Archives for November 2004

“One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time. Those who went farther than Chicago would gather in the old dim Union Station at six o’clock of a December evening, with a few Chicago friends, already caught up into their own holiday gayeties, to bid them a hasty good-by. I remember the fur coats of the girls returning from Miss This-or-that’s and the chatter of frozen breath and the hands waving overhead as we caught sight of old acquaintances, and the matchings of invitations: ‘Are you going to the Ordways’? the Herseys’? the Schultzes’?’ and the long green tickets clasped tight in our gloved hands. And last the murky yellow cars of the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul railroad looking cheerful as Christmas itself on the tracks beside the gate.

“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

“That’s my Middle West–not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all–Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Few happy days are entirely unspotted by melancholy. I just had an exceptionally fine one, and my mailbox overflowed with congratulations by the time it was done, but I couldn’t help thinking of departed friends with whom I would have rejoiced to share my good news, and how they would have rejoiced to hear it. As I remembered them, I thought of the stark confession Dr. Johnson made in the preface to his Dictionary: “I have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tranquillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from praise.”

Those are terrible words, and in Dr. Johnson’s case they might almost have been true, for he was thinking of his wife, who was forced to live in harsh discomfort because of the paralyzing sloth that kept him from finishing his great work until after her death. He was racked with guilt as a result, and the preface to the Dictionary reflects that guilt. But was it really true that he had “little to fear or hope from censure or from praise”? I doubt it. Dr. Johnson was a very great man, but great men are still men, and few of them are wholly indifferent to the kind words of friends and colleagues, even if they wish to be thought so.

In any case, most of us, however curmudgeonly we may pretend to be, acquire at least a few younger friends as we grow older, in part because it is a comfort–a relief, really–to know people who take you at face value. Old friends know too much about you to do that. I noticed a few years ago that most of my closest friends were younger than I am (two of them are half my age), and briefly wondered what that said about me. Was I seeking to feed off their vitality? Did I hunger for the uncritical admiration of a student for his teacher? Or was I simply following the predictable path of a normal life, in the course of which we sort out our friends and acquaintances over time, picking new ones and pruning old ones in the light of our growing self-knowledge? All of the above, I suspect, and I’m not so sure that there’s anything bad about it. I love my new friends, sometimes selfishly and sometimes not, just as Dr. Johnson didn’t let his pretended indifference stop him from warming his hands at the fire of Boswell’s admiration.

To be sure, the one thing a new friend can never do for you is say I knew you when, and I find it rather sad that there are so few people in my life who can speak those words. None of my closest friends in Manhattan knew me when: we didn’t meet until after I’d figured out who I was and what I wanted to become. On the other hand, the friends of our youth present their own problems. They are part of the train of memories that we all pull behind us, the one that grows longer with each passing day, and for that reason harder to pull. “The friend of your youth,” Robert Penn Warren wrote in All the King’s Men, “is the only friend you will ever have, for he does not really see you. He sees in his mind a face which does not exist anymore, speaks a name–Spike, Bud, Skip, Red, Rusty, Jack, Dave–which belongs to that now non-existent face but by some inane and doddering confusion is for the moment attached to a not too happily met and boring stranger.” Old friends knew you when, but new ones know you now, and now is when it is and where you are.

Which brings me full circle, back to those absent friends who will never know me now. I miss them all, one or two with a keenness undulled by the passage of time. How I wish they could have seen what they missed–just as I wish I could have seen what they missed. But there’s no point in longing for what you can’t possibly have, especially since I’m as grateful as a man can be for what I do have: the perfect job, a handsome apartment whose walls are crowded with beautiful works of art, and a couple of dozen beloved friends who give me more joy than I deserve. I’d trade every piece in the Teachout Museum for any one of them. They are what I treasure most.

“Life is short, art long, opportunity fleeting, experience treacherous, judgment difficult.”

Hippocrates, Aphorisms

A diary of recent events in Teachoutworld:

FRIDAY: Spoke about All in the Dances at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and was given a private view of “Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum,” a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of original costumes and set designs for such legendary ballets as Les Noces, Prodigal Son, and Nijinsky’s Sacre du Printemps (including a costume hand-painted by Matisse). More next week, but for the moment I’ll just say that anybody with more than a casual interest in twentieth-century ballet will find this show, which runs through Jan. 2, jaw-droppingly good.

SATURDAY: A triple-decker day. Went to Knoedler & Company and looked at Onrushing Waves, the Milton Avery exhibition. Then to the nearest movie theater to see Sideways, about which Our Girl was soooo right: it couldn’t have been better. Then to Broadway for a preview of Dame Edna: Back with a Vengeance, followed by dinner and a fast cab home, where I watched two stockpiled episodes of What’s My Line?
on the DVR (Steve Allen just joined the panel) and went to bed way too late.

SUNDAY: Maccers, my blogstalker, came to my Barnes & Noble signing last Tuesday (incognito, but I found her out), so I e-mailed her an invitation to a Broadway preview. She turned up her fine nose at a glitzy musical, forcing me to up the highbrow ante several thousand notches with Sheridan’s The Rivals, to which she said yes. Updated the Top Five with four fresh items, including a heartfelt paragraph about the Avery show. (See the right-hand column for details.) Lunched quickly and dirtily on the fly, called my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., from the street, then saw two back-to-back off-Broadway shows, John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt
and Woody Allen’s A Second Hand Memory. Called Our Girl the second I got home to discuss Sideways. Knocked out a quick posting for Monday (you’re reading it). The loft beckons.

And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow? Well, I have three pieces to write (two shorts and a long) before I head for LaGuardia on Wednesday morning to fly home to my family for Thanksgiving. Between meals, I plan to sleep. No blogging, though–you’ll be on your own from Wednesday through next Tuesday.

How about you?

“If acting is a creative art–if it is–then it is perfectly reasonable to demand for it conditions similar to those of the painter or the writer: the right, that is, to make a mess, to splash around, to make drafts and sketches, to have a wasterpaper bin at your side. In any creative activity, art is madness, craft is sanity. The balance between them makes the work.”

Simon Callow, Charles Laughton: A Difficult Actor

Says Modern Kicks:

Anyone caught posting after, say, 7 PM Wednesday evening or before 1 PM next Monday is officially a pathetic, internet-addicted loser.

Well, that tears it: I’m definitely not taking my iBook home for Thanksgiving!

I just got a call from the National Endowment for the Arts informing me that the Senate has confirmed my nomination to the National Council on the Arts by a unanimous voice vote. I’ll go to Washington to be sworn in some time between now and the next NCA meeting in March.

I blogged about my nomination back in July, and you can read all about it here. Briefly, President Bush appointed me to the civilian panel that advises the NEA and its chairman, Dana Gioia. It is, needless to say, a great honor–an opportunity to give something back to the arts after a lifetime of pleasure and profit–and I will do my best to be worthy of it. I couldn’t be more grateful to the President, the Senate, and my old friend Dana.

In case you’re wondering, I’ll still be writing about the arts for whoever cares to put up the money, and “About Last Night” will soldier on as outspokenly as ever.

This part, by the way, will make you laugh: the NEA tells me that anyone who receives a presidential appointment that is confirmed by the Senate is thereafter entitled to be called “the Honorable,” as in the Honorable Terry Teachout. I myself prefer Nancy Mitford’s less formal usage: I’m a Hon!

And now…back to work. I still have a few counter-Hons to slay before I can go home for Thanksgiving, and just because I’m now a Hon doesn’t mean my three deadlines have been extended by presidential fiat. We’ll crack open the champagne later.

UPDATE: I’ve already gotten one phone call from a friend asking if I can also be called “The Right Honorable Terry Teachout.” Straight answer: I think that usage is strictly for Brits. Funny answer: Only when I am.

I lunched on Wednesday with a friend of mine who recently went to work at the Museum of Modern Art, whose brand-new midtown headquarters will be opened to the public tomorrow. The flu had laid me too low to attend any of the preceding week’s press previews, so when she asked me if I’d like to take a quick peek at the galleries, I was–well, torn. I was worn out from a hard night’s book-plugging and knew I really needed to go home and grab a nap, but I couldn’t imagine passing up a chance to see the new MoMA before the crowds arrived, so I took a deep breath and said, “You bet. Let’s go.”

No doubt every art and architecture critic in the known universe will be holding forth this week and next about MoMA. (The New York Times even has a special page on its Web site devoted to the opening.) Opinions published to date range from the ecstatic to the apocalyptic. For my part, I feel neither inclined nor qualified to lay down the law based on a single brisk walkthrough. The new MoMA is going to be around for a long time, and my feelings about it will evolve each time I come back to see it again. The sheer bigness of the public areas, for instance, struck me as offputting at first glance. “This’d be a great place for a roller derby,” I told my friend as we entered the first-floor lobby. But I realized in the next breath that they’d look different–radically so–once they were filled to capacity with excited museumgoers, and immediately resolved to suspend judgment.

Most of the artbloggers who’ve written about MoMA have concentrated on the contemporary galleries and their contents. (Modern Art Notes is posting fresh links on a regular basis.) I was more interested in how MoMA’s “narrative” of the development of modernism had been revisited and reshaped by John Elderfield and his team of curators. Again, my reactions are strictly provisional, but here are some of the things that struck me as I sprinted through the galleries for the first time:

– In the old MoMA, Picasso was the big cheese. Now it’s Matisse. (Suits me.)

– Visitors to the old MoMA had only one way to experience the unfolding of modernism: in a sequence carefully controlled by the entrances and exits to the successive galleries. The new floor plan, by contrast, is much more open. MoMA still tells a highly idiosyncratic “story” about modern art, but you can read the chapters in whatever order you choose.

– In the old MoMA, prewar American modernists were all but ignored, except for the ones whose work either related to European surrealism (Joseph Cornell) or prefigured abstract expressionism (Milton Avery). Nor were such postwar representationalists as Fairfield Porter given the time of day. Alas, nothing has changed. Justin Davidson and Ariella Budick nailed it in their Newsday review:

Every museum has its omissions, but MoMA’s disregard for Americans who don’t fit the official line is all the more breathtaking because of the building’s scope. Two floors of painting and sculpture are still not ample enough to include Fairfield Porter, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Philip Pearlstein, or Alex Katz. Even Larry Rivers’ “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” one of the museum’s marquee paintings, is absent.

These omissions are all the more striking to me in light of the fact that my own collection of works on paper by American artists focuses on precisely those artists whom MoMA fails to take seriously. I originally conceived of the “Teachout Museum” as a kind of counter-canon of American modernism–a reply to MoMA, so to speak. The fact that the old MoMA was too small to exhibit more than a fraction of its vast holdings made me wonder whether the new MoMA might possibly be planning to rethink its cramped view of American art before 1945. No such luck. At least for now, Elderfield & Co. haven’t even tried.

– If you want to sum up MoMA’s occasional fits of provincialism in a single sentence, you could do worse than this one: it owns at least four major Morandis, but none of them is on view.

– One of the best things a smart curator can do is hang works of art together in such a way as to make you say, Wow! I never thought of that. The new MoMA offers more than a few such double-take moments. The gallery devoted to minimalism, for instance, also contains a large circle painting by Kenneth Noland. To see it hanging across the room from a Donald Judd sculpture is eye-opening in the best possible way. Likewise the now-notorious stairwell in which Matisse’s “La Danse” looks down on Avery’s “Sea Grasses and Blue Sea” (which used to hang next to the cloakroom!) and a Richard Diebenkorn “Ocean Park” canvas. No, I don’t like the way the Matisse is hung, not one little bit–it’s cute, if you know what I mean–but I love the juxtaposition.

A thought-provoking afternoon, in short, and I was bone-tired when I headed for home, got on my back for a couple of hours, then cabbed down to the theater district to hear the Phil Woods Quintet
at Birdland, an event I’d been eagerly awaiting for weeks.

Woods is one of those jazz musicians who is extravagantly admired by his peers without ever having enjoyed the general acclaim he deserves (except for the too-brief period in the Seventies when he sat in on Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are” and Steely Dan’s “Doctor Wu” and recorded under his own name for RCA). He is that rarity of rarities, a second-generation bebop saxophonist who learned the lessons of Charlie Parker without choking on them, and now that he’s reached the threshold of old age, his playing is purer and more compelling than ever. Yes, Woods is still hot enough to burn a hole in a girder, but the hard-edged style of his youthful days has given way to a warmer, richer sound–perhaps he picked up a touch of Benny Carter somewhere along the way. Of course he’s also a great virtuoso, one of the greatest in jazz, but you never get the feeling that he’s showing off: everything is casual, even offhand, as though he were playing for a roomful of friends.

It doesn’t hurt that Woods has been working with the same bassist and drummer, Steve Gilmore and Bill Goodwin, for thirty years. To say all three of them are on the same page is the blandest of understatements–they finish each other’s sentences–and trumpeter Brian Lynch, who joined the group in 1992, fits in no less seamlessly. Among a thousand other things, I love the way they rely on only the most minimal amplification, letting their individual sounds blend naturally in the air. (Microphones have always been a formality for the mammoth-toned Woods.) As for Bill Charlap, who signed on in 1995 and has continued to appear with the quintet from time to time even after his own career mushroomed, I simply can’t say enough good things about him, try though I do; I go to hear Charlap as often as possible, and he never fails to spin my head around. On Wednesday he did it with a solo version of David Raksin’s “The Bad and the Beautiful” that sounded as if he were breathing into an Aeolian harp instead of caressing the keys of Birdland’s Cadillac-sized B