About Last Night

Time once again to play “In the Bag,” my version of the old desert-island game–with a twist. In this variant, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can put five works of art into your bag before departing for the proverbial desert island, and you have to decide right now. No dithering–the enemy is at the front door, lasers blazing. No posturing–you have to say the first five things that pop into your head. What do you stuff in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks:

BOOK: Isaac Bashevis Singer, Enemies, a Love Story

MUSIC: Maurice Ravel, String Quartet in F Major

PAINTING: Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin, Basket of Wild Strawberries

SONG: Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer, I Wonder What Became of Me (as sung by Joe Mooney)

FILM: William Wyler, The Heiress

Over to you.

“We followed Jo as she marched out of the room with that fanaticism known only to an overachiever, one who lives with the eternal fear that some lurking underachiever will, in a flash of brilliance, achieve more.”

Samuel Shem, The House of God

Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, which became all but moribund in the Nineties, is now showing fresh signs of life. One is the upcoming production of Mozart’s Il re pastore (it’ll be seen next Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday) directed by Mark Lamos, in whose work I take wild delight (he’s the guy who directed the Met’s Wozzeck and New York City Opera’s Turn of the Screw). Another is the presence of the Mark Morris Dance Group, which has been performing Gloria and V, two of Morris’ most important dances, at the New York State Theater (the last show is tonight at eight).

I went on Wednesday, mainly to see V, Morris’ staging of the Schumann Piano Quintet. Over the years, I’ve been lucky enough to catch the premieres of a half-dozen or so works of art that I immediately recognized as great. That’s how I felt about V when I saw its New York premiere two years ago at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I’ve seen it four more times since then, and I haven’t changed my mind. By now, I know V well enough to be able to talk in a fairly specific way about what makes it so good. But how did I know how good it was the first time I saw it? What made me so sure it was a masterpiece?

These questions aren’t as simple as they sound. I mean, it’s not as if I’d been sitting in my aisle seat that night, ticking off boxes on the Masterpiece Checklist. (The 18th-century neoclassicists tried to draw up just such a checklist, which is one reason why their art is so dull.) In fact, I tend not to do much thinking about a great work of art when I’m experiencing it for the first time. Instead, I become swept up in what Robert Warshow called the immediate experience. In the face of mastery, analysis is impossible–it’s something you do after the fact.

C.S. Lewis wrote a wonderful little book called An Experiment in Criticism in which he suggested that in order to understand the nature of greatness in literature, we might try approaching it in reverse:

Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books. Any judgement it implies about men’s reading of books is a corollary from its judgement on the books themselves. Bad taste is, as it were by definition, a taste for bad books. I want to find out what sort of picture we shall get by reversing the process. Let us make our distinction between readers or types of reading the basis, and our distinction between books the corollary. Let us try to discover how far it might be plausible to define a good book as a book which is read in one way, and a bad book as a book which is read in another.

With that in mind, I asked myself these questions on Wednesday: How did I feel as I watched V for the first time? Did I feel the same way as I watched it for the fifth time? And might those feelings tell me something about the nature of a masterpiece?

I was a bit surprised (though perhaps I shouldn’t have been) to discover that I still had fairly easy access to the sensations I experienced at the New York premiere of V. What’s more, I remembered having had similar sensations on such other occasions as the New York premiere of Paul Taylor’s Piazzolla Caldera and my first viewing of Kenneth Lonergan’s film You Can Count on Me, both of which I also recognized as masterpieces at first sight.

Here’s what I felt:

Immediate involvement. More often than not, it takes a few minutes to become fully engaged by a work of art. You have to shut out the rest of the world, and that isn’t always easy, especially in a noisy place like New York. With V, on the other hand, I felt as though the dancers had reached out from the stage and grabbed me as soon as the curtain went up.

The perception of competence. Early on in a masterpiece–often very early indeed–something unexpected happens that makes me shake my head with pleasure and surprise. I realize that the person who made it knew exactly what he was doing, and I say to myself, I’m in good hands.

The opposite of boredom. Harry Cohn, the boor who ran Columbia Pictures in the Forties and Fifties, is supposed to have said that whenever he caught himself squirming in his seat as he watched the rushes of a movie, he knew there was something wrong with it. Herman J. Mankiewicz, the drunken sage of Hollywood (and the author of the screenplay for Citizen Kane), is supposed to have replied, “Imagine–the whole world wired to Harry Cohn’s ass!” I don’t know anything about Harry Cohn’s ass, but a quarter-century on the aisle has taught me that whenever my attention flags midway through a new work, the chances are good that there’s something wrong with it. That never happened with V. I was completely involved–“present,” as actors say–from start to finish. I didn’t squirm once.

Performance anxiety. Roughly halfway into V, I realized that I was nervous. It took a little longer before I realized why: what I was seeing on stage was so beautiful that I was afraid something would go wrong, that Morris would fumble the ball. When I say “afraid,” I really mean it. I felt extreme anxiety, not for Morris or me, but for the dance itself, as if it were a living thing for whose health I feared.

Consummation. That anxiety disappeared toward the end of the last movement, at the exact moment when Schumann launches a fugue-like musical episode and the dancers run out from the wings and start to embrace one another. Right then, I knew Morris had “solved” the dance–that he had successfully worked out its internal logic and was demonstrating the solution on stage–and my eyes immediately filled with tears.

All these sensations came back to me as I watched V on Wednesday night. This time around, of course, they were accompanied by a clearer intellectual understanding of the way the dance works, how it grows out of Schumann’s music and creates a visual counterpart to the tonal architecture. But I didn’t need to understand any of these things to know that V was a masterpiece the first time I saw it. I just knew.

As A.E. Housman famously said, “Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.” I know what he meant. Instead of analyzing V, I read its quality off myself, the same way you can read the seismographic chart of an earthquake and know how strong it was. Or–to put it more simply–I knew how good V was because of the way it made me feel.

Some of my best friends are old crocks. No offense meant–I hope to be an old crock someday. Besides, I tend to think they’re right when they grumble about how things ain’t what they used to be. But if you’re one of those Gershwin-loving Luddites who thinks nobody knows how to write a really smart song lyric anymore, kindly go here.

Johnny Mercer it isn’t, but I still can’t get this song out of my head.

“I admit that it would never occur to me to ask a question of an electronic brain, chiefly because I’d be incapable of it. The interrogated electronic brain very quickly generates thousands, if not millions, of responses, and among those thousands of millions of responses, only one is right. Rather than bother with an extremely burdensome apparatus and spend months formulating a question, isn’t it quicker to have a stroke of genius and find the right solution right away?”

Olivier Messiaen, Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color

A reader writes, apropos of various recent postings about the possibility of New York City Opera’s moving to a new house at or near Ground Zero:

About the opera house on Ground Zero–I admire the idea, and would certainly think it moving. But really, how long would it be before some sort of play or production was put on commiserating with the plight of the poor oppressed hijackers? Or possibly a reading by some famous Jihadist poet? I’d love to see great art at Ground Zero, but the other possibilities make me fear the idea just as much as I love it.

Point taken. I myself have written testily on more than one occasion about what one might euphemistically call the wide-ranging responses of quarter-witted artists here and abroad to 9/11, and I’ve no doubt that somebody, somewhere, would dearly love to do just what my pessimistic correspondent fears most.

On the other hand, Paul Kellogg, who runs City Opera, is a man of taste, and I’ve also no doubt that anything he presented in a Ground Zero Memorial Opera House would be worth seeing–which doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d like it, of course. But if I required artists to make only works of art with whose underlying premises I agreed, I’d be an unhappy soul indeed. Kellogg, for example, is a fan of Jake Heggie’s operatic version of Dead Man Walking, which City Opera performed last season. I disagree, to put it mildly, but I also recognize that it’s a serious piece of work (as opposed to, say, the bisected pigs of Damien Hirst), and so I respected his intentions in producing it. If I didn’t–if I thought City Opera were in the hands of a cultural politician who didn’t give a damn about beauty–I wouldn’t be backing the company’s plan to move to Ground Zero.

So I guess the smart-ass answer to this perfectly reasonable question would be something like Opera houses don’t kill opera, opera directors do. Which is also a perfectly reasonable answer, when you think about it.

The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a four-CD set containing 56 extremely well-chosen Warner Bros. cartoons from the Forties and Fifties (plus a couple of gazillion DVD-type special features), is now available for pre-ordering on amazon.com. Click here to do so. It’ll be on the street Oct. 28.

The amazon.com page also contains a customer review from an animation fanatic with inside skinny:

It’s hard to believe, but Warner Brothers is reportedly not sure that these cartoons can sell. This set is a test to see whether DVD collectors are in the market for Looney Tunes fully restored and presented with in-depth extras. If the set sells well, there will be more big boxes like this one, with still more cartoons (including earlier classics that are still in the process of restoration). If it doesn’t sell, all we’ll get is bare-bones samplers aimed at kids alone. So don’t buy the bare-bones “Premiere Collection,” a poorly presented kid-oriented release with no extras and only half of the cartoons on this set….Help make “The Looney Tunes Golden Collection” a best-seller and you’ll not only be helping the cause of classic animation on DVD, you’ll be getting some of the best comedy films ever produced, animated or live-action. You’ll be getting fascinating extras and supplements. You’ll be getting hours and hours of great entertainment. What could be better than getting great entertainment in a good cause? Buy this set, and if enough people do, we’ll get to see more sets of Bugs, Daffy, and the rest, to enjoy at home as often as we want–and believe me, we’ll want to watch it often.

Clearly, the Golden Collection is the set to buy. (And yes, I’ve put my money where my blog is.)

The Paul Taylor Dance Company will be performing for free next Tuesday and Wednesday at Damrosch Park, in between the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theater, as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series. Both performances start at eight p.m. For those of you who know about modern dance, that’s all I need to say. (Did I mention the word free?)

For everybody else, a word of explanation: Paul Taylor is the world’s greatest living artist, irrespective of medium. I don’t deny that I’ve been known on occasion to exaggerate, but I happily stand by every word of that high-octane statement. If you want further details, I wrote the foreword to the 1999 paperback reissue of Private Domain, Taylor’s autobiography, in which I summed up my opinion of his work as concisely as possible. (Private Domain is a wonderful book, by the way, by far the best memoir ever written by a choreographer.) His dances are serious and funny, lyrical and frightening, harsh and poignant–sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once. If you’ve never seen any of them, go and be blessed.

P.S. Not to scare you off, but these are free performances, so try to get to Damrosch Park at least an hour before curtain time if you want to snag a halfway decent seat.