About Last Night

Our Girl in Chicago writes:

The back of the book in this week’s New Yorker is a real roller coaster. It leads off with a typically smart review-essay by Joan Acocella about recent scholarly infighting over the historical origins of childhood. An Acocella byline is always good news. Here, she distills the lumpish books under review into their “good parts,” conducting a brisk tour of the most relevant and striking historical ground they cover. She’s an even-tempered, fuss-free giant slayer:

A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern: First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held beliefs.

As one who exceeded her own recommended lifetime allotment of academic writing some time ago, I say: Joan, you had me at “a French person.” Flip a few pages, though, and the unsuspecting reader, knocked off guard by Acocella’s wit, seems to have strayed into an upmarket edition of FHM. Richard Avedon’s creepy photo of a smirking, haphazardly clothed Chan Marshall, leader of the band Cat Power, stages the accompanying article’s tagline in a laughably literal-minded way: “Cat Power demands attention, then resists it.”

But at least the Avedon photo, for all its raincoat-flasher aesthetic, has a couple of things going for it. One, lots of fans don’t really know what Marshall looks like. (When I saw Cat Power perform in Chicago this past March, it was maddening that the stage was unlit and her hair flopped over her face.) Two, the Hilton Als piece that goes with the picture is worse.

Cat Power’s music is ravishingly abstract. Marshall’s famous voice is at once disaffected and melodramatic, the instrumentation spare, the effect like strong weather for the psyche. Als’ piece seems to aspire to the same enigmatically profound condition. The problem is that Marshall is an artist, while Als is merely a critic–and not a very good one, either. After drawing out Cat Power’s classic blues roots in a reasonable enough middle section, he staggers from one undercooked metaphor to another, calling Marshall in the space of one column a cowboy, a preacher, and “a fluid version of Liberty standing guard over the Harbor.” To all of which, and much more, I can only say, “Huh?”

Yes, Marshall may be unprofessional and off-putting. She may also may be this generation’s incarnation of the untamable spirit of rock and roll. (It’d be pretty surprising, though, if the faux scandal of a naughty glossy photo in The New Yorker did anything but puncture the latter image.) But whatever she is or isn’t, her great music deserves better–and smarter.

I wish I could take it for granted that you read Lileks before breakfast, but since some of you probably don’t, allow me to draw the attention of the benighted to yesterday’s “Bleat,” in which (among various other things) the indispensable James Lileks confesses to having developed a midlife taste for the country music he hated as a boy:

On the odd chance I shoot a home video that needs a song about an impotent Vietnam war vet imploring his wife not to go to town and do some hooking, I also ripped “Ruby” by Kenny Rogers. “If I could move I’d get my gun and put her in the ground.” Cheery! Socially relevant! Once you realize that they usually followed this song with “Candy Man” by Sammy Davis Jr., you’ll know what a strange stew AM radio used to be.

That’s so quintessentially Lileksian (an adjective waiting to happen). I love his sharp turns–all of a sudden he swerves from Seventies country to the long-lost world of unformatted AM radio, where you really could hear a little bit of everything in the course of a day’s listening, from Paul Harvey to Top Forty to “Desafinado” and “Take Five.”

Excuse me for a momentary lapse into being an intellectual, but the drying-up of unformatted radio is yet another sign of the fast-growing fragmentation of American culture. Time was when there were mass-media “meeting places” where you could get a quick taste of life outside your cultural niche, no matter which niche you happened to inhabit. Time and Life used to fulfill that function. So did TV variety programs like The Ed Sulllivan Show. So, to a surprising extent, did commercial radio.

And now? Well, I’m trying to do something similar, in my Web-based, eggheady way, but I suspect that to the marketers, who see the world through category-colored glasses, we “About Last Night” types are our own little niche–the niche of people who like to peer into other people’s niches. Call us The Eclectics. The Unpredictables. Slap a label on us and sell us our very own brand of designer beer.

Sigh.

I usually listen to music while I’m editing–my iBook contains an iTunes player onto which I have loaded 2,646 songs to date–and I thought it might amuse you to know the ones I played as I polished up today’s blog:

(1) The Beatles, “Lovely Rita” (I love Paul McCartney’s swoopy bass line)
(2) Pat Metheny, “A Lot of Livin’ to Do”
(3) Earl Hines, “Love Me Tonight”
(4) Buddy Rich, “Love for Sale” (dig that single-stroke roll at the end!)
(5) Dwight Yoakam, “Long White Cadillac”
(6) Woody Herman and His Woodchoppers, “Lost Weekend”
(7) Glenn Miller and His Army Air Force Band, “Flying Home”
(8) Elvis Costello, “Pump It Up”
(9) Bobbie Gentry, “Ode to Billie Joe”
(10) Steely Dan, “Monkey in Your Soul”

“The number of those who undergo the fatigue of judging for themselves is very small indeed.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, The Critic

It’s worth noting that in the four weeks since “About Last Night” first went live, I haven’t felt the need to recommend a single new classical CD to you. That says something about the increasingly desperate state of the classical recording industry. Still, good things do find their way to my desk from time to time, and “good” isn’t nearly strong enough a word to describe the latest release from BBC Records, a 1971 broadcast of the Mozart Requiem conducted by Benjamin Britten.

In addition to being one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Britten was also an extraordinarily gifted pianist and conductor. But even though he made many commercial recordings for Decca/London, they were mostly (though not always) of his own music. Fortunately, the BBC also taped dozens of concerts in which Britten can be heard performing the music of his favorite composers, and this one ranks right up there with his unforgettable BBC broadcasts of the Mahler Fourth and Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphonies. Not that he does anything obviously startling. As always with Britten the performer, the insights are contained within an essentially traditional interpretative framework–but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there in abundance. His approach to the Mozart Requiem is both weighty and rhythmically forceful, with sonorities built from the bass line upward (an approach typical of many other composer-performers as well). The result is at once fresh and “centric,” so to speak.

The recording was made at a 1971 performance by the the Aldeburgh Festival Chorus, English Chamber Orchestra, and four of Britten’s favorite solo singers. It’s well sung and well played, with slightly congested but otherwise serviceable sound–none of which matters in the least. If you had a chance to hear Felix Mendelssohn conduct Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, you wouldn’t pass it up because the organ was out of tune, would you?

Should you require additional persuasion (and you shouldn’t), the filler is a half-hour interview in which Britten talks about such subjects as the process of composing, opera on TV, and his reluctance to teach. It’s worth the price of the album all by itself.

“One is justified in leaning towards severity in the laying down of principles, but should nearly always incline to indulgence in the application of them.”

Irving Babbitt, Rousseau and Romanticism

A drama critic who spends most of his evenings covering Broadway and off-Broadway openings tends to forget that most of the plays being staged in New York on any given night are performed in tiny little theaters consisting of a ratty lobby, a smallish rectangular performance space whose ceiling, walls, and floor are painted black (hence the name “black-box theater”), and an even smaller backstage area (often indistinguishable from the hall). Such places are typically situated on blocks so unfashionable that you look twice at your appointment book to be sure you’ve come to the right place. Then you climb up a flight or three of stairs, settle into a creaky old theater seat, and wait to see what happens next. Often it’s painfully earnest. Sometimes it’s downright awful. Every once in a while, though, the black box turns into a time machine in which you spend an hour or two exploring a parallel universe of the imagination, and when the lights come up again, you remember why you love theater, and why the waitress who served you brunch in between callbacks loves it, too.

The New York International Fringe Festival, which is currently presenting 200-odd plays in 21 off-off-Broadway houses scattered throughout lower Manhattan (it runs through Aug. 24), is dedicated to the proposition that there’s more to theater than Beauty and the Beast. More than a few of the plays are stinkers, and my guess is that most are no better than adequate. But some are remarkable, while even the worst ones can be oddly touching, in part because you can smell the hope oozing out of the pores of the actors on stage (if you want to call it that–many black-box theaters are so small that the word “stage” loses its meaning).

I went down to the East Village the other day to see a Fringe play that I more or less picked out of a hat. I didn’t know anything about the playwrights or the company, but something about the press release tickled my fancy, and I wanted to see at least one show not on account of The Buzz but simply because it sounded interesting. So I requested a pair of press seats, and when the appointed hour arrived, I boarded the subway and made my way to the theater. I had to change trains twice–not a good sign.

Once I got there, the sidewalk was crowded with chattering playgoers, some coming, others going. The theater itself, somewhat to my surprise, was air-conditioned, but in every other way it conformed to my darkest expectations. The program was a single photocopied sheet, the set a half-dozen folding chairs, and it didn’t take much eavesdropping before I figured out that the house was packed with friends and family of the cast members (including small children), all of whom laughed and clapped at every possible opportunity (especially the small children).

Sounds awful, no? Fooled you. Fooled me. I loved the show, and not just because the homely surroundings made me feel sympathetic, either. Just the opposite: I sat in my lumpy seat for five minutes waiting for the lights to go down, muttering to myself, Oh, man, this is going to be crappy. But no more than a minute after the play started, I started saying, Oh, wow, this is really good!

Do I come to a performance with expectations? Of course. How could I not? I’ve been a critic for a quarter-century, and in that time I’ve learned not to bet too heavily against the odds. More often than not, you can judge a book by its cover. But I’ve also learned to leave myself open to the possibility that the odds might be wrong this time around, and when I hear that telltale click in your head and realize that something I expected to be bad is actually good…well, it’s just about the best feeling I know.

I went to two other plays that day, one of which was lousy and the other fine. I got rained on all night, spent a couple of hours sweating in a sauna-hot theater, and came home soaked to the skin. It didn’t matter. I knew that come week’s end, I was going to write a review that would make a gaggle of struggling young actors very, very happy. Rave reviews don’t necessarily make much difference in the hard life of a performer. (I once wrote a glowing profile for the Sunday New York Times of a singer who was all set to open in a theater-district cabaret…on September 12, 2001. Needless to say, she didn’t get much bounce from that piece.) Still, they don’t hurt, especially when they come from out of the blue. Which is one of the reasons–and one of the best ones–why I do what I do.

A reader writes:

All of yr. posts where you talk abt. hanging out w/ musicians and painters raise the specter of the critic who’s friendly w/ those he writes abt. I imagine I know where you stand on this, that it doesn’t change how you write abt. them, but it could make for an interesting discussion.

Sure could. It’s a tricky business, being in the world of art but not of it…but wait a minute. I’m not a priest, right? Nope, just a freelance journalist, and one who believes deeply that anyone who tries to write about art without knowing artists is going to make a rotten job of it.

At the same time, I should point out that I’m not at present a regular working performance critic in any field other than theater. Speaking in my official capacity as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, I can assure you that I know a grand total of two (2) actors, both of whom are among my closest friends and both of whom I knew long before I hooked up with the Journal. I’ve never mentioned either one in my drama column.

Beyond that, I make no promises, nor should you expect me to. Many of my other friends are artists working in other media. I have occasion to write about some of them from time to time, and the fact that I know them personally does change what I write–for the better. Because I know certain artists well and have talked to them at length about their art, I understand it more fully, and can explain it more intelligently. In the process, I also learn more about the worlds in which they work, and that makes my writing more nuanced and comprehending. (My writing is probably also affected in much the same way by the fact that I myself used to be a professional musician once upon a time.)

I might add that it seems to me perfectly natural for a person who writes about the arts to befriend artists whom he admires, so long as they’re nice. Needless to say, this isn’t always the case, though it turns out to be true surprisingly often. Three or four of my best friends are artists whom I got to know in the course of writing about them, and they’re very nice.

(In case you’re wondering, the thought occasionally crosses my mind that this niceness might in certain cases have something to do with the fact that I’ve written nice things about the artists in question. Yes, it’s happened once or twice, and it stings when you realize you’ve been snookered, but that goes with the territory. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, and I’ve gained a whole lot more than I’ve lost.)

Does any of this affect my writing for the worse? Maybe. But in the end, you must judge me not by some abstract theory about my work, but by the work itself. Do you tend to agree with what I write? Even if you don’t, do you find it illuminating? If so, then it doesn’t really matter whether I happen to know the people who made the works of art I recommend, does it? A lot of readers, after all, seem to think I’m a trustworthy critic, and the reason why they do is because their experience has taught them to trust my taste. I’ve worked hard at building that trust. It’s my capital. I wouldn’t dream of squandering it by writing a favorable review of a bad work of art by a good friend. I never have, and I never will.

One more thing: I teach a course in criticism at Rutgers/Newark University, in which I spend a few minutes early in the semester talking about conflicts of interest. Rule No. 1 of arts journalism, I tell my students, goes like this: “Never sleep with anybody you write about.” That gets their attention–especially since I put it more bluntly than that.

Either way, it’s a good rule to live by.