Archives for August 5, 2004

It’s been way too long since I conducted a tour of the blogosphere. Even when I was feeling thoroughly crappy (i.e., yesterday), I continued to surf the Web and bookmark cool stuff I found along the way. Here’s some of it:

– Eat your hearts out, film buffs: Celluloid Eyes has a great list of “movies I am dying to rent/own on DVD and cannot” because (gnashing of teeth) they aren’t available on DVD. As she remarks in passing:

Many of these hard-to-find movies are my favorite kind of movie: those delightful, witty, frothy, often surprisingly relevant, sometimes surprisingly naughty American movies from the 1930s.

Why hasn’t anybody told me about this blog?

– Zoilus gleans this Elvis Costello quote from the New York Times:

“You’re kidding yourself if you believe it when people say, `Oh, that’s a political song,’ ” Mr. Costello said. “No. A political song is one that if you played it to Donald Rumsfeld, he would give up his career and enter a monastery. That would be a political song — one that affected him so deeply that he would renounce his view of the world. I don’t think anybody alive is capable of writing that song. So all you’re doing is writing things that matter to you.”

To which he appends numerous disagreements, concurrences, and amplifications, among them:

Costello’s right, though, that some sort of potentially transformative experience should at least be nosing around the edges of a properly political song – political speech is primarily persuasive, right? And I think…that in art the best mode of persuasion is empathetic, to bring the audience through the experiences that shape the point of view rather than to argue the point of view. (Does arguing ever do anything ever?)

Timely.

– From the Daily Telegraph by way of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, a smart interview with Stephen Sondheim on the latest London revival of Sweeney Todd:

I remember when I was at college, one of the English professors made what seems an obvious point, but it wasn’t obvious to me at the age of 17, that one of the things that keeps Hamlet alive is that every generation brings something new to the performance. It isn’t just the poetry; it’s that every time you do Hamlet you can take a different view of it – and that’s what keeps theatre alive.

With musicals, the audience tend to want to see what they’ve seen before. Whereas people who go to Hamlet want to see something different.

– I love smart lists, and my super-smart artsjournal.com colleague Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, has published a fine one:

Here are my ten favorite artists. Or at least my ten favorite artists as of when I typed this. And to make this an even sillier exercise, I’ll give a one-word summary of what I like best about each artist….

Go see for yourself. Four of Tyler’s listees would either make my list or come damned close. One of them makes me run screaming from the room.

– Speaking of lead-with-the-chin lists, Alex Ross, the classical music critic of The New Yorker, has posted a list of 20 non-classical albums he loves (or, as he says, “an irrational series of powerful attractions”) on his blog, The Rest Is Noise. I like or love 11 of them. One of these days I’ll see Alex and raise him….

– And speaking of The New Yorker, did you see John Updike’s essay about Philip Larkin? It contains this beautifully balanced pair of clauses: “Larkin, though modest in manner and production, achieved major eloquence and formal perfection…”

Yes, exactly.

– Advertising can be deceptive–both ways. On my recent visit to the Williamstown Theatre Festival, I spent the night at the Porches Inn, which is located right across the street from MASS MoCA (the too-cute acronym for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). I loved Porches and intend to stay there again whenever I return to the festival, but had I read this description on the inn’s Web site, I might well have thought twice, or maybe even three times, about checking in:

Porches is the most visible manifestation, to-date, of the changes sparked by MASS MoCA. Its 50-plus rooms of retro-edgy, industrial granny chic ambiance make a spirited lodging statement in New England and beyond.

That’s got to be a prime candidate for Private Eye‘s Pseuds Corner.

– Memo to Frank Lloyd Wright buffs: have you stayed here yet?

– The Buck Stops Here has a lovely little tribute to the sheer niceness of classical guitarist Christopher Parkening. I suspect–I hope–that a lot of us have similarly sweet stories about similarly thoughtful celebrities. I know I do.

– Not to beat a dead horse, but several hundred thousand bloggers published their own versions of the Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index. Of them, I liked this one best.

– One of the participants in Michael Dirda’s recent Washington Post online chat turns out to have been a fan of this blog and several of its brethren. Dirda thinks the Web is incompatible with “bookishness.” The chatter begged to differ:

One of the most delightful and unexpected developments on the WWW in the last year or so is the development of a community of literary blogs. These are creating a very real conversation about serious books, including many of those serious books that only infrequently are reviewed in the WP and NYT (and even then are often confined to the genre-ghetto roundups).

Some of my favourites: Terry Teachout occasionally takes a break from reviewing art and plays to write about the very particular joys of reading Donald Westlake. Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor at Tor books has a long-standing blog covering inter alia publishers’ slushpiles, pygmy mammoths and sf fandom. It’s a small gem — well worth browsing the archives. Jessa Crispin’s Bookslut is an indispensable source of literary gossip and astute judgements on the merits of recent releases. Maud Newton’s taste in literature is eclectic but unfailingly good, while her writing style is both direct and elegant. Scott McLemee — an authority on obscure Marxist sects, Dale Peck and the MLA. All considered, there’s never been a better time to seek out good, interesting conversation about books.

To which Dirda, a columnist for Washington Post Book World, replied:

I’m glad you disagree with me, and your tastes in blogs is certainly discriminating, if only because I’m a great Westlake fan (having reviewed him frequently and interviewed him onstage at the Smithsonian). But, despite this chat, I personally find that the Internet sucks up too much time. I enjoy doing this for an hour a week; indeed, might enjoy it for an hour a day. But I’m fundamentally a loner and my communing tends to be with books and their authors rather than my fellow readers.
But this is just me. I’m perfectly sociable and charming, but my streak of puritanism is so strong that I can’t help but see online discussions as simply fooling around. For a writer it even feels like throwing away good material. But then I probably don’t have as many ideas as most bloggers and need to carefully marshal the few I do have.

I of course think otherwise. More than that, I suspect Dirda doesn’t look at enough blogs to know what they’re really like. For me, “About Last Night” is occasionally a burden (at which times I hand over happily to OGIC), more often a stimulus. As for blogs “sucking up too much time,” I wonder if Dirda would say the same thing about magazines….

– Lastly and leastly: O.K., Mr. TMFTML, I laughed at this one, too.

UPDATE: Don’t miss Ed‘s whirlwind tour of the blogosphere, all done in a single paragraph of sentence fragments. Whoosh!

A reader writes:

A man who on the same day can quote
Cardinal Newman and Paul Goodman (an unfairly neglected good poet) can be assured I will keep reading him daily.

Not only did I get a kick out of that e-mail, but it occurred to me as I read it that my correspondent had come up with a pretty good mission statement for “About Last Night.” Between us, Our Girl in Chicago and I specialize (or try to) in unexpected juxtaposition. We love all the arts, and within each art form we love a large and varied assortment of artists and artworks. It’s never seemed to either of us that such things are best appreciated in isolation. Hence the curve balls we throw as often as we can, some big and some, like this one, little. Nor do you have to know anything about Newman or Goodman to enjoy the fun. Nothing pleases me half as much as knowing that something I’ve written inspired somebody who read it to go read a book he’s never read before by an author he’s never heard of–or, better still, to go see his first ballet or visit his first art gallery or jazz club. Or whatever.

Maybe that’s the best way of describing our specialty here at “About Last Night”: whatever, and lots of it.

I’m going to be covering the New York International Fringe Festival for my Wall Street Journal drama column later this month. This year’s festival, which opens August 13, is presenting shows by 197 “emerging theatre troupes and dance companies.” That is, how you say, an impossible task, there being only one of me and I having only enough time to go to a dozen shows at most. What’s more, the hardest job is picking the shows. Every once in a while the buzz on a particular performance becomes overwhelming, but for the most part I find myself sifting through a stack of press releases in search of inspiration, wondering if I might do better to use a dart board.

This time around I’ve decided to enlist the help of those “About Last Night” readers with an interest in theater. So if you know of a particular Fringe show that you expect to be good, either because you’re in it or you know somebody who’s in it or you’ve simply heard good things about it, please make haste to send me an e-mail saying so. Be brief, but not too brief (i.e., tell me in a sentence or two why I should see it). I don’t promise to take your advice, especially if I get a lot of it, but I do promise to pay attention to it and be grateful for it. Besides, who knows? You might be responsible for my writing a rave of a show I wasn’t planning to see as I write these words. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Don’t delay–I’ll be scheduling and booking my Fringe visits early next week.

“There is one piece of advice, in a life of study, which I think no one will object to; and that is, every now and then to be completely idle,–to do nothing at all.”

Sydney Smith, Lectures on Moral Philosophy

A reader writes:

I’m a lawyer–I don’t believe anything anyone says about themselves or anything else. This world view was confirmed by last night’s viewing of the superb Out of the Past.

That one I had to pass on!

Parabasis took part in the Lincoln Center Directors Lab, and has now posted on his blog a long report about his experiences there. It’s a must-read for anyone with a serious interest in the state of American theater.

I especially liked this item:

Writers and directors are slowly starting to be more honest about their antipathy towards each other. It sort of seems to break down like this–directors feel shackled by writers and writers feel exploited by directors. To directors, a production is just one production and the text is a living document not a closed system, so doing something other than what’s in the stage directions or the writers’ head is not only okay but might be devoutly to be wished. To writers, a play might be alive, but the writer is the only one who has to live with it after the director and actors are done with it. One visiting artist put it best when he said, “When you’re doing the first production, you should do make the playwright’s vision come to life. But after that, you shouldn’t be constantly reviving the same version of a show. Then the show is dead. Like how Streetcar is dead because everyone is essentially doing Kazan’s version.” I think I’m growing to agree with that assessment. The problem is, so many directors’ visions are bad.

Ay, there’s the rub!

Thank you, Lileks:

Medved had on his show a fellow who wants people to make new sex partners promise not to vote for Bush in exchange for hot monkey love. Or something like that. He insists that this is just a means of “starting the conversation,” which I hear from artists all the time. As if we’re all just standing here making mute gestures and shrugging, unable to discuss something unless the idea is put forth in Handy Art Form. He also wanted to “remind us of the connection between politics and sex,” which officially made him the most dreary fellow I’d heard so far this week. These people always want to remind us of the connection between politics and everything. Politics and hot dogs. (Work conditions in the slaughterhouse!) Politics and lawn mowers. (Illegals keep our grass short!) Politics and Smurf fetishes. Politics and nose picking. It all goes back to that phrase I hated the first time I heard it – the personal is the political. No, the personal is the personal. I remember sitting in a booth at the Valli arguing with someone about the political implications of Mozart

On Monday I was thinking out loud about how an art-loving New Yorker might seek to profit from the knowledge that terrorists were planning to attack his home town in the near future:

It happens that my life was turned inside out in all sorts of ways in the immediate wake of 9/11, but no matter what fears I found myself facing, I almost always managed sooner or later to slip out of the fearful present and immerse myself in the blessed world of art, responding all the more passionately because of my renewed consciousness of life’s brevity. Strange that it so often takes a catastrophe, whether personal or public, to make you face a fact that was no less true on 9/10, or 9/12.

So what did I do when I heard the news on Sunday afternoon? I threw myself into correcting the page proofs of All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine, which had arrived in the mail shortly before I left town for a long weekend of playgoing in Massachusetts and Washington. In a sense, I didn’t have much choice–the corrections were due on Monday—but it still struck me as odd that I should have been pouring so much mental energy into so mundane a task in the midst of an orange alert. Granted, it wasn’t as if I’d just been told that I’d be hanged the next day, but even so, correcting my proofs somehow seemed an unsuitable response to the news I’d just received.

On the other hand, what should I have been doing? Listening prayerfully to Das Lied von der Erde or the Schubert Cello Quintet? Reading a never-before-read classic—or, alternatively, rereading an especially beloved one? Looking at and meditating on the contents of the Teachout Museum? What would you do if you knew you had only a day to live? A week? A year? If a piece of unfinished work rested reproachfully on your desk, would you feel obliged to finish it? If you knew you couldn’t get it done in the time remaining, would you try to do as much as you could? Or would you put it aside, smiling wryly at the vanity of human wishes, and spend your last hours communing with better minds than your own?

I wish I could say I stopped to ask myself one or more of these questions, but I didn’t. When duty calls, philosophy must wait. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work, and at some point in the middle of the night I corrected the last page of All in the Dances, e-mailed my changes to the San Diego office of Harcourt, Inc., put the proofs aside, and fell into bed, there to sleep fitfully for what remained of Sunday night and Monday morning.

Needless to say, no truck bombs exploded in Manhattan on Monday, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time since then reflecting on first and last things. It occurred to me somewhere along the way that I’d just learned a valuable lesson about my personal priorities, one neither good nor bad but simply revealing. After all, I don’t have any illusions about All in the Dances. It’s a short critical biography of a great choreographer, not a philosophical treatise, and while I do think it’s a damned good book, I can’t imagine that it’ll be read a hundred years hence, nor would I dream of suggesting that its publication will help make the world a significantly better place. So why did I work so hard on it at what might reasonably have been thought to be an inappropriate time? Because I believe deeply in the ennobling sanctity of craft. Because I agree with Ecclesiastes’ preacher: Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might. Because it’s mine.

I was watching Howard Hawks’ Red River yesterday afternoon, a film in which John Wayne has occasion to “read from the Book” over the grave of a man he has just shot to death. He says what movie cowboys usually say on such grim occasions: “We brought nothing into this world, and it’s certain we can carry nothing out.” As the Duke spoke those words, I looked up from the TV screen at the prints hanging on the wall of my living room. I can’t take them with me, either, and though I’ve arranged to leave them to friends in the event of my death, those well-laid plans would very likely go awry if terrorists struck anywhere near my Upper West Side apartment. Were I to flee for my life, I might possibly think to cram my smallest work of art, a painted tile by Nell Blaine, into my shoulder bag—but probably not. More likely I’d lock the door, run like hell, and never see any of the Teachout Museum again.

Is it, then, a foolish vanity for me to be correcting proofs and collecting art at a time like this? Or is it a pledge of allegiance to the dual republic of beauty and craft? “Art, which resists decay, and the summer lightning of happy love, are all that we can cling to in our lives.” So said Alexander Herzen, and I think he was pretty close to the mark. Perhaps nobody will care to read All in the Dances a hundred years hence, but now that I’ve finished correcting the proofs, Harcourt can and will bring it out even if I get blown up by a truck bomb or choke on a piece of steak, thereby making it possible for somebody, somewhere, to read my posthumously published words and be inspired to go see his first Balanchine ballet. That’s a good thing, don’t you think? And as for the Teachout Museum, it may indeed be destroyed by fire or picked over by looters, but until that dread day it will continue to give pleasure to me and to my guests—and, should it survive me, to my heirs and assigns.

At any rate, I’m finished with All in the Dances. Or, to be exact, almost finished. I still have to write the dust-jacket copy and sign off on the photo insert. Just two more things to do, both of which could be omitted in a pinch, and my next book can go to press. Ecclesiastes’ preacher had something to say about that, too: And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. He sure got that right.