About Last Night

I wrote last week, apropos of the death of Bob Hope:

In the words of my favorite refrigerator magnet, “Time passes quickly, whether you’re having fun or not.” (I wonder what that sounds like in Latin.)

That parenthesis was wistful. Despite having studied four foreign languages, one of them Latin, I’m still a humiliatingly single-tongued monoglot. Fortunately, two of you came through, lickety-split. One reader, who admits to “an almost total lack of fluency in Latin,” nevertheless resorted to an on-line dictionary and came up with this homemade rendering: Tempis fugit aut oblectas aut non.

A few hours later, I heard from a Latin teacher who offered a more plausible-sounding alternate version: Tempus celeriter degit, utrum frueris necne. He obligingly explained:

It may be suggested, and rightly so, that the phrase, “Time passes quickly,” could be translated “Tempus fugit.” Strictly speaking, “tempus fugit” translates to “time flies.” It is a rather well-known sententia Latina antiqua (old Latin maxim). But “tempus celeriter degit” accurately parallels “time quickly passes.” (The word order may seem odd, but that’s how it should be in Latin.)

Won’t you sleep better tonight knowing someone is out there obsessing about this sort of thing?

Absolutely. Now, can anybody out there do cross-stitch?

“All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt.”

Kingsley Amis, The Amis Collection

Avenue Q, an X-rated musical satire of “Sesame Street” performed by a cast of singing puppeteers, opened last night on Broadway, and I reviewed it for this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s an excerpt:

“Avenue Q,” which opened last night at the Golden Theatre, is as raucously, cruelly, unsparingly funny as “Big River” is sweet and warm-hearted….The songs, written by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, are wicked, often unprintable parodies of such smile-and-be-sensitive ditties as “Bein’ Green” and “The Rainbow Connection.” One of them, “Everyone’s a Little Bit Racist,” is so dead on target that I halfway expected the theater to be picketed during the last verse: “Everyone’s a little bit racist–it’s true/But everyone is just about as racist–as you!/If we all could just admit/That we are racist a little bit/And everyone stopped being so P.C.,/Maybe we could live in–harmony!”

To read the rest of the review, pick up a copy of the Journal and turn to “Weekend Journal,” the Friday arts-and-lifestyle section. Then go right out and get a ticket, because I have a feeling that this show is going to ring the gong very loudly, in its own weird way.

I’ve seen Finding Nemo twice and liked it both times, yet something about it left me cold, the same way all Pixar animated features leave me cold. That something is the animation itself, which is, as you probably know, digitally created, and looks that way. I don’t mean that it’s rigidly mechanical–the character animation in Finding Nemo is actually quite deftly realized. What bothers me are the three-dimensional backgrounds, which are both fantastically elaborate and hyper-realistic. It’s an impressive achievement, I suppose, but I can’t help feeling a incongruity between the characters, which are obviously animated (meaning unreal), and their environment, which just as obviously aspires to a different set of visual objectives.

Am I being persnickety? Probably. I mean, I really liked Finding Nemo. But every time I see a Pixar movie, I think of the dead end down which the Disney animators of the Thirties and Forties charged so heedlessly. Artist for artist, the Disney team packed a greater technical punch than any animation shop in history, but its product got duller and duller, while the Warner and MGM cartoons of the same period became more vivid and witty with every passing year. What made the difference? Disney’s creative team was fixated on the chimerical goal of realism, whereas Chuck Jones and Tex Avery knew that no matter how well you drew it, an animated cartoon was going to look like drawings of a talking animal.

This sounds like a debate over modernism, doesn’t it? Well, that’s just what it is. You can’t watch a cartoon like Jones’ “Duck Amuck” or Avery’s “King-Size Canary” without understanding that what you’re looking at is a cartoon. Both men accepted the inherent limitations of their chosen medium, thereby freeing their imaginations to run rampant within those limitations. Not so Walt Disney, whose goal was to make his studio’s cartoons look as real as possible, meaning that the imagination of the artists got tied up in knots. (Unlimited virtuosity can be a trap.)

I know there’s more to animation than animation, so to speak. Pixar’s features are good not just because of the way they look but also because of the way they’re written and voiced and scored. In those departments, Pixar stands head and shoulders over just about everybody else’s stuff. But the best animated feature of the past decade, Lilo and Stitch, is just as imaginatively written and voiced and scored–but also makes generous use of hand-drawn characters and hand-painted backgrounds that don’t aspire to Pixar-like hyper-realism. I can’t help but think that this is part of the reason why Lilo and Stitch touched me, whereas Finding Nemo mostly only charmed me.

Speaking of bluegrass, the Washington Post recently ran a great profile of Eddie Stubbs, the 41-year-old fiddler, disc jockey, and Grand Ole Opry announcer whose midnight-to-eight show on WSM is one of the last preserves of traditional country music and bluegrass in commercial radio.

Which reminds me to tell you–and no, this is not a confession, it’s a boast–that I love country music, though not the idiot kind you usually hear on the radio nowadays. I like the hard stuff, the high-stepping honky-tonk anthems and wrist-slitting laments about adulterers and adulterees that you used to hear on the radio back in the parallel universe that was my youth. On the other hand, country doesn’t have to be old to be good. An up-to-the-minute case in point is Allison Moorer, the warm-voiced, hard-rocking young Alabama balladeer whose new album, a two-for-one CD/DVD live set called Show, is absolutely as good as country gets.

I once gave serious thought to writing a book about the contemporary country scene (I wanted to call it Middle-Class Music, because country is so self-evidently by and for people who work for a living), and even went so far as to pitch it to my publisher. A funny thing happened on the way to the band bus, and I ended up writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken instead, but I still love country music. And Westerns. And cool jazz and abstract art and George Balanchine and Avenue Q. And Chuck Jones. So there.

“A man who never makes a mistake will never make anything.”

John Dexter, Notebook

A reader writes:

Obviously, a critic should be rigorous, honest, and forthright, but how far is not too far? When the critic likes the work, there’s not much problem, but what if the work is deemed flawed or worse (an all too common situation in my experience)? Living artists, even those without significant talent, are still human and apt to be hurt. Furthermore, it’s always possible for a critic to be wrong, however honestly. It’s been said that Art is ruthless and only cares for its own goodness or quality. Should a critic simply serve Art, and artists be damned?

Whenever I think about that question–and any critic who doesn’t lose sleep over it from time to time is a boor and a cad–I think of this couplet by Alexander Pope: “Yes, I am proud! I must be proud to see/Men, not afraid of God, afraid of me.”

Terrible words, aren’t they? They say a great deal about Pope, and what they say, I don’t like. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that they have the rank smell of pathology–that they speak of a man whose ego was badly twisted, and who took it out on the people about whom he wrote. But I’m not going to try to tell you that they don’t hit the target: I know a lot of critics, and some of them are just like that. I also know a lot of critics who are incompetent, by which I mean they don’t know enough about their chosen art form to responsibly pass judgment on the things they review. Such critics make artists miserable, confuse audiences, and generally add to the sum total of unhappiness on this earth.

It’s not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics–not all, but most–have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don’t know that–and I mean really know it–you shouldn’t be a critic. And you’re more likely to know it when you’ve lived and worked in a city small enough that there’s a better-than-even chance of your meeting the people you write about at intermission.

Writing for the Kansas City Star taught me that lesson, and it also taught me that critical standards have to be appropriate. You don’t review a college opera production the same way you review the Met. That’s another reason why critics should ideally have hands-on experience in the areas about which they write: It teaches them proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls “the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night.” It’s hard to sing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, or to dance in Concerto Barocco. It’s scary to go out in front of a thousand people in a dumb-looking costume and put your heart and soul on the line. Unless you have some personal experience of what that feels like–of the problems, both psychological and practical, that stand in the way of getting the curtain up–then you may err on the side of an unrealistic perfectionism, and your reviews will be sterile and uncomprehending as a result.

None of this is to say that criticism should be bland and toothless. Sometimes it’s your duty–your responsibility–to drop the big one. But you shouldn’t enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can’t, even when you don’t think they do it very well.

You will find a contrary view in today’s almanac entry, written by Ernest Newman, one of the most distinguished music critics of the 20th century. I take his point–which doesn’t mean I agree with it.

Sooner or later, everybody with a computer discovers the Internet Anagram Server, a Web site that generates anagrams of any phrase you plug into it. What you mostly get are reams of garbage, but sift through it long enough and you can usually find some gems.

I got tired of writing the other day and decided to run my name through the Internet Anagram Server, and was surprised to receive in return a fairly large number of anagrams that could be related to my career as a drama critic: “Reroute thy act,” “Teary tech tour,” “Outcry at three” (how’s that for a play about a matinee murder?), and my favorite, “Hey, actor, utter!” I also got some vaguely naughty responses, such as “Etch your tater,” and a few sinister ones, including “Treachery tout” and “Cutthroat eyer.”

But all these are merest fluff compared to my Top Five Personal Anagrams. In ascending order of coolness, they are:

5. That cuter yore
4. Ratty, cute hero
3. Arty, cute other
2. Retract ye thou!
1. The Tory Curate

O.K, back to art. But I bet you can’t wait to check out that Web site, can you?