Archives for December 7, 2003

“With her brightest students Miss Batterson was always on terms of uneasy, disappointed admiration; their work never seemed to be helping their development as much as the work of the stupider students was helping theirs. Every year there was a little war–an eighteenth century one, though–about whether the school magazine was printing only the work of a clique. Miss Batterson was perfectly good-hearted in this: if you cannot discriminate between good and bad yourself, it cannot help seeming somewhat poor-spirited and arbitrary of other people to do so. Aesthetic discrimination is no pleasanter, seems no more just and rational to those discriminated against, than racial discrimination; the popular novelist would be satisfied with his income from serials and scenarios and pocket books if people would only see that he is a better writer than Thomas Mann.”

Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

Joseph Epstein, my favorite essayist, has a witty and thoughtful essay in the current Weekly Standard:

Funny, but I do look Jewish, at least to myself, and more and more so as the years go by. I’m fairly sure I didn’t always look Jewish, not when I was a boy, or possibly even when a young man, though I have always carried around my undeniably Jewish name, which was certainly clue enough. But today, gazing at my face in the mirror, I say to myself, yes, no question about it, this is a very Jewish-looking gent….

I have always wondered what it might be like not to be Jewish but to have a Jewish-sounding name–Sarah Jacobson, Norman Davis, Mark Steyn–and often be taken for Jewish. First, there would be the worry that someone might hold your being Jewish (when you’re not) against you; and, second, there is the discomfort entailed in getting special treatment from another Jew or philo-Semite because that he or she thinks you are someone you are not. I once saw a man who was a dead ringer for the old actor Cesar Romero wearing a bright red T-shirt with bold white lettering that read “I Am Not Cesar Romero.” Perhaps people with Jewish-sounding names ought to wear T-shirts, or at least carry business cards, that read, “I’m Sidney Ross, But Not Really Jewish.” Glenn Gould, whose name and face and manner all falsely suggest Jewishness, could have used such a T-shirt.

Read the whole thing here.

So far as I know, I’ve never been “taken for Jewish,” nor do I expect to be. I doubt if anyone in the United States looks more goyische than me, and “Terry Teachout” is roughly as Jewish-sounding as “Thurston Howell III.” I do, however, have highly cultivated tastes for lox and bagels, the fiction of Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Jewish jokes of the way-too-close-to-the-knuckle sort, and it also happens that I’m the music critic for a magazine Jewish enough to have been mentioned by name in Annie Hall. I keep hoping that some raving anti-Semite who only knows me on paper will jump to the wrong conclusion, thus allowing me to reply, “No, but I wish I were.” Alas, it hasn’t happened yet….

I know a very WASPy-looking WASP musician, by the way, who used to play a lot of recitals at synagogues, where she would invariably be approached at the post-concert reception by at least one old lady who told her, “You don’t look Jewish, darling.” Eventually she came up with the perfect response: “I know, that’s what everybody says!”

UPDATE: Cup of Chicha links to this posting, and (as always) adds some intriguing comments of her own. Take a look.

Doug McLennan of artsjournal.com, our prize-winning host site, has installed a search button in the top module of the right-hand column. Click on CLICK HERE TO SEARCH SITE and you will be taken to a Google-driven search engine that allows you to search the “About Last Night” archives at will.

Try it, you’ll like it.

A reader writes, apropos of my recent posting
on the postmodern decline of the movie theater:

I decided to brave the storm and go to Times Square to see the latest version of Fellowship of the Rings. Made me think of your latest blog about the demise of the movie theatre. Sorry, this may date me, but for me there’s nothing that will replace sitting in the dark watching a world unfold before me larger than life. I must get it from my mom, who was a teenager in the forties and like most of her friends lived in the movies. She was not content to keep it to herself either – I first saw ‘Gone With the Wind’ on the big screen when I was 9. You forget that for the young, going to a movie theatre is a social thing of getting out of the damn house and even if the whole concept of the dinner -n- movie gets tiring after the third decade, it still gives a couple of strangers something to discuss before they really know each other.

Point taken, and it explains why the movie theater remains a popular destination among the young–why, in fact, they are the only demographic group that still matters to Hollywood. For teenagers, theaters are affordable meeting places whose appeal has little or nothing to do with the aesthetic appeal of Film as Art. This suggests that as the median age of Americans continues to soar (driven by the graying of the baby boomers), the trend away from theatergoing will increase.

Needless to say–or perhaps not–I, too, will miss the uniquely enveloping experience my correspondent so beautifully describes. I think that was part and parcel of the original appeal of movies: the fact that we saw them on a large screen, sitting in the dark. And maybe that helps explain why the appeal of theatergoing has diminished for me, since the theaters of my high school and college days were smallish-screen multiplexes. The transition from a small multiplex screen to home viewing is pretty easily made. I’ve mostly made it, though I feel the tug of the old ways on the rarer-than-rare occasions when I get a chance to see a widescreen Technicolor western in a large theater. Such films were not made to be seen at home–and that’s the only place we get to see them nowadays.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies on TV in the past couple of days, by the way (that’s what catching a bad cold does to you), and it’s been interesting to see which ones work and which ones don’t. Black-and-white films shot in pre-widescreen aspect ratios almost always translate well to the small screen–even William Wellman’s Yellow Sky, a Gregory Peck Western whose early scenes are conspicuously landscape-driven. Widescreen color films tend not to work unless their subject matter is intimate, as in the case of The Cincinnati Kid, the Norman Jewison-Steve McQueen film about big-time poker players. And indie-type flicks, significantly but not surprisingly, always work: Amy’s Orgasm and Kissing Jessica Stein could have been made for TV.

Which reminds me that I’ve been meaning to draw your attention to Cinetrix’s recent posting about the use of music in Magnolia, and why it’s smarter and more essentially cinematic than the fruits of “the so-called renaissance of the movie musical.” V. smart, v. much worth reading.