Archives for September 17, 2003

Kindly note the time stamp. Contrary to the suspicions of certain of my loyal readers, I do sleep from time to time, but Tuesday was yet another crazy-busy day, climaxed by a cultural double-header–I went to see Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation in Chelsea and the Bad Plus at the Village Vanguard, with sushi in between–from which I literally just returned. So instead of serving up a made dish, I’ll scratch down my first impressions of both events, followed by an item I wrote this morning and the latest almanac entry, in the hopes that the immediacy will excuse the haste.

About Lost in Translation I don’t have much to add to what most of the critics have been saying, which is that it is a thoughtful, elegant, amazingly self-assured piece of work. I’m as suspicious of bandwagons as the next guy, but anyone capable of writing and directing a film like this is the real deal, regardless of her last name.

Two observations:

(1) I love the way Coppola catches the strangeness of surfaces in Tokyo–the subtly disorienting quality of a city that looks Western at first glance, but isn’t.

(2) Bill Murray really is as good as everybody says, partly because he looks so nakedly middle-aged. The lines in his face are like the rings in a tree stump–you can read his age off them. (In another half-dozen years he’ll be a dead ringer for W.H. Auden.) I kept trying to figure out who he reminded me of, and all at once two names popped into my head: Jeff Bridges and Robert Mitchum, both of whom reek of that same barely penetrable disillusion. In fact, Murray’s performance is just inches away from film noir–I can almost imagine him playing Philip Marlowe, or Bridges’ part in The Fabulous Baker Boys.

As for the Bad Plus, about whom I held forth in this space just the other day, I can only say that there isn’t another jazz piano trio in the world that sounds nearly as fresh. Not that their music is “jazz” in any strict sense of the word, since it draws no less deeply from the wells of contemporary pop and 20th-century classical music. Ethan Iverson, in particular, has liberated himself completely from the impressionism-derived harmonies and blues clich

My editor and designer at Yale University Press are cooking up a dust jacket for A Terry Teachout Reader, the volume of my selected essays coming out next spring. First, it was going to be an all-typography jacket, which was perfectly fine by me, so of course that wouldn’t do. Then they wanted to put my photo on the front cover, which I nixed without hesitation. Then they asked me what I’d like to do. Since all the essays included in the book are about American artists (we actually planned at one point to call it All American: A Terry Teachout Reader), the thought occurred to me that it might be fun to put one of my favorite works of American art on the cover. To this end, I suggested four pieces that seemed to me variously evocative of American art and culture in the modern and post-modern eras.

The first, logically enough, is my celebrated John Marin etching, Downtown. The El, a semi-cubist portrayal of downtown Manhattan circa 1921.

The second, Fairfield Porter’s 1971 color lithograph Broadway (not part of my collection, alas), is a more contemporary variation on a similar theme.

Finally, two of Stuart Davis’ jazz-flavored paintings struck me as eminently suitable. The Whitney Museum’s Owh! in San Pao contains snippets of text that I thought highly suitable to a book about American art. And Ready-to-Wear, which belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago, seemed to me particularly appropriate because of the color scheme, in which red, white, and blue predominate.

I sent all four links off to Yale last week, but haven’t heard back yet. What do you think?

“If intolerable alternatives are to be avoided, life must achieve various types of often uneasy equilibrium. I believe this deeply: but it is not a doctrine which inspires the young. They seek absolutes; and that usually, sooner or later, ends in blood.”

Sir Isaiah Berlin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin