Archives for September 2003

“The difference between a critic and a reviewer is, I forget.”

Wilfrid Sheed, Max Jamison

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

Apologies–I spent most of yesterday either sitting in cabs (the traffic in New York was insane all day long) or waiting for other people who were sitting in cabs. Hence I spent very little time sitting at my desk, which means that today’s edition of “About Last Night” lacks that discursive generosity to which you’ve become accustomed. Nevertheless, I’m here, and so are you, so let’s get going. Today’s topics, from crisp to concise: (1) Music from a charnel house. (2) Paul Desmond’s ghost. (3) Middle-aisling it with Felix Salmon. (2) Murder at the Corcoran Museum. (4) The latest almanac entry.

Say, where were you yesterday? The ratings were way down. Am I the only person in the blogosphere who didn’t take Monday off?

Edmund Wilson claimed that one of his greatest pleasures was telling a friend about an especially good book he’d read, so long it was (1) out of print, (2) rare, and (3) written in a language the friend didn’t speak.

Aside from being a hopeless monoglot, I’m too kind-hearted a soul to play that mildly sadistic game, but I do want to tell you about a recording I heard the other day that you almost certainly haven’t heard, and very possibly will never hear. It’s the first recording of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, made by Yevgeny Mravinsky and the Leningrad Philharmonic just four months after they gave the 1937 premiere. So far as I know, this recording has never been issued, much less reissued, in the West. It turned up a few years ago as a bonus CD in an obscure Japanese box set devoted to Mravinsky’s early recordings, and a collector I know burned a copy and presented it to me Saturday afternoon at the Mencken Day celebrations in Baltimore.

If you’re a Mravinsky buff or a Shostakovich scholar, the inherent interest of this performance will be self-evident. If not…well, give this some thought. Shostakovich wrote the Fifth Symphony not long after Stalin’s culture thugs put him in the hot seat by attacking his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District in Pravda. All at once, Soviet Russia’s most celebrated composer had a bull’s-eye hung around his neck, and for the rest of his life he would be haunted by the memory of the fear he first knew on that terrible day. Shostakovich was well aware that the KGB could drag him away in the middle of the night, never to be seen again, just like they’d already disposed of tens of thousands of his fellow Russians. He wrote the Fifth Symphony when that fear was still fresh and raw, and though a Communist “critic” (i.e, hack) dubbed it “a Soviet artist’s creative reply to just criticism,” everybody with ears to hear knew that it was a lament for Russia.

Years later, Mravinsky was rehearsing the slow movement of the Fifth Symphony with the Leningrad Philharmonic, an occasion about which one of the violinists told the following story:

Mravinsky turned around to the violin sections and said, “You’re playing this tremolo with the wrong color, you haven’t got the necessary intensity. Have you forgotten what this music is about and when it was born?”

Can you hear any of that in the 1938 recording? I’m not sure. My experience of it is colored too sharply by what I know of the circumstances under which it was made. I have no doubt that beneath the scratch and grind of the old shellac discs, I can hear an orchestra playing with fire and commitment, performing a still-unfamiliar piece on which the ink was still barely dry–and playing it as if they knew it was a masterpiece, which of course it was. But what were they thinking? What was Mravinsky thinking? I cannot imagine my way back to the time and place in which that recording was made, in a country ankle-deep with the blood of innocents, mere weeks after a premiere performance at the end of which the audience cheered for a half-hour.

I dropped my new Alex Katz lithograph off yesterday afternoon at a framing shop in my neighborhood. I do a good bit of business there, and so I struck up a conversation with the fellow who runs the store. He’s a refugee from Afghanistan, and we got to talking about how that country has suffered–first at the hands of the Russians, then at the hands of the Taliban. I mentioned that the Taliban had banned all secular music from Afghanistan. He shook his head in disgust. “You cannot live like that,” he said. “You cannot. You know I still have family over there? They tell me there is much poverty, many poor people who are lucky if they eat twice a day–but they’re happy now, because they don’t have to live like that anymore.”

I don’t know if my framer much cares for Western music, and I know he doesn’t care for Russians, but I think he might possibly appreciate my new recording of the Shostakovich Fifth Symphony. Even if he didn’t like the music, I think he’d understand what it must have meant for a man to write a piece like that, and for a hundred other men to play it, in the midst of such horror. I know I can’t appreciate it, not really–and I hope I never do.

I had dinner on Sunday with a friend of mine who is the daughter of a guitarist who played quite a bit with the late Paul Desmond, the alto saxophonist of the Dave Brubeck Quartet and my favorite jazz musician ever. She’d recently been interviewed by Doug Ramsey, who is at work on a biography of Desmond, so we got to chatting about his life and music. Then we strolled around the corner to a Japanese restaurant, and just as we were sitting down, we noticed that the background music was “Le Souk,” the last track on the first side of the Brubeck Quartet’s Jazz Goes to College, the very first jazz album I ever heard. (My father owned a battered copy which I found in his record cabinet some 35 years ago, thereby changing my life beyond recognition…but that’s another story for another day.)

We both heard it at exactly the same moment. Then my friend looked at me, grinned, and said, “Paul’s here.”

Felix Salmon
has taken note of my recent postings on Zankel Hall, and begs to differ with my suggestion that the joint needs a center aisle. I’m not sure I’m convinced, but he definitely makes a strong case, not to mention witty and well-informed.

Blake Gopnik, art critic of the Washington Post, recently torched and sewed salt on the ashes of “Beyond the Frame: Impressionism Revisited: The Sculptures of J. Seward Johnson, Jr.,” a show of three-dimensional sculptural renderings of impressionist paintings currently on display at Washington’s Corcoran Museum of Art. I’ll cut right to the rough stuff:

Once upon a time–as recently as the ’70s and even later–the Corcoran was a significant force on the national art scene. That reputation has slipped badly over the last few years; when I’m on the road, people often ask me, “What’s with the Corcoran these days? Is it still around?”

And now, thanks to the prankster art of J. Seward Johnson, the Corcoran has fallen even further. It has tumbled all the way from nobody to laughingstock.

Go here to read the whole thing. I regret to say that it sounds all too convincing.