Archives for December 2003

Eric Felten has a very interesting piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about advertisers who pitch to the 18-to-34 cohort, and why they’re foolish to do so. This paragraph is particularly relevant:

A few years ago the Chicago Symphony commissioned a survey that found the average age of its concert-goers to be 55. But the orchestra’s president, Henry Fogel, didn’t fall for the actuarial fallacy. Instead he checked similar research done 30 years earlier and found that the average age at that time was also 55. “There is simply a time in one’s life when subscribing to a symphony orchestra becomes both desirable and possible,” says Mr. Fogel, now president of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Acting on this insight, the Chicago Symphony is wooing boomers who, though they may still enjoy their old Beatles records, long for a new musical experience. The orchestra has targeted new subscribers by advertising on, of all places, a local “classic rock” station.

Read the whole thing here. I think Felton is dead right, but as one who has blogged aggressively about the need for arts organizations to target and capture a younger audience, I should point out that in the context of symphony orchestras and opera companies, “younger” means “younger than 70,” not “18 to 34.” And when it comes to creating a younger audience, don’t forget that arts education in the public schools is in decline. The question everybody is asking, or ought to be asking, is this: how hard is it to persuade people of a certain age (i.e., mine) to make a serious commitment to an art form about which they know little or nothing going in?

I just wrote a piece for Commentary (I’ll link to it when it’s available on line) about how I became interested in the visual arts. I am an adult convert–I didn’t start looking at painting and sculpture until I was 40 years old. So it can happen. But I was an aesthete going in: I was already habituated to the notion of seeking pleasure through high art. If the Chicago Symphony is counting on there being enough people like me in Chicagoland to pay its bills in the coming decade, I have a feeling that they’re whistling Schoenberg.

I’m reading the revised edition of City Comforts: How to Build an Urban Village, a book by David Sucher, who blogs, logically enough, at City Comforts. Sucher has popped up on this site before, usually in connection with modern architecture. He can be quite thought-provokingly testy, in the very best tradition of bloggers. Take a look at his blog–and definitely buy his book. It’s a manual of dos and don’ts about urban planning on a human scale, and it is immensely readable (not to mention beautifully designed).

You may not think this topic interests you, but if you live in or near a city, it does whether you know it or not, and Sucher has an uncanny knack for simplifying complicated issues by reducing them to practical essentials. I’ve never read anything so illuminating about what he calls “the sociable city.”

To order the book, go here. I strongly recommend it.

Cinetrix writes about obsessive filmgoers:

You’ve seen them, too. Perhaps even dodged them. Unlike film students, they don’t go to the movies because they’re supposed to, they go to the movies because they have to. The darkness is asylum and escape from a world that’s never just like it is on the silver screen.

(Read the whole thing here.)

No doubt I have these tendencies, too, though I never noticed them until the afternoon a few years ago when I attended a matinee devoted exclusively to Warner Bros. cartoons. Granted, this was in New York, but as I stood in the lobby and looked around me at the visibly peculiar souls drawn by the prospect of spending an hour and a half with Bugs, Daffy, and Wile E. Coyote, I thought to myself, What must I look like to them?

I had this thoroughly unsettling experience in mind when I wrote the first paragraph of “What Randolph Scott Knew,” an essay about the Westerns of Budd Boetticher included in A Terry Teachout Reader (preorder your copy today!).

If you long to meet odd people, it’s hard to top Manhattanites who go to movies on weekdays. To be sure, I am among their number, but at least I have an excuse: I write about movies. The viewers I have in mind are the pure-hearted obsessives, overwhelmingly male and uniformly unattractive, who flock to revival houses on sunny spring afternoons to take in the latest week-long tribute to Alexander Dovzhenko, Ida Lupino, or maybe Edgar G. Ulmer–it scarcely matters, since the same folks show up every time, no matter what’s showing….

It isn’t just filmheads, of course. Danceheads and operaheads are the same way, and since I partake of all of the above obsessions, plus a few others, what does that make me? But at least in New York you know you’re not alone. I can’t think of another city where it’s possible to satisfy so many different obsessions so thoroughly, or to be a member of so many different social groups whose membership doesn’t overlap at all. I first noticed this at my fortiety birthday party (one of the very few parties, incidentally, that I’ve ever thrown, or had thrown for me). I didn’t know a room could have so many different corners, much less that each could be inhabited with its very own gaggle of recognizably similar people.

Perhaps all my obsessions cancel one another out and leave in their wake the residue of an approximately normal human being. But I wouldn’t count on it.

Erin O’Connor, who blogs at Critical Mass, writes this morning about The Human Stain–the novel, not the movie–from the point of view of “the human cost of the culture of campus speech codes.” In light of my unenthusiastic earlier posting on the film, it’s hugely interesting to read what she has to say, and even more interesting to read this striking quote from the book:

There is something fascinating about what moral suffering can do to someone who is in no obvious way a weak or feeble person. It’s more insidious even than what physical illness can do, because there is no morphine drip or spinal block or radical surgery to alleviate it. Once you’re in its grip, it’s as though it will have to kill you for you to be free of it. Its raw realism is like nothing else.

Read O’Connor’s own trenchant posting here. And if you haven’t bookmarked Critical Mass, do so. It’s indispensable.

“I know of nothing more beautiful than the Appassionata, I could hear it every day. It is marvellous, unearthly music. Every time I hear these notes, I think with pride and perhaps childlike naivete, that it is wonderful what man can accomplish. But I cannot listen to music often, it affects my nerves. I want to say amiable stupidities and stroke the heads of the people who can create such beauty in a filthy hell. But today is not the time to stroke people’s heads; today hands descend to split skulls open, split them open ruthlessly, although opposition to all violence is our ultimate ideal–it is a hellishly hard task.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, quoted in Maxim Gorky, Days with Lenin

I reviewed the openings of two off-Broadway shows, Neil Simon’s Rose’s Dilemma
and Bill Irwin’s The Regard Evening, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

About the first I was tepid:

“Rose’s Dilemma” is worth seeing, albeit for a sad reason: Mr. Simon is 76 and in fragile health, and my guess is that he intended it as his farewell to the theater. The self-pitying tone of the play, which tells the story of Rose Steiner (Patricia Hodges), an aging, hopelessly blocked playwright who is haunted by the imagined ghost of Walsh McLaren, her old lover (John Cullum), leaves little doubt of that. “You sound like a caricature of yourself that fell off the wall at Sardi’s,” Rose tells Walsh at one point. I winced, suspecting that Mr. Simon’s satirical gun was aimed at his own forehead.

Unlike Rose, Mr. Simon is still in there pitching, but he’s lost his curveball. “With Neil Simon,” the playwright David Ives once told me, “you can sort of walk out of the theater and hum the jokes, like humming the tunes from a musical.” Alas, the jokes in the first act of “Rose’s Dilemma” are tuneless, though their metronomic rhythm–setup, payoff, setup, payoff–keeps clacking away relentlessly. That’s the problem: The first act feels like a comedy, only it isn’t funny….

About the second I wasn’t:

[T]his revival of “The Regard of Flight,” Mr. Irwin’s 1982 spoof of postmodern theater and its malcontents, runs through Jan. 25. That gives you plenty of time to see it at least once, and preferably twice. Not only is it a hoot and a half, but Mr. Irwin has tacked on a brief afterpiece in which the three characters of “The Regard of Flight” grapple ineptly with life in the age of e-mail and cell phones. It’s superfluous–the original show is perfect–but it does give you 20 extra minutes in the company of Mr. Irwin and his droll colleagues, and that’s good enough for me…

No link, so to read the whole thing, buy this morning’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and regale yourself with a wide variety of arts and culture coverage, all for a dollar. It’s the best deal in town.

A blogger out there refers to me as “Terry ‘Unpronounceable’ Teachout.” In fact, my last name is pronounced exactly like the two words of which it is constructed: TEACH-out.

OGIC, by the way, is pronounced like “logic” without the “l.”

Aren’t you glad we cleared that up?

I’ve gotten a lot of terrific mail in recent days, and haven’t had time to do anything with it. My plan is to devote most of next week’s blogging to the best of your letters, with occasional interspersed comments.

If you haven’t heard from me, that’s why…and watch this space!