Archives for August 2003

“What advice, then, would I give to someone forced–for no one could be willing–to become a reviewer? Firstly, never praise; praise dates you. In reviewing a book you like, write for the author; in reviewing any other, write for the public. Read the books you review, but you should need only to skim a page to settle if they are worth reviewing. Never touch novels written by your friends. Remember that the object of the critic is to revenge himself on the creator, and his method must depend on whether the book is good or bad, whether he dare condemn it himself or must lie quiet and let it blow over. Every good reviewer has a subject. He specializes in that subject on which he has not been able to write a book, and his aim is to see that no one else does. He stands behind the ticket queue of fame, banging his rivals on the head as they bend low before the guichet. When he has laid out enough he becomes an authority, which is more than they will.”

Cyril Connolly, The Condemned Playground

Even though I receive complimentary press tickets to most of the shows I want to see, I still get a huge kick out of free performances, especially when they’re outside. I love the uncomplicated carnival atmosphere, the feeling that everybody came to play. Of course it helps that in New York, you often get to see fairly famous people for free, meaning that the crowds are staggeringly large–but it’s still fun as long as the weather is nice, and sometimes even when it’s not.

I don’t know how hot it was when I went to see the Paul Taylor Dance Company at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park a couple of days before I left for Maine (I was too scared to check), but it definitely wasn’t balmy, and I didn’t care, at least not too terribly much, since you can never see the Taylor company often enough, hot or not. I was particularly interested in their appearance at Lincoln Center Out of Doors because they were dancing Promethean Fire, a new work that had its New York premiere in March, and I was curious to see how it would hold up on a third viewing (I also saw an incomplete runthrough last year at Taylor’s downtown studio).

As soon as I got home, I looked up what I’d written about Promethean Fire in the Washington Post back in March:

Taylor must have been in one of his apocalyptic moods when he made this jolting piece, set to three of Leopold Stokowski’s orchestral transcriptions of Bach organ music. The first one, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, was used in “Fantasia,” which Taylor claims was his inspiration. Maybe, but nothing in “Fantasia” is remotely as hair-raising as the final tableau of the first section, in which the dancers pile up in the middle of the stage, looking for all the world like a heap of corpses, out of which Patrick Corbin and Lisa Viola emerge to dance a stunned pas de deux.

At the same time that Taylor claimed Fantasia was his inspiration, he specifically denied having had 9/11 in mind when making Promethean Fire, and I took him at his word. Like George Balanchine, he’s very careful about disclosing the “secret meanings” of his dances–he wants you to think about what’s happening on stage, not in your head. Nor was I inclined to suspect him of being coy.

Yet as I watched Promethean Fire under the stars at Lincoln Center, with low-flying jets gliding into LaGuardia Airport not so very far above my head, I started to have my doubts. It’s true that Taylor has always been drawn to the unspecifically apocalyptic (this, after all, is a man who once made a dance called Last Look). But as I watched the male dancers hoisting women over their heads in positions eerily evocative of flight, after which the whole ensemble crumpled into that terrifying center-stage heap, I found I couldn’t simply write off Promethean Fire as a piece of pure abstraction.

Once the applause had died down, I turned to the friend I’d brought with me.

“Paul says this isn’t about 9/11,” I told her.

“Yeah, right,” she replied.

Does it matter? Not a bit. A plotless dance is about what you think it’s about while you’re watching it. The next time, it might be about something completely different. What Paul Taylor was thinking about when he made Promethean Fire is his business, to be disclosed if and only if he chooses to spill the beans. I admire his refusal to give his viewers an easy escape path to equally easy meanings.

But…is Promethean Fire about 9/11? Your guess is–literally–as good as mine.

Time again for “In the Bag,” my personal variant of the old desert-island game, featuring a twist of the wrist. In this version, the emphasis is on immediate and arbitrary preference. You can put 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 death squad is 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 stuff in the bag?

As of this moment, here are my picks. I don’t mind admitting (well, maybe a little bit) that one of them is kind of dopey. Nevertheless, I swore I’d tell the whole truth and nothing but, so here goes nothing:

BOOK: Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

CLASSICAL MUSIC: Sir William Walton, First Symphony

PAINTING: John Singer Sargent, A Study from Life (Egyptian Girl)

MOVIE: Michael Caton-Jones, Doc Hollywood

POP ALBUM: The Band, The Band

Your turn.

“A certain amount of brick-throwing might even be a good thing. There comes a moment in the career of most artists, if they are any good, when attacks on their work take a form almost more acceptable than praise.”

Anthony Powell, Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant

Here I am again, back in New York and not quite up to speed, though August is a good month for a Manhattan-based critic to take a little time off. So far as I know, nothing much happened while I was gone, though I’m pleased (and a little surprised) to see that you kept on visiting www.terryteachout.com in my absence.

In case you’re wondering, I was visiting Isle au Haut, a Maine island where I spent several days holed up in a lighthouse built in 1907. Well, not quite–I was actually staying in the keeper’s house, which has been turned into an inn. No electricity, believe it or not, but the site is eye-bogglingly picturesque and the food is as good as it gets. (To find out more about the Keeper’s House Inn, go here.) It’s the only lodging available on the island, to which I had traveled in order to see whether I could locate the scene of a 1975 lithograph by Fairfield Porter called “Isle au Haut,” a copy of which hangs in my living room. I’ll be writing a piece about my adventures for The Wall Street Journal, so I don’t want to give too much away, but suffice it to say that no sooner did I discover that I’d have to spend a few hours tramping along a pathway known as the Goat Trail than I started to have second, third, and fourth thoughts….

En route to the Goat Trail, I looked at paintings. The Portland Museum of Art is currently hosting a first-class Fairfield Porter exhibition, and I spent an ecstatic hour looking at the Colby College Museum of Art’s John Marin collection, which is nothing short of spectacular. I also tried to visit the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, only to find the place locked up tight (they were hanging a show that opens today). So my vacation was far from unartful, though I made sure to spend plenty of time doing nothing but sitting in an Adirondack chair, watching the lobster boats off the shore of Isle au Haut. (I like to think one of them might have been piloted by Linda Greenlaw.) My goal was to gear down a bit–I haven’t taken a bonafide vacation for more than a decade–and I think I succeeded.

Not surprisingly, I toted a bag of books to Isle au Haut, two of which were good enough that I read them by candlelight. Both were memoirs, a genre notable in recent years for little more than gross self-indulgence, but these two, I’m pleased to say, turned out to be compelling exceptions to that dismal rule.

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free Press) is the story of Carlos Eire, a professor of religion at Yale who was a mere child when Fidel Castro took over Cuba, and who has woven his youthful memories of Havana life into a gorgeously written, unsettlingly passionate account of what it felt like for a little boy to watch his world turned inside out. George Howe Colt’s The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home (Scribner) is the story of a Cape Cod house and the family that spent its summers there, fishing and sailing and keeping unexpectedly dark secrets. It’s less intense than Waiting for Snow in Havana–Colt, after all, is a bred-in-the-bone WASP–but no less passionate or involving.

If you’re looking for a book or two to round out your summer reading, look no further.

One day I was trying to pick out a Mozart sonata on the piano. Like all poor pianists, I unconsciously emphasized the “sentiment” as I played. All at once, my father interrupted me.

“Whose music is that?”

“Mozart.”

“What a relief. I was afraid for a minute it was that imbecile Beethoven.” And, as I expressed my surprise at his severity, he went on: “Beethoven is positively indecent, the way he tells about himself. He doesn’t spare us either the pain in his heart or in his stomach. I have often wished I could say to him: what’s it to me if you’re deaf?”

Jean Renoir, Renoir: My Father

A funny thing happened on the way to the theater yesterday afternoon. I was sitting at my desk, sending one last e-mail before I departed for a Fringe Festival performance of a musical about Robert Blake, when the lights quivered, dimmed, and died. Figuring the power on my Upper West Side block had gone out, I put my shoes on, walked downstairs in the dark, caught a cab…and realized by the time we’d gone 20 blocks that it wasn’t just my neighborhood. Assuming that there wouldn’t be any shows to see that day, I told the cabby to turn around.

Eighteen hours later, here I am, very sweaty and insufficiently slept but otherwise none the worse for wear. The power’s back on in my neighborhood, some of the restaurants are open, and I’m in the process of figuring out what to do next. I was supposed to see Les Ballets Trockaderos de Monte Carlo, the drag ballet troupe, outdoors at Lincoln Center this evening, but I don’t know whether that performance will be taking place, or any others. I listened to a wind-up radio last night, so I have some idea of what’s been going on, but I only just managed to get back onto the Internet. It’s a strange feeling, being out of touch in an age when we make a fetish out of being in touch. If it weren’t so damned hot, I’d say I kind of liked it.

In any case, I plan to remain out of touch, but for another reason. I’m leaving tomorrow (I hope!) for a week’s vacation, both from New York and from “About Last Night,” and I won’t be taking my laptop with me, either. I need to rest up before the fall season starts. I’ll be back in the driver’s seat on Monday, August 25, and this page will remain visible and viewable in my absence.