Archives for September 2003

As you know, I won’t be here tomorrow–I am, in fact, leaving town later today to fly down to Raleigh, N.C., to spend the weekend snarfing down barbecue and looking at Carolina Ballet–and since it happens that I’ll also be gone twice more after that, speechifying in Connecticut and St. Louis, I had the bright idea of inviting one of my faithful guest bloggers to run things on Fridays for the next three weeks.

To this end, I have handed the keys to Our Girl in Chicago. Beneath her cloak of pseudonymity, Our Girl (who lives, duh, in Chicago) is a sweet and lovely young thing, wise and good, who…but why listen to me? Here’s the Girl herself:

OGIC is a thirty-something dilettante (in the best sense of the word, she hopes) with experience as an editor, critic, graduate student, and teacher. Naturally drawn to the medium-hot centers of this world, she is a fierce advocate of her adopted Second City but still feels at home when she visits her one-time stomping grounds of Manhattan. A serious media addiction helps her keeps close tabs on the red-hot from her comfy but happening city by the lake. She worries she should shoulder more guilt about her guilty pleasures–which include pro hockey, cop and lawyer shows, Las Vegas, and the colorful adventures of Travis McGee–but they’re all just so damn pleasurable. More presentably, she’s into Romantic poetry, Henry James, landscape painting, modern dance (with and without shoes, if you know what she means), and Edward Gorey. But she’s not always sure she doesn’t have some of those items in the wrong column.

OGIC’s blogging may, how shall we say, somewhat leaven the mix here at “About Last Night” with more pop culture and specifically Buffy references–well, she’ll try to keep those under control. Besides the inevitable fluff, OGIC will blog a lot about literary topics: writing, reading, publishing, reviewing, history, reputations. She’s especially excited about using ABL as a venue for enthusing out loud about overlooked or forgotten books that she loves. That said, she’s certainly not above the occasional snipe (no, she’s not using that other s-word) when sniping is called for–and let’s face it, sometimes it really is called for.

See what I mean?

The rest of today’s posts are mine, but Our Girl in Chicago will be taking charge at 12:01 tonight, and all postings committed on Friday will be entirely her fault. (Aside from being more charmingly written than mine, OGIC’s postings will be signed “ourgirlinchicago,” just as mine are signed “terryteachout.”)

I’ll be back on Monday morning, slightly the worse for wear but as aesthetic as ever. In the meantime…you go, Girl!

Now for today’s topics, from tremulous to self-confident: (1) Fading photographs. (2) Ronald Reagan, man of letters. (3) Somebody else’s bag. (4) The latest almanac entry.

Over to you, OGIC! I’m out of here….

Courtesy of artsjournal.com, my invaluable host, a story from The Art Newspaper about a problem rarely considered by anyone other than museum conservators:

All colour photographs fade. According to best estimates, the average colour print has a shelf life of about 200 years. Now, in Basel, Switzerland, the Cesar Foundation, chaired by Claudio Cesar, an American photography collector who runs a company that specialises in coloured glass is trying to reverse this deterioration….

The problem is that the materials of c-print colour photography, chemical reactants which create the image, are complex organic compounds which are unstable and decompose over a long period. Unlike the constituents of black and white photographs or oil paints, the ingredients of c-prints continue to undergo chemical reactions in perpetuity rather than stabilise….

The Cesar Foundation is proposing a two-part solution. First, photographs should be stored in digital form, so that a new copy can be printed when the original fades. Second, the foundation’s scientists have invented a software programme and device that scans non-digital, “normal” colour photographs which have aged, and then prints off a version which restores the original colour.

I almost hate to bring up Frank Lloyd Wright again, but reading this story made me think of Fallingwater, the Wright house whose conservators have had to work fearfully hard to keep from collapsing. Commenting on this in an earlier post, I asked, “Is a great painting less great because it makes use of innovative but chemically unstable pigments that change over time?” I had at the back of my mind the awkward but undeniable fact—astutely pointed out by the neo-Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson in his remarkable little book Painting and Reality—that all paintings are evanescent, due in the fullness of time first to fade, then to disintegrate. This basic fact of art is one nobody likes to admit, much less think about. A similar discomfort is now inspiring choreographers and their companies to struggle mightily (and honorably, though not always successfully) to preserve dances far beyond what once would have been their normal life span. It has also led museum conservators to engage in heroic acts of preservation–and, not infrequently, in ill-considered acts of mutilation.

Exactly what are such folk trying to preserve? Sometimes it’s all too clear that a collector’s interests are fiduciary–that he wants to maintain the value of an object for which he may have paid dearly. More often, though, I think their intentions are reasonably pure. If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation—I feel it myself—but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you’re pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose. Needless to say, this is a problem without a solution. The only thing you can do is fiddle with the proportions and try to get them right, or at least righter.

For what it’s worth, I currently own 13 pieces of visual art, all but two of them works on paper—etchings, lithographs, screenprints. Of these, six are by living artists, two of whom I know. I won’t say that’s a perfect average, but I do think I’ve put at least some of my money where my mouth is.

I’ve been looking through Reagan: A Life in Letters, a book whose publication will no doubt startle a lot of people unaware that Ronald Reagan was the most prolific presidential correspondent of modern times. I’m not talking about the kind of “letter” produced in batch lots by a team of secretaries equipped with autopens, either. Of the 1,100 letters in this 934-page book, some 80% were written by hand, another 15% dictated. The editors had “over 5,000 genuine Reagan letters” to choose from, and they estimate that another 5,000 or so have yet to surface.

Put aside for a moment your opinion of Reagan (either way) and think instead about the implications of those numbers. Speaking as a biographer, I can assure you that this is an extraordinarily large number of letters to have been written by any public figure, much less one who wasn’t a professional writer–though Reagan, as it happens, spent a number of years writing his own speeches, radio commentaries, and syndicated columns, and would also have been perfectly capable of writing his own memoirs without assistance had he been so inclined. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of any other 20th-century president who left behind so large a body of informal writing, and few who wrote as much in any medium. Theodore Roosevelt, probably Nixon, possibly Calvin Coolidge (who was, believe it or not, the best by-his-own-hand presidential prose stylist in modern times), and…who else? Nobody comes to mind.

On paper, Reagan was unselfconscious, fluent, surprisingly candid, and rarely eloquent–most of his best-remembered speeches were written by other people, and I doubt that anything in Reagan: A Life in Letters will make it into the next edition of Bartlett’s. Still, I have no doubt whatsoever that his next biographer will quarry this volume assiduously. I’m about to start work on a biography of another non-writer, Louis Armstrong, who left behind a large body of correspondence, and I can tell you that the existence of Armstrong’s letters (of which several hundred have been preserved) is one of the main reasons why I decided to write a book about him. It’s hard to write about the great jazz musicians of the past precisely because they rarely left behind that kind of material. Unless they happened to be interviewed on tape by intelligent, well-informed journalists (of which there aren’t nearly enough) or deposed for oral-history projects, we have few if any reliable documents of the way they expressed themselves off stage. We only know them from their work, and while that’s the most important thing, it doesn’t tell you everything a biographer wants and needs to know.

Beyond this, of course, the mere fact that Reagan chose to put so much energy, even as president, into corresponding with friends, colleagues, and plain old pen pals is fascinating in and of itself. So is the introduction to Reagan: A Life in Letters, in which the editors describe his letter-writing routine in some detail. As I worked on The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, I never ceased to be astonished by the sheer volume of Mencken’s correspondence, and I couldn’t help but wonder how he managed to churn out so many letters while simultaneously functioning as a full-time writer. I’m even more mystified that Reagan wrote all those personal letters–most of them by hand–while serving as president.

I also can’t help but wonder how the next generation of biographers will approach the next generation of subjects, now that e-mail has essentially replaced snail mail (and now that public officials are routinely warned not to keep diaries for fear that they’ll be subpoenaed in court cases). I wonder, too, whether there will ever again be so self-revealing a politician as Ronald Reagan, though that seems an odd word to use about a man whose colleagues all found him difficult to know. Peggy Noonan thought so, too, and offered a plausible explanation of his opaqueness in her deft life of Reagan, When Character Was King:

Ronald Reagan once had deep friendships and close friends. He had men who knew all about him, but by the time he’d reached the presidency they were dead. He’d outlived them.

True enough, I suspect, but not the whole truth. Could it be that Reagan was simply more comfortable writing to people than talking to them? I don’t know–I never met him–but henceforth, anyone who tries to make sense of Reagan the man will have to start by explaining the very existence of these letters.

Not only has the cancer that is “In the Bag” spread to numerous other blogs, but Sean Nelson, one of my faithful readers, has taken to playing solitaire and sending me the results. I particularly liked his latest list:

CLASSICAL CD: Pablo Casals, Bach Cello Suites

POP SONG: Etta James, All I Could Do Was Cry

PAINTING: Paul Klee, Ancient Sound, Abstract on Black

FILM: Baz Luhrmann, Strictly Ballroom

BOOK: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

Any number can play.

To all of you who wrote identifying “Today’s Installment” as Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find, my congratulations. (I even lured a couple of fellow bloggers out of the woodwork!) If I do this again, I’ll choose something considerably trickier.

A special prize for sheer unscrupulousness goes to Kevin Joyce, who wrote:

Doesn’t everyone know about Google now? I found the author, and story, in ten seconds by typing “orange sports section” and clicking Search. Not to take anything away from Ms. Carew et al., but next time, please keep us honest and find an unGooglable source.

What a scamp.

By the way, nobody wrote to say that they remembered the one-sentence-at-a-time serialization of Ulysses in The New Yorker. I can’t even begin to tell you how old that makes me feel.

“Admiration, n.: Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.”

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Things are silting up here as I prepare for my long weekend in Raleigh (I have two more pieces to write before I can get on the plane and go), so I’ll be keeping it fairly short. Today’s topics, from testy to zesty: (1) Zankel Hall reviewed–by other people. (2) “Today’s Installment” explained, sort of. (3) Today’s installment. (4) Last night’s playlist. (5) The latest almanac entry.

You know what I want. You know who you are. You know what to do.

I haven’t been back to Zankel Hall since the media preview concert–unlike the music critics, I have other things to do–but I’ve been keeping a close eye on what’s been written about New York City’s newest concert hall since it opened a couple of weeks ago. Generally speaking, the reviews accord pretty well with what I said about the hall here and on NPR’s Performance Today. In brief, most critics like the design but are variously skeptical about the acoustics. Beyond that, the consensus is all over the place, sort of like a drunken ballerina.

Unlike certain well-known bloggers, I’m disinclined to trash my print-media colleagues (I have to live with them, after all), but I do want to make a few, ahem, general observations about what’s been written up to now:

(1) Most critics have discussed the appearance of the hall without attempting to evaluate its functionality. Were the seats comfortable? Are the aisles wide enough? How hard is it to get in and out of the place? Will the interior design wear well–and does it seem to have any effect on the perceived acoustics? These folk are henceforth on Double Secret Probation, and will be watched closely for further signs of shortsightedness.

(2) A few critics had nothing whatsoever to say about the acoustics, or commented on them without drawing any distinction between the differing responses of the hall to amplified and unamplified sound. These clowns get the Lifetime Booby Prize–a dunce hat, nailed on their heads–and are permanently disqualified from any further discussion of Zankel Hall.

(3) Most critics (but not all!) at least mentioned the subway noise that leaks into the hall during performances, and one, Barbara Jepson in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (go here to read her piece), singled it out for extensive and unfavorable comment, suggesting that until the noise can be lessened significantly, the success of the hall must remain in doubt. Good for her. (In fact, I fear the noise problem will become more obtrusive over time, not less.)

I might add that at least one Carnegie Hall head, and probably several, should be gently lowered to the chopping block at the earliest opportunity. Anybody who didn’t think noise wouldn’t be a huge problem in a hall that is nine feet from the nearest subway tunnel is a quarterwit.

(4) Nearly everybody has praised Zankel Hall’s multicultural programming to the skies. In my opinion, it’s sucker bait for the print media. I’m not saying the programs aren’t good–some are, some aren’t–but come on, folks, this is New York City, where every imaginable kind of music can already be heard all over town. Not only are performing arts centers soooooo Seventies, but Manhattan was the biggest and best performing arts center in the world long before Zankel Hall switched on its escalators. In any case, presenting a lot of different kinds of art in one place doesn’t make any of them any better. Does Emmylou Harris need a Good Housekeeping seal of approval from Carnegie Hall to be considered the greatest country singer of her generation? Puh-leeze. And just because the (mostly classical) critics who’ve been writing about Zankel Hall don’t get out much doesn’t mean the rest of us have to bow and scrape before them.

So one mild cheer to the management of Carnegie Hall for having discovered something the rest of us already knew about, and another when they figure out how to make amplified music sound halfway decent in a hall that so far doesn’t appear to be very well suited to it.