Archives for August 2004

“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.

Who’d have thought it? I’m still struggling with the persistent remnants of last week’s chest cold, exacerbated by my recent travels to Williamstown and Washington, and after spending most of Tuesday writing a piece that refused to come easily, I found myself without enough steam to open a doll’s envelope. So I gave myself the night off, very possibly followed by a day off. If you don’t hear from me again until Thursday, that’s why. My head is full of wonderful postings (doubtless the source of all that gooey congestion), but they’ll just have to stay in there until I feel like doing more than absolutely nothing.

Later.

“Americans as a whole do not really care for poems or novels or plays as such, as individual works of art each of which is to a certain extent self-contained and autonomous. They like the generalisations that can be drawn from them or put into them, the messages, the bits of uplift or downpush, the statements, the large imponderables reached as soon and as directly as possible without niggling, limiting, specialising detail (seen in things like character, story, setting, motivation, etc.) and proclaimed as loudly and eye-catchingly as possible.”

Kingsley Amis, Memoirs

You didn’t really think I could keep on blogging like that for two whole days in a row, did you? I’ll be spending most of today hammering away at my Wall Street Journal drama column for Friday, but I’ll be back at some point with a Festival of Cool Links accumulated during my two-week intermittent absence from “About Last Night,” plus whatever else the spirit moves me to post. Keep an eye peeled.

In the meantime, check out the “Second City” and Top Five modules of the right-hand column, both of which have been updated with the very latest stuff.