Archives for July 2004

“I’m no intellectual, you understand, but I like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, John P. Marquand, Louis Auchincloss, and Simenon.”

Bing Crosby (quoted in Nat Hentoff, Listen to the Stories)

Though I didn’t go to any plays last weekend or this week, I managed to keep busy. Here’s some of what I’ve been up to:

– On Thursday I went to Birdland to hear Roger Kellaway and Bill Charlap play two-piano jazz. Both of
them have figured prominently on this blog in recent months, so I won’t sing their individual praises. What I will say is that the set I caught last night was the best live two-piano jazz performance I’ve heard in my life–including a concert that Tommy Flanagan and Hank Jones gave together in Kansas City back when the world was young. Their version of “Blue in Green” suggested an off-the-cuff collaboration between Bill Evans and Maurice Ravel, while the ferociously competitive up-tempo “Strike Up the Band” with which they set the proceedings in motion sounded like two guys shooting Roman candles at each other in a locked room. (“Lotta black notes on that page,” Charlap said to me afterward, grinning slyly.) As if all this hadn’t been more than sufficiently awe-inspiring, the remarkable young classical violinist Yue, about whom more another day, sat in on “Nuages” and “In a Sentimental Mood” and made an equally strong impression.

Words to the wise: Kellaway, Charlap, and Yue will be at Birdland through Saturday. Do not miss this gig.

– I spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the Metropolitan Opera House, watching the first two nights of Lincoln Center Festival’s Ashton Celebration, a two-week-long minifestival of the ballets of Sir Frederick Ashton, England’s greatest choreographer. Both performances were mixed bills danced by the Joffrey Ballet, the Birmingham Royal Ballet, and K-Ballet, a Japanese troupe. I plan to write at length about what I saw over the coming weekend. For now, take a look at Seeing Things, the artsjournal.com blog for which dance critic Tobi Tobias is covering the Ashton Celebration. I don’t agree with everything Tobi says, but she’s damned smart and always to be taken very seriously.

In addition, you might also be interested in reading
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In case you bought this morning’s Wall Street Journal to read my drama column…it’s not there. I took a week off, the first time I’ve skipped a Friday since January. I earned it.

Not to worry: I’ll be doing business at the same old stand next Friday. And you can still buy the paper, you know! It’s got all the usual cool “Weekend Journal” stuff, only minus me.

The White House announced this afternoon that President Bush will be nominating me to serve on the National Council on the Arts, the civilian panel that advises the National Endowment for the Arts and its chairman, Dana Gioia.

(For those of you not familiar with the intricacies of the federal arts bureaucracy, go here to find out exactly what the Council does.)

This is a volunteer post, meaning that I won’t be paid for my labors, but it does require Senate confirmation, meaning that I was recently investigated by the FBI (which is a story in itself) and have filled out a stack of papers not dissimilar in size to an unabridged dictionary. As close readers of this site may recall, I also had myself fingerprinted back in April, and now you know why.

I had to give the White House my full legal name, which I never, ever use, and that explains why the official announcement refers to me as “Terence Alan Teachout.” Maybe they’ll change it, someday….

Beyond that, there’s not much to tell. The NEA will be issuing a press release about my nomination, and I’ll post a link to it as soon as it goes up on their Web site. The Senate will either confirm me or not, and if it does, I’ll serve a six-year term. Yes, I’ll continue to write about the arts, here and elsewhere, but I’ve been requested not to make any public statements about the NEA or its activities until my name comes before the Senate, so don’t ask me.

This much I’ll happily say: I’m grateful to the President for giving me the opportunity to serve on the Council. It’s an honor. I hope the Senate finds me worthy of confirmation.

“About Last Night” appears to be on the way to breaking its all-time record for single-day traffic, mainly because the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index, in addition to having been mentioned in yesterday’s “Hip Clicks” column on the USA Today Web site, was linked early this morning by Political Animal, Kevin Drum’s Washington Monthly blog. In the immortal Time-style words of Wolcott Gibbs, “Where it will all end, knows God!”

In Our Girl’s temporary absence, I’m trying to stay on top of the scores posted by the various bloggers listed in “Sites to See.” Here’s the complete roster to date:

Banana Oil, 70%.
Bookish Gardener, 57%.
Brandywine Books, 67%.
Collected Miscellany, 68%.
Crescat Sententia, 40%.
Elegant Variation, 47%.
A Fool in the Forest, 64.38%.
Futurballa, 47%.
Gnostical Turpitude, 72%.
Mixolydian Mode, 52%.
Maud Newton, 54%.
MoorishGirl, 44%.
Rake’s Progress, 59%.
The Reading Experience, 43%.
The Rest Is Noise, 55%.
Return of the Reluctant, 54%.
Shaken & Stirred, 73%.
Something Old, Nothing New, 45%.
…something slant, 58% “or thereabouts.”
Superfluities, 41%.
James Tata, 49%.
Tingle Alley, “60%ish.”
Sarah Weinman, 58%.

To all those bloggers who’ve posted answers but no score: do your own math if you want to hang with the popular kids!

As for reaction to the TCCI, Ed has converted the results into a USA Today-style graphic, while Gideon Strauss posted this funny response:

I’ve decided not only to test how far my tastes differ from that of Mr. Teachout, but also how much less informed my tastes are. So I will give myself two scores: my TCCI score, and a score for the number of paired items out of a hundred on Teachout’s list for which I had any idea what he is talking about (which I will call the Teachout Cultural Superiority Index or TCSI, so that my TCSI score will measure how close I am to his perfect 100)….

Read the whole thing here.

Gnostical Turpitude actually went to the trouble of writing a longish essay about the TCCI. Among his astute observations:

[T]he questions posed by Teachout reminded me of “Humiliations,” a parlor game that appears in the David Lodge novel Changing Places. In that game, players confess the titles of books they’ve never read, receiving one point for every player who has read the book in question; hence, the winner is the competitor who has never read the books that are most familiar to his opponents.

There’s a certain odd thrill to announcing that I’ve never read anything by Thomas Mann, that I’ve never read either Huck Finn or Moby-Dick, and that I’ve never been to (or read) an Edward Albee play. (As the professor in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe might say, “What do they teach them in the schools these days?!”) I’d imagine that the thrill I’ve just described is similar to the feeling one experiences after winning a round of Humiliations!…

Read the whole thing here.

This seems as good a time as any to confess that I once organized a game of Humiliation (I’m not positive, but I think it’s in the singular) at a garden party of budding young New York intellectuals who were all friendly enough to play honestly. I thought I’d die laughing, or at least throw up. No, I won’t tell you who was playing or what other sordid admissions were made, but I will admit that I stopped the show by acknowledging that I once reviewed a literary biography of an author with whose novels and short stories I was totally unfamiliar. It was a long, long time ago….

I’ve always been oddly unsentimental about objects, and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s simply a manifestation of a preference that I mentioned a few months ago apropos of the rise of pay-per-song Web sites and the resulting decline of the record as art object: “I’m old-fashioned–but my attachment is to essences, not embodiments.” Or maybe it has more to do with the fact that I’ve spent the past quarter-century moving from one small apartment to another (two in Kansas City, one in Illinois, four in the New York area), a practice that tends to inhibit the accumulation of superfluous stuff.

Whatever the reason, I haven’t kept many souvenirs of my past life. Nearly all those dating from my childhood and adolescence–my old Roth violin, my high-school yearbooks, a scraggly pair of stuffed cats named Russell and Louise–are at my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., which is where I expect they’ll stay. Beyond that, next to nothing remains. I’ve never saved the manuscripts of my books, for instance, and I got rid of all my tattered old clippings after putting together A Terry Teachout Reader. I sold two-thirds of my library when I moved to my present apartment, mainly in order to have room to hang the art I was starting to collect. I don’t keep programs from the performances I review, nor do I have any photograph albums (in fact, I don’t even own a camera). The only pictures I have on display are the ones of my parents, Our Girl in Chicago, and my old friend Nancy LaMott that are on my desk, plus a snapshot taken in an old-time photo booth immediately after I completed my first roller-coaster ride. A mottled, surf-pocked stone from the shore of Isle au Haut, the Maine island to which I traveled last fall in search of the spot that Fairfield Porter portrayed in a lithograph I own, rests atop my incoming mail. One of my paintings was done by a friend. And outside of a few inscribed books and a bare handful of unsorted photos crammed randomly in a drawer, that’s pretty much it. Except for these few relics, I live almost entirely in the present, surrounded by books, CDs, and the art on my walls.

If my uncluttered existence strikes you as austere, all I can say is that I’m not unsentimental about other things. I’m the easiest of weepers, always ready to turn on the taps while watching an old movie or listening to a piece of music with personal associations. Nor am I shy about quarrying my past life for literary purposes (one of my books is a memoir). Yet for whatever reason, I prefer to travel light–as lightly, that is, as a man who owns twenty prints, two paintings, a pastel, a Max Beerbohm caricature, a small assemblage by Paul Taylor, a cel set-up of Jerry Mouse, several hundred books, and a couple of thousand CDs is capable of traveling–and I never think about the things I haven’t saved.

So it was with no small amount of surprise that I found myself confronted the other day with three grocery sacks full of miscellaneous papers retrieved from an old desk I’d left behind in my previous apartment. I’d completely forgotten the contents of that desk, and though I didn’t expect them to include anything important, I thought I ought to give them a quick sifting just to be sure.

I threw out most of what I found. I saw no reason, for instance, to hang onto a two-inch-thick stack of photocopied pieces I’d written for the New York Daily News during my tenure as its classical music and dance critic, though I did shake my head at the thought of the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve published in the twenty-seven years since my very first concert review appeared in the Kansas City Star. Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you’re not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote, and for a few years I even kept an up-to-date bibliography of my magazine pieces! Now I marvel at the vanity that once led me to think my every printed utterance worthy of preservation.

Only one of those pieces held my attention for more than the time it took me to pitch it in the nearest wastebasket: a copy of the first piece I wrote for Commentary, a review of James Baldwin’s The Price of the Ticket published in December of 1985, six months after I moved to New York. I remember how hard I worked on it, and how proud I was to have “cracked” Commentary. Today it sounds hopelessly stiff and earnest, which is why I left it out of the Teachout Reader. What on earth could have possessed Norman Podhoretz to find a place for that immature effort in his book-review section? He told me the first draft was too “knowing,” the best piece of advice any editor has ever given me, and I revised it nervously, hoping to pass muster, never imagining that I would write hundreds more pieces for Commentary, eventually becoming its music critic. Would it have pleased me to know these things back in 1985? Or might it have dulled the tang of my first sale?

I didn’t expect to find a Metropolitan Opera program among my forgotten papers, though no sooner did I look at it than I knew why I’d saved it. I went to the Metropolitan Opera House on the evening of January 5, 1996, fully expecting to review the company premiere of Leos Janacek’s The Makropulos Case for the Daily News. Instead, I ended up writing a front-page story about how one of the singers in the production died on stage, a minute and a half into the first act. The opening scene of The Makropulos Case is set in a law office where Vitek, a clerk, is looking up the files for a suit that has been dragging on for close to a century. To symbolize the tortuous snarl of Gregor v. Prus, designer Anthony Ward turned the entire back wall of the set into a forty-foot-high filing cabinet containing hundreds of drawers. Enter Vitek, played by a character tenor named Richard Versalle. As the curtain rose, he made his entrance, climbed up a tall ladder and pulled a file out of one of the drawers. “Too bad you can only live so long,” he sang in Czech. Then he let go of the ladder and fell mutely to the stage, landing on his back with a terrible crash.

Three thousand people gasped. David Robertson, the conductor, waved the orchestra to a halt and shouted, “Are you all right, Richard?” Versalle didn’t speak or move, and the curtain was quickly lowered. I sat frozen in my aisle seat, stunned by what I had seen. Then I pulled myself together and ran to the press room to find out what had happened. A company spokesman told the rapidly growing band of critics and hangers-on what little he knew: Versalle had been rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital. We started firing questions at him. How old was Versalle? When did he make his Met debut? Did he have a wife and children? I scribbled the answers (63, 1978, yes) on my program and pushed through the crowd to the nearest pay phone, where I dropped a quarter in the slot, dialed the number of the Daily News city desk, and spoke three words that had never before crossed my lips other than in jest: “Get me rewrite.” Eight years later, I leafed through the program of that unfinished performance, looking at my barely decipherable notes. As souvenirs go, it was a good one, and I decided to keep it.

Almost as evocative was a sheaf of birthday cards given to me on my fortieth birthday, a month and a day after The Makropulos Case‘s abortive opening night. It was a strange and somber event, for my friend Nancy had died only a few weeks before, and I was nowhere near getting over the shock of her loss. Still, you only turn forty once (if at all), and I didn’t want to disappoint the friends who’d planned a party to mark the occasion, so we went through with it and had a surprisingly good time, considering. Tucked inside the cards was a short stack of photographs, most of them of my parents, my niece, and the various cats I’ve owned over the years. I saved four of the best ones, along with a fading snapshot of Harry Jenks, a half-blind Kansas City jazz pianist with whom I used to sit in back in my college days (he could play just like Art Tatum, by which I don’t mean sort of like Art Tatum), and a picture of Our Girl in Chicago standing in front of a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, Illinois, dressed in white from head to toe and looking like a warm summer day come to life.

I also found two wallet-sized photos of Libby Miller, an adored friend from Smalltown, U.S.A., with whom I ran a lemonade stand once upon a time. I had a crush on her but was too shy to do anything about it. Libby joined the Air Force after graduating from high school, and I played piano at her wedding. Then she vanished from sight, as the friends of our youth are all too prone to do, and I heard nothing more from her for a quarter-century. Not long ago she called me up from out of the blue, and I learned that she’d divorced and remarried, retired from the Air Force, settled down in rural Washington, and taken up watercolor painting as a full-time hobby. I Googled her as we talked, found one of her watercolors on the Web, and saw with a start that my long-lost friend had somehow transformed herself into Elizabeth Michailoff, a bonafide artist. Now I held two of her fresh-faced high-school pictures in my hand, marveling at the myriad changes that thirty years’ worth of living had wrought.

I slipped the pictures and birthday cards into my Makropulos Case program, left everything else for the garbage collector, and headed back to my apartment, feeling wistful and unsettled, the way we so often feel after a brief immersion in the irretrievable past. Two packages awaited me on my return. I slit open the first one and was astonished to find a gorgeous, near-abstract marine watercolor by Libby–or Elizabeth, as I suppose I ought to call her now. With it was a note: “I painted the tide flats in February–and I have enjoyed how it turned out. When I started thinking of a painting to send to you, I kept returning to it. I don’t know why. But I do know why I wanted to send you one. You were such a great friend to me at a time when I dearly needed someone I could go to and just be me. You gave me that gift and now in a very small way–I wanted to return the kindness. So I hope you do enjoy it.” I do, dear Libby, I do.

The second package contained a handsomely carpentered wooden box with an elegant latch and a Georgian-blue lid. Inside, I discovered to my amazement and delight, was a custom-made jigsaw puzzle that depicted the front cover of A Terry Teachout Reader. It was a belated birthday present from Our Girl in Chicago, very possibly the best one I’ve ever been given. I tucked my snapshot of Our Girl into the box and put it on one of my bookshelves, where I expect it will remain. Yes, I like to travel light, but no matter how many times I move between now and the end of my life, whenever that may be, I intend to hang onto that particular souvenir. Some things–not many, but some–are meant to be kept.

“There can be no doubt that the dedicated Balzacian must accept a torrent of vulgarity, but, in matters of situation and behaviour, a great deal of improbability too. Never mind. Balzac’s improbabilities do not prevent many of his least likely climaxes from being the best ones. Besides–something never to be forgotten–with all novelists one must put up with something.”

Anthony Powell, Messengers of Day

The Public Theater’s well-reviewed revival of The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s 1984 AIDS play, closed abruptly last week after just sixty-three performances, none of which sold out. “I’ll tell you one thing: I will never write another play again,” Kramer told the New York Times. “I mean, when are we all going to realize that people don’t want to go to the theater anymore?” That is, you might say, a trifle solipsistic. I remember the original production of The Normal Heart vividly, and also unfavorably, it having been little more than a noisy piece of sermonizing. Hence I didn’t bother attending, much less reviewing, the revival. Once was enough.

Conversely, I didn’t catch the original run of Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins a decade and a half ago, which was why I went out of my way to see and write about the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival at Studio 54. While I thought the show itself had major problems, I was as impressed by the production as were my fellow critics. But ordinary theatergoers begged to differ, and so Assassins will close, barring a miracle, on July 18.

To date, Sondheim has made no whiny public statements about the failure of Assassins to find an audience, that not being his style. He did, however, express concern prior to opening night that the show might give offense to those whom he considers politically benighted. “I live in a liberal community, which is happy to bring into question things about this country,” he told a reporter for Time, a statement I found–well, smug. I called him on it when I reviewed the show for The Wall Street Journal:

Whenever Mr. Sondheim and John Weidman, his librettist, attend to the twisted souls of John Wilkes Booth (Michael Cerveris), Lee Harvey Oswald (Neil Patrick Harris), and their partners in ignominy, “Assassins” holds you in its grip like a demented strangler–but no sooner do they seek to use these sad creatures to score debating points than it turns as jejune as a college revue.

If you think I’m being harsh, you haven’t seen “Assassins,” which takes the form of a carnival sideshow whose brass-voiced barker (Marc Kudisch) invites unhappy passers-by to forget their troubles by stepping right up and taking a potshot at the man in the Oval Office: “No job? Cupboard bare?/One room, no one there?/Hey, pal, don’t despair–/You wanna shoot a president?” That’s the message of “Assassins,” such as it is: if only there were ice cream for everyone, Camelot would still be with us! Instead, we preach the American dream, and some of those born losers who find it hollow seek to even the score with a gun: “And all you have to do/Is/Squeeze your little finger./Ease your little finger back–/You can change the world.”

Aside from being sophomoric, this rigidly reductive thesis clashes with the core of “Assassins,” a series of nine sharply drawn sketches of successful and would-be presidential assassins. Not surprisingly, this is the part of the show where Mr. Sondheim finds his footing, since his other musicals are exclusively concerned not with ideas but feelings (or the inability to feel). Not even in “Sweeney Todd,” which purports to locate its antihero’s murderous rage in the dehumanizing context of 19th-century British industrialism, does he betray any real interest in or understanding of politics. For Mr. Sondheim, the political is personal, and no matter how hard he and Mr. Weidman try to persuade us that their desperate characters are meaningful symbols of mass alienation, we persist in seeing them as individual objects of pity united only in their varied forms of despair: “There’s another national anthem, folks,/For those who never win,/For the suckers,/For the pikers,/For the ones who might have been.”

Do the lives of these misfits have any larger meaning? Perhaps, but you can’t prove it by “Assassins,” which merely asserts their significance rather than demonstrating it–and that’s where the show runs off the road. To be effective, political theater must deal in fact, not fancy, and most of America’s presidential assassins were in fact driven not by ideology but madness. “Assassins” leaves no doubt of that, especially in “The Ballad of Guiteau,” in which Charles Guiteau (Denis O’Hare), who shot and killed James Garfield, displays his megalomania to spectacular effect. And what do such delusions tell us about the validity of the American dream? Nothing, which is why “Assassins” makes no sense.

I doubt it’s altogether coincidental that the authors of Assassins and The Normal Heart presupposed the prior agreement of their audiences with the shows’ underlying political premises. Tim Robbins’ Embedded was like that, too, as are (surprise) the plays of Tony Kushner. The trouble with this kind of playwriting, as with any other kind of highly politicized art, is that it’s lazy. You might even go so far as to say that it arises from an entitlement mentality–the assumption that so long as you think all the right things, you need not make the extra effort to transform your ideas into a fully realized work of art.

Two paragraphs buried deep in the Times story about The Normal Heart gave that game away with embarrassing clarity:

Still, producers thought that its political subject and gay heroes might attract audiences, especially on a Gay Pride weekend in an election year.

But sales for last weekend–gay pride–were awful, Mr. Kramer said. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said. “If your own people aren’t going to support you, that really hurts someone like me.”

Note the planted axiom: gay people should have supported The Normal Heart. Why? Because they’re gay, that’s why. But they didn’t, just as Sondheim’s “liberal community” has declined to turn out in sufficient numbers to keep Assassins open. Now, no demographic group in America is as reliably liberal–or contains, I suspect, as many gays–as the regular theatergoers of Manhattan and its environs. Does that make all those inconsiderate stay-at-homes insufficiently liberal? Or insufficiently gay? Somehow I doubt it.

Larry Kramer did, however, say something sensible about the revival of The Normal Heart, though it may have been unintentional: “It speaks very ill of us, meaning all the people today involved in culture and entertainment, that we can produce this stuff and in no way market it to the world.” I’m not suggesting that the failure of his play was a failure of marketing, though. Rather, I have in mind the characteristic failing of political art, which is that its makers fail to understand the need to effectively “market” their ideas by embodying them in works of art capable of commanding the attention of an audience consisting in part–perhaps even in large part–of people who don’t already believe in them.

I quoted David Denby’s review of Fahrenheit 9/11 the other day, but what he said is worth repeating:

Michael Moore has become a sensational entertainer of the already converted, but his enduring problem as a political artist is that he has never known how to change anyone’s politics.

Which begs a more difficult question: can art change anyone’s politics? I don’t mean in the sense of persuading ninnies that the CIA killed John Kennedy, but in the deeper and more thoroughgoing sense of effecting a genuine transformation in one’s view of the world.

W.H. Auden thought not:

Clement Greenberg said much the same thing, less poetically but more transparently: “Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.” I incline that way as well, but my own view is more nuanced. The insurmountable problem of explicitly political art, it seems to me, is that it is, literally, exclusive. As a result, it fails in what I take to be one of the defining responsibilities of aesthetically serious art, which is to aspire to universality, speaking (at least potentially) to all men in all conditions.

The only way art can do this is by reposing, in Dr. Johnson’s immortal words, on the stability of truth. By embodying and dramatizing truth, it brings us closer to understanding the nature of the human condition. And might such an enterprise be political? In a way, I suppose, though one must never forget that political opinions are epiphenomenal: they arise from experience rather than preceding it. (If they don’t, those who hold them are by definition out of touch with reality.) As for me, I know that my experience of great art has shaped my philosophy of life, which in turn informs my political views. But has great art ever had a direct effect on those views? Not in my experience. Nor can I think offhand of even one truly great work of art that was created with the specific intention of changing anyone’s political views. If you want to do that with your art, you must accept going in that the results will be less than great–and if that doesn’t bother you, fine. Greenberg got that right, too: “There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness.” This may mean choosing politics over art, especially if you’re not a good artist to begin with.

Which brings us back to The Normal Heart and Assassins. Larry Kramer, alas, isn’t a good artist. Stephen Sondheim is a very good artist, but one who in this case allowed his aesthetic priorities to be skewed by his political passions. And you know what? The results of both men’s best efforts went belly-up at the box office. Maybe that means ordinary playgoers are simply too stupid, or craven, to know a good thing when they see one. Or maybe it means they’re too smart to fall for bad art, even when they happen to agree with its political premises.