Archives for February 2004

Last night: a conversation candy heart with a message to warm the real hearts of lit bloggers everywhere:

LET’S
READ

It failed to specify highbrow or popular.

I’m late for something, but please click here for a masterful reading of a little-known but amazing poem.

That is all.

The invaluable Cinetrix, who blogs at Pullquote, has posted a neat little
tribute to one of my favorite movies, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels, at the end of which she takes an unexpected swerve and revives last summer’s discussion of what your favorite Woody Allen movie says about you. Hers didn’t make the list. Neither did mine, Radio Days, which also happens to be the only Woody Allen movie I still enjoy (and I enjoy it very much). I now find most of the others unendurably smug, a seemingly endless series of object lessons in what I don’t like about New York. How could I ever have talked myself into admiring such awful films?

Over to you, OGIC.

“Driver, what stream is it?” I asked, well knowing

it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing.

“It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,”

he said, “under the green-grown cliffs.”

Be still, heart! No one needs

your passionate suffrage to select this glory–

this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing

under the green-grown cliffs.

“Driver, has this a peer in Europe or the East?”

“No, no!” he said.

Home! Home! Be quiet, heart!

This is our lordly Hudson

and has no peer in Europe or the east;

this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing

under the green-grown cliffs

and has no peer in Europe or the East;

be quiet, heart! Home! Home!

Paul Goodman, “The Lordly Hudson”

UPDATE: As Old Hag notes, this poem has been set to music–beautifully–by Ned Rorem (see yesterday’s almanac entry). She and I agree that the best recording currently available on CD is by Susan Graham and Malcolm Martineau.

Our Girl and I have been holding forth about the paradoxical provincialness of New York City, so I thought it might be worth posting some fugitive reflections on the subject of why I do live here and not in, say, Washington or San Francisco, or even my beloved Chicago.

Last night was a case in point. I met a writer friend for dinner in the East Village at one of the dozen-odd inexpensive Indian restaurants on Sixth Street, all on a single block and widely rumored to share a single kitchen as well. It’s also said that there are no cats in that neighborhood, but we had a very good meal, after which we made our way through the wintry mix to an off-Broadway theater in the vicinity, the New York Theatre Workshop, where we saw the penultimate preview of Valhalla, Paul Rudnick’s new play, which opens Thursday. (Watch this space Friday to see what I wrote about it for my theater column in The Wall Street Journal.) That’s one kind of weeknight in Manhattan.

And tonight? Well, I stuck to my own neighborhood, the Upper West Side, but the evening ended up having a downtown flavor anyway: I took a singer friend to hear Dave’s True Story
and the Lascivious Biddies at Makor. Regular readers of this blog will recall admiring references to both groups, about whom I last wrote a couple of months ago in my Washington Post column:

I ventured down to the Village to hear two hip bands, Dave’s True Story and the Lascivious Biddies, at Fez. DTS, previously praised in this space, is a volatile blend of two seemingly incompatible ingredients, the coolly kinky songs of David Cantor and the warmly engaging vocals of Kelly Flint. Hearing Flint sing about the wild side of downtown life in so comforting a voice is guaranteed to knock your dreams a bubble or two off plumb. As for the Biddies, they’re a pop-jazz quartet of clever women who yoke two similarly dissimilar styles–girl-group vocals and King Cole Trio-style instrumentals–to charming effect.

Part of what makes DTS and the Biddies two of the most interesting bands in town is that they don’t lend themselves to ready categorization. Both make music that is rooted in jazz but open to all manner of sounds, and both sing smart self-composed songs–often witty, sometimes wry, occasionally rueful–that float free of the up-with-love trap. (The Biddies’ “Famous,” for example, is a cruelly comic piece of celebrity mockery: “I wanna be famous/Tabloids will print what I eat/I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street.”) They fit no pigeonholes, not even the made-in-downtown-New-York label that accurately describes the clubs where they’re usually to be found.

What, I asked myself, were two such exotic groups doing north of Noho, working a room one block from Lincoln Center and a few doors away from Caf

A reader inquired about “Alas, not by me,” the running head I use to link to choice snippets by other people (usually bloggers) that I wish I’d written. It’s a reference to a celebrated anecdote about Johannes Brahms. Back in the nineteenth century, autograph seekers sometimes invited their quarry to inscribe fans–the kind you hold in your hand. Brahms, the story goes, was invited by the wife (or possibly the daughter) of Johann Strauss the Younger to sign a fan, and responded by sketching a musical staff, writing out the first couple of bars of “On the Beautiful Blue Danube,” and signing it “Alas, not by–Johannes Brahms.”

This is such a wonderful story that I fear it may not be true, especially since it could have been: Brahms was a witty gent capable of just such a spontaneous gesture, and his friendship with and admiration for Strauss were anything but apocryphal. (He told Hans von Bülow, for example, that Strauss was “one of the few colleagues I can hold in limitless respect.”) I just checked, and two of the most reliable Brahms books on my shelves make no reference to the anecdote, so I plan to check no further. When the legend becomes true, print the legend (alas, not by me).

Incidentally, the word “alas” is one of my too-familiar, over-relied-upon fingerprints, along with “not surprisingly,” “needless to say,” “much less,” “least of all,” “I suspect,” and (sigh) the use of hyphenated modifiers. Not surprisingly, I suspect that most far-too-prolific writers have, alas, a whole stack of these tics. Used in the strictest moderation, they’re part of what turns a voice into a full-fledged style, but I’m not always careful about using them moderately, least of all on this blog, which is frequently written on the fly. When I was editing The Skeptic: A Life of H. L. Mencken, I determined to trim away all but one or two occurrences of each of my personal clichés. Don’t hold me to it, though, and please don’t keep score when you’re reading A Terry Teachout Reader. I guarantee you’ll find them there, in profusion.

I didn’t expect my throwaway item on Woody Allen to have caused quite so much of a hullabaloo
in
cyberspace. Around this town, Allen is generally thought to be soooo over. Go figure.

In all fairness, let me add this footnote: a few days after Jack Paar’s death last week, one of our local PBS affiliates reran a Paar clip show that included what I gather was Allen’s network TV debut as a standup comedian. I can just barely remember his standup days, and since then I hadn’t seen or heard any of his work from that period. I was struck by how fresh and engaging his style was–free, fantastic, not at all punchline-oriented. Judging by that clip, one could easily imagine him having evolved into an on-stage monologist

The ‘Fesser, whose many felicitous observations and coinages are on regular offer at Pullquote*, has an expression he reserves for noting especially entertaining outbreaks of intellectual pugilism. He borrowed it from hockey. In homage to the blood-thirstiest fans in the first few rows who make it their business to egg on any actual or potential fisticuffs, he’ll e-mail me when, say, Dale Peck and [insert novelist here] exchange blows to say he’s “Pounding on the Plexiglass/Spilling My Popcorn.” Of late this has been abbreviated to a simple “PTP/SMP.”