre on Wednesday, feature a photo of the torso of a half-naked person of indeterminate gender whose necktie dangles from his (or her) open trousers in such a way as to suggest…well, you get the idea. And so, I thought, did I. But “The Thing About Men,” much to my surprise, turned out to be something altogether different from the silly sex farce I was prepared to endure. Instead, Joe DiPietro and Jimmy Roberts, the authors of “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” have now made another honorable and largely successful attempt to breathe new life into the moribund tradition of the middlebrow musical….

To read the whole review, simply go to the nearest newsstand, part with one (1) hard-earned dollar, and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section of this morning’s Journal, which is, as ever and always, full of good stuff.

Courtesy of the ever-interesting 2 Blowhards, some statistics gleaned from the magazine American Demographics:

According to a study commissioned by AD with research firm Ipsos-Reid, only 17% of American adults are aware of blogs, and only 5% claim to have read one. The awareness of blogs skews towards men; 21% of male Internet users report they’re hip to the blogosphere, while only 13% of women are. Financially, visitors to blogspot.com are either rich or poor; those making under $25,000 or over $100,000 a year are over-represented, while middle-income visitors are under-represented.

These numbers strike me as intuitively right, though I’m a bit surprised at the underrepresentation of middle-income visitors. It’s certainly been my experience that most people don’t yet know what a blog is. On the other hand, what the numbers don’t tell us is exactly who those 15 million American adults are, though I have some guesses. The income spread, for instance, strongly suggests that they are either well-to-do or young (since younger people are both less likely to be making a lot of money and more likely to be comfortable with the Internet).

If you’re interested in blogging about the arts, that should make you sit up and take notice. Given the well-established fact that the Internet is an ideal way to reach highly motivated niche audiences, it stands to reason that Web surfers with an interest in the arts are likely to stumble onto an arts blog sooner or later. Bloggers typically link to and write about one another (that’s a big part of what blogging is all about, as 2 Blowhards recently and rightly pointed out), and it follows that such interaction is bound to encourage significant growth in the art-related sector of the blogosphere, especially now that younger people are increasingly inclined to look to the Web as a source of news and information.

My own experience may be relevant in this connection. I first heard the word “blog” some three years ago, and like most blogwatchers of that period, it was Andrew Sullivan who first got me in the habit of looking at a blog or two each morning. Not long after I started visiting www.andrewsullivan.com, it occurred to me that it would be possible to launch an arts blog that worked more or less the same way as his political blog. What stopped me in my tracks was that I hadn’t the faintest idea of how to start such a site (the user-friendly software employed by most of today’s bloggers had yet to be invented). Within a few months, I got sidetracked by the need to finish writing The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, and my still-inchoate plans were filed away, though not forgotten.

The tremendous growth of the blogosphere in the past year revived my interest in www.terryteachout.com, and when I met Megan McArdle, who writes Asymmetrical Information, she persuaded me that it was time to give it a try. (In other words, blame her.) At that exact moment, Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com called me cold and offered to start a site for me. Within a week, “About Last Night” was up and running.

The surprising thing (or maybe not) is that it wasn’t until after “About Last Night” went live that I first encountered any other arts blogs. Think about that. Here I was, a potential blogger with a serious interest in the medium, yet I didn’t know of the existence of even one arts blog. It wasn’t until I started getting e-mail from fellow arts bloggers and clicking my way through their blogrolls that I finally discovered what was already out there, and how good so much of it was.

All this indicates to me that arts blogging is a phenomenon waiting to happen, in much the same way that political blogging gradually built up to a critical mass, then suddenly mushroomed in the wake of 9/11. The difference, of course, is that arts bloggers can’t count on a cataclysmic event to stimulate interest in what we’re doing. We’ll have to publicize ourselves, not only by linking to one another (though that’s important) but also by reaching out to potential readers who don’t yet know what a blog is. That’s why I always include the www.terryteachout.com URL in the shirttails to the pieces I write for the print media. That’s why I remind you each morning to tell someone you know about this site. People who come here will go elsewhere, too.

Am I having fun yet? You bet. But I want lots more people to come into the pool. As I wrote in this space a couple of weeks ago, I believe that serious arts journalism in America is destined to migrate to the Web. If you’re reading these words, you’re part of that migration. Don’t keep it to yourself.

A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting on film scores:

Add Johnny Mandel to your ALN list. Among his best on CD are I Want to Live (Rykodisc) and The Sandpiper (Verve). And The Verdict (it’s almost no writing, but what there is is perfectly placed).

I couldn’t agree more, and am chagrined to have momentarily forgotten about Mandel, whose name is universally known and admired throughout the world of jazz. This may explain why I forgot to think of him in connection with film scoring–he simply does too many things well, including songwriting. To have written “The Shadow of Your Smile,” the theme from The Sandpiper, is achievement enough for a lifetime. All praise to Johnny Mandel, then, for never having rested on any of his myriad laurels.

Incidentally, my favorite recording of “The Shadow of Your Smile” is by Singers Unlimited. It’s only available in a box set at present, but if you’re feeling extravagant, I can’t think of a better way to spend a hundred bucks.