Archives for January 29, 2004

A reader writes:

I must thank you for listing Dance in America: Acts of Ardor in your top five. I just finished watching it and was overwhelmed. I really did enjoy it. I am a relative new comer to art appreciation and I have been somewhat skeptical about whether I would enjoy dance. That show definitely changed my mind and to think it was on the same day that I received your book The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken
in the mail. I am sure I will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed the Paul Taylor Dance Company.

I sure hope so. The pleasure is all mine. And for those of you who missed Acts of Ardor, some stations are replaying it. (In New York, for example, it’ll be shown again next Tuesday at 12:30 a.m. on Channel 13.) Click on the Top Five link for more information.

Another reader writes, apropos of my Wall Street Journal piece about the Lake Shore Limited:

My first
experience with trains was last March, when I traveled with a friend from
Chicago to Tucson on the Texas Eagle, a three-day trip. The wonderful
thing about a train trip is that you can’t possibly do anything else except
eat, drink, and socialize. We spent afternoons in the lounge car, grumbling
that we were behind schedule (as train passengers are obliged to) and
exchanging rumors that the conductor had told someone that there would
be a smoke break in St. Louis, or that we would make up time after San
Antonio. At 4 o’clock, the dining steward walked through to take dinner
reservations. My friend and I were always seated with two other people, so
as not to waste space at the tables (which, happily, are still appointed with
fresh flowers). One evening, we dined with a delightful older lady named
Margaret, who, upon hearing that coach passengers were not provided with
a shower, invited us to the use the one in her sleeper car–“if the steward
tries to stop you, tell him your Aunt Margaret is traveling in the sleeper and
said you could use it.” In the evenings after dinner, we sat in the lounge
until 1 or 2 o’clock drinking bottle after bottle of dreadful Amtrak
Cabernet, talking about philosophy and staring out at the Texas night.
While I never experienced the grand old days of really first-class train
service, I believe it is still the most civilized way to travel. It was nice to
read about your experience and your other reader’s train memories on the
weblog.

I’ve been getting other nice letters from people who remember their own train rides, past and present, with great fondness. Thanks to you all for writing.

Finally, this wildly amusing speculation:

I have to admit, there was a period of time in which I thought Our Girl
was just Joseph Epstein having a little fun pretending to be a woman.
All that gushing about Henry James… But your recent statements
concerning Our Girl looking ravishing (or something like that) while
listening to Johnny Cash (and not Schubert’s “Trout”) have been poking
huge holes in my thesis. Either that, or your blog is no longer
grounded in reality.
I may tune in to your radio appearance and miss all those cool
Super-Bowl commercials just to hear my best guess as to Our Girl’s
identity smashed once and for all.

Fond as I am of Joe Epstein, he isn’t nearly as pretty as OGIC. And she’s taller, too.

I’m surprised by the response to my recent list of books I read for relaxation and comfort. I mean, it wasn’t even my idea–I was just responding to a curious reader! Nevertheless, fellow bloggers from far and wide (starting, naturally, with Our Girl) have chimed in with comments, demurrers, and lists of their own. You can see some of the latter by going here (scroll down), here (ditto), here, and here.

Seeing as how I have the night off and am disinclined to do any gainful work, I thought I’d post a similar list, this one of music to which I turn when my brain and/or heart are stuck on 11 and I feel the urgent need to gear down:

(1) Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in A Major, K. 488, performed by Alfred Brendel (or better still, if you don’t mind the wait, Robert Casadesus)

(2) The Paul Desmond Quartet Live

(3) Schubert’s A Major Rondo, D. 951, performed by Artur and Karl Ulrich Schnabel

(4) Copland’s Quiet City, performed by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic

(5) Frank Sinatra and the Hollywood String Quartet, Close to You

(6) The Band, The Band

(7) The Very Best of Fats Waller

(8) Chopin’s Barcarolle, Op. 60, performed by Dinu Lipatti

(9) Count Basie and the All-American Rhythm Section, The Kid from Red Bank

(10) Getz/Gilberto

How about you, OGIC? And do you remember the first time we listened to Getz/Gilberto together, by the way?

From the New York Times:

President Bush will seek a big increase in the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts, the largest single source of support for the arts in the United States, administration officials said on Wednesday.

The proposal is part of a turnaround for the agency, which was once fighting for its life, attacked by some Republicans as a threat to the nation’s moral standards.

Laura Bush plans to announce the request on Thursday, in remarks intended to show the administration’s commitment to the arts, aides said.

Administration officials, including White House budget experts, said that Mr. Bush would propose an increase of $15 million to $20 million for the coming fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1. That would be the largest rise in two decades and far more than the most recent increases, about $500,000 for 2003 and $5 million for this year.

The agency has a budget of $121 million this year, 31 percent lower than its peak of $176 million in 1992. After Republicans gained control of Congress in 1995, they cut the agency’s budget to slightly less than $100 million, and the budget was essentially flat for five years.

In an e-mail message inviting arts advocates to a news briefing with Mrs. Bush, Dana Gioia, the poet who is chairman of the endowment, says, “You will be present for an important day in N.E.A. history.”…

Read the whole thing here.

Our Girl and I will be on WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s public-radio station, this Sunday from eight to nine p.m. EST (opposite the Super Bowl, but who cares about that?). I’ll be speaking from the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she from a studio in Chicago. The occasion is the last episode of a week-long series called “Should I Stay or Should I Go?: The Local Artist’s Lament.” We’ll be chatting about the art scene in Chicago and–more generally–the state of the arts outside New York City. I dare say “About Last Night” will be mentioned, too, and there’ll also be a call-in segment.

This, by the way, is Our Girl’s first public appearance since taking the veil of anonymity, and while I don’t think she’ll demand that a voice filter be used, she has no intention of disclosing her secret identity on the air. Guessing is discouraged–we’d prefer not to have you killed, though we’ll do whatever’s necessary.

To learn more about the series, go here.

To listen to WBEZ on the Web in streaming audio, go here.

To listen on a plain old terrestrial radio, tune to 91.5 FM. (Loser.)

P.S. No, I do not plan to flash the host. This is radio, for God’s sake.

Apropos of my posting about Bob Brookmeyer, jazz critic Doug Ramsey writes:

I might quibble with you about Brookmeyer being the greatest living jazz composer/arranger, and he might, too. Bill Holman
is alive, well, and more brilliant than ever. How nice to have such a close race.

As the saying goes, I’d hate to have to live off the difference. Holman was already damned good in the Fifties (back when he was dedicated to the proposition that even the Stan Kenton band could be made to swing), but he’s grown and grown and grown since then, to the point where he ranks with the best of the best. Alas, precious little of his recent music is currently available on CD, but between them, A View from the Side and Brilliant Corners: The Music of Thelonious Monk offer a pretty good snapshot of what he’s up to these days.

“Everybody who lives in New York believes he’s here for some purpose, whether he does anything about it or not.”

Arlene Croce, Afterimages

FYI, I don’t expect to be posting much of anything else until Saturday, since I have to spend the rest of today and all of tomorrow writing an essay about Kandinsky and Schoenberg for Commentary.

You know where to go. And be sure to tune in Our Girl and me on Sunday night.

Later.

Jonathan Yardley, who is writing an occasional series of Washington Post pieces about “notable and/or neglected books from the past” (and what a good idea that is!), has just gotten around to A.J. Liebling’s The Earl of Louisiana:

Turn to the opening sentences of A.J. Liebling’s “The Earl of Louisiana,” and three things happen. You are dazzled by the wit and acuity of Liebling’s prose, you want to keep on reading for as long as he keeps on writing, and you are struck by how deeply the character of American politics has changed in the four-plus decades since “The Earl of Louisiana” was first published. To wit:

“Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas—stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.”

That was 1960, when the first article in Liebling’s series about Earl Long, then governor of Louisiana, appeared in the New Yorker. Now, 44 years later, you still can “experience the old-fashioned traditional corn flavor of Golden Bantam,” as one seed company puts it, but the old-fashioned traditional corn flavor of Southern politics is as dead as Earl Long himself. Yes, you still can buy a Moon Pie in Ol’ Dixie, but the rumpled rustics who inspired Al Capp to create a comic-strip politico called Sen. Jack S. Phogbound long ago vanished, replaced by the blow-dried suburban slicksters who’ve turned the Solid South into Anyplace, U.S.A….

Read the whole thing here.

I share nearly all of Yardley’s admiration for Liebling, whom he rightly compares to H.L. Mencken. I also have strong feelings of nostalgia about him: Liebling was the subject of the first book review I ever wrote for a national magazine, all the way back in 1981. He wasn’t that well known then, and he’s not now (The Earl of Louisiana, in some ways his best book, was reissued by an academic press), even though he was one of The New Yorker‘s most admired contributors back in the unimaginably far-removed days of Harold Ross.

I’ve never quite understood why Liebling isn’t better remembered, though I have some suspicions. For one thing, his prose is a rich dish, by no means indigestible but a bit much for many palates. For another, he was a journalist, not a familiar essayist, and most of his pieces, intensely personal though they may be, are about something or somebody other than himself. Nor did it help that his books went out of print early and stayed that way for a very long time. Most of them, including The Earl of Louisiana, are still out of print.

Liebling was no paragon, least of all in his much-admired press criticism, which for me hasn’t held up well. It didn’t help that his own grasp of “journalistic ethics” (not quite an oxymoron, but close) could be alarmingly shaky. He was, for example, privately advising Alger Hiss’ defense team at the same time he was dissecting press coverage of the Hiss-Chambers case in The New Yorker, a feat of ethical elasticity comparable only to the similar services provided by Mencken to the defense team in the Scopes trial. That is a big fat juicy blot on the escutcheon of a writer who deserves to be remembered for many things other than his too-cute “Wayward Press” pieces in The New Yorker. It, too, should be remembered, but in perspective, much like Mencken’s anti-Semitism, a dismaying footnote to a career of the highest possible individuality, one to which Yardley’s Washington Post piece is a fine and timely introduction.

I’m not quite sure that The Earl of Louisiana is the best place to start with Liebling, though. When I wrote about the Library of America’s superlative two-volume set devoted to journalism in World War II, I was struck by how many of the least dated pieces had originally appeared in The New Yorker–one doesn’t usually think of The New Yorker as a source of first-rate war coverage–and by how many of the best of those pieces had been written by A.J. Liebling. He originally made his name writing about peculiar New Yorkers, and nobody except Ross expected that so utterly urban a character would have the slightest notion of what to do in a war zone. But time and again, Liebling buried the puck in the net, never deeper than in “Cross-Channel Trip,” filed from a landing craft in the English Channel on D-Day:

I looked down at the main deck, and the beach-battalion men were already moving ahead, so I knew that the ramps must be down. I could hear Long shouting, “Move along now! Move along!,” as if he were unloading an excursion boat at Coney Island. But the men needed no urging; they were moving without a sign of flinching. You didn’t have to look far for tracers now, and Kallam and I flattened our backs against the pilot house and pulled in our stomachs, as if to give a possible bullet an extra couple of inches clearance. Something tickled the back of my neck. I slapped at it and discovered that I had most of the ship’s rigging draped around my neck and shoulders, like a character in an old slapstick movie about a spaghetti factory, or like Captain Horatio Hornblower. The rigging had been cut away by bullets….

A sailor came by and Shorty, one of the men in the gun crew, said to him, “Who was it?” The sailor said, “Rocky and Bill. They’re all tore up. A shell got the winch and ramps and all.” I went forward to the well deck, which was sticky with a mixture of blood and condensed milk. Soldiers had left cases of rations lying all about the ship, and a fragment of the shell that hit the boys had torn into a carton of cans of milk. Rocky and Bill had been moved belowdecks into one of the large forward compartments. Rocky was dead beyond possible doubt, somebody told me, but the pharmacist’s mates had given Bill blood plasma and thought he might still be alive. I remembered Bill, a big, baby-faced kid from the District of Columbia, built like a wrestler. He was about twenty, and the other boys used to kid him about a girl he was always writing letters to. A third wounded man, a soldier dressed in khaki, lay on a stretcher on deck breathing hard through his mouth. His long, triangular face looked like a dirty drumhead; his skin was white and drawn tight over his high cheekbones. He wasn’t making much noise.

First-person journalism will never get any better than that.