Archives for January 5, 2005

Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique, whose off-Broadway revival I reviewed for The Wall Street Journal back in September, closed on Sunday. To mark the occasion, Twist invited me to come see the show again–only this time from backstage. I immediately took him up on the offer, bringing Our Girl with me to Dodger Stages to see the final performance. It was an unforgettable spectacle, especially for someone as stagestruck as I am. I did my fair share of acting in high school and college, but for me the real romance of the theater was to be found backstage, not in the spotlight, so I jumped at the priceless opportunity to watch Twist’s puppeteers from the far side of the curtain.

If you’ve never seen Symphonie Fantastique, my Wall Street Journal review gives a fairly clear idea of what it looks like out front:

Like “The Bald Soprano,” it’s a theatrical magic act that all but defies explanation, if not description. To put it as simply as possible, “Symphonie Fantastique” is an abstract, wordless puppet show performed in a 1,000-gallon tank of water and accompanied by a recording of Hector Berlioz’s “Fantastic Symphony.” That doesn’t tell you much, does it? If anything, so straightforward a description is likely to be offputting, especially to the casual theatergoer who doesn’t much care for puppets in the first place, so I’ll try to flesh things out a bit.

What you see in “Symphonie Fantastique” is one wall of a shallow glass tank into which five wet-suited puppeteers dip and slosh 180 peculiar-looking objects, none of which even remotely resembles Charlie McCarthy. Inspired by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Berlioz’s own program for the “Fantastic Symphony,” Mr. Twist uses this equipment to conjure up a bewitching string of complex scenes that unfold with the nagging compulsion of a love story (which is what Berlioz’s symphony is, more or less). The puppeteers are hidden from view by a black wall, and the tank, which looks rather like a flat-screen television, is lit so cunningly and colorfully that you soon become disoriented and surrender joyously to the illusions being created before your amazed eyes.

In the end, literal descriptions of what “happens” in “Symphonie Fantastique” must inevitably fall short of conveying its loony, inscrutable beauty. Metaphor is the only way to suggest its essence. I’ve now seen “Symphonie Fantastique” something like a half-dozen times, starting with its original off-off-Broadway production at the HERE Arts Center, and I described a previous incarnation as looking like “a cross between George Balanchine, Paul Klee and Chuck Jones.” If that sounds good to you, head for Dodger Stages and prepare to be entranced.

Seen from the other side of the wall, Twist’s inscrutable illusions looked and sounded more like a fistfight in a dark alley on a rainy night. Soggy puppets and props sailed drippingly through the air, the black-clad puppeteers grunted and cursed and howled along with Berlioz, and I sat quietly in a corner with my mouth hanging open, alternately thinking Oh, that’s how they do it!, I have the coolest job in the whole world, and Maybe I should have brought a raincoat (a towel was supplied, fortunately). Every once in a while I’d snatch a hasty glance at a TV monitor that showed what it looked like from the front of the house. What I saw there was beautiful, but what I saw with my unaided eyes seemed chaotic to the point of insanity, and I kept reminding myself that it wasn’t–that the deceptively wild tumult was in fact choreographed down to the last splash.

Here’s another thought that crossed my mind as I sat in the wings: might it be that live theater in all its endless varieties is the most unselfish of the art forms? When I played bass in my college orchestra, for instance, I participated completely in the musical experience as it was happening. I could hear the piece unfolding, and reveled in the multihued sound of the ensemble of which I was a part. But the gifted artisans who enacted Symphonie Fantastique at Dodger Stages saw nothing but a huge tank of water into which they stuck odd-shaped objects and sloshed them around. The visual experience thereby brought into being was reserved exclusively for the audience. The performers had to take it on faith.

Watching Twist’s puppeteers splash and curse and sing, I was reminded of George Balanchine’s famous remark that dancers, like angels, carry a message but do not themselves experience it. Of course they must experience something pleasurable–otherwise they wouldn’t keep doing it day after day–but they don’t get to see what we see, not even when they see themselves after the fact on film or videotape. The same goes for puppeteers, and for actors of all kinds. Theirs is the burden, ours the blessing.

My good friend Tyler Green, who blogs at Modern Art Notes, is yanking my chain:

I disagree with my esteemed AJ colleague Terry Teachout about the lack of usefulness of specialized critical fields. There is value to readers in specialized knowledge, in a critic spending hours and hours studying, thinking about and examining a certain field….what about providing context, insight and original thinking about contemporary art when the premiere of Alias is on at 8 tonight and there’s a new novel to be read? What about doing the legwork to look at all that a critic has to look at in order to speak with some level of insight?

Er, did I really say critical specialization wasn’t useful? Because it is, or can be, for all the good reasons Tyler mentions–but only so long as the specialist remains conscious and appreciative of the place of his specialty in the larger world of art. Critics who lack or lose this awareness become provincial, which is the curse of certain branches of criticism (dance in particular). What do they know of modernism who only modern art know? Answer: not enough.

I don’t offer my own experience as a model for all critics, by the way. I started out years ago as a critical specialist (in music), but gradually began writing about other things that interested me simply because…I wanted to. And I hope I’m properly modest about what I can and can’t do. To quote from my introduction to A Terry Teachout Reader, “I am all too aware that when I discuss any art form other than music, it is as a more or less well-informed amateur, not a practitioner. The only claim that I would make for myself is that because I chose not to remain a specialist, I thereby acquired a feel for the unity of the arts that has had its own value.” At least I think so, anyway!

Yes, I do believe good critics should be encouraged to write outside their specialties. (Bad critics, conversely, should be encouraged to take up other lines of work.) But specialization in and of itself is no bad thing, so long as it doesn’t lead in bad directions. My favorite art critic, Fairfield Porter, was in one sense the ultimate specialist–a professional painter who wrote about art when not making it. He was also a part-time poet and a deeply thoughtful man whose aesthetic interests (and knowledge) ranged very widely. Don’t you wish he’d taken the time to write on occasion about other art forms as well? I do, just as I’m excited that the anything-but-provincial music critic John Rockwell will soon become the chief dance critic of the New York Times. He may be wrong–a lot–but at least he’ll be interesting.

One more quote, this one from the mission statement for “About Last Night”:

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and elsewhere…It’s about all the arts, not just one or two. Clement Greenberg, the great art critic, believed that “in the long run there are only two kinds of art: the good and the bad. This difference cuts across all other differences in art. At the same time, it makes all art one….the experience of art is the same in kind or order despite all differences in works of art themselves.” We feel the same way, which is why we write about so many different things. We think many people–maybe most–approach art with a similarly wide-ranging appreciation. By writing each day about our own experiences as consumers and critics, we hope to create a meeting place in cyberspace for arts lovers who are curious, adventurous, and unafraid of the unfamiliar.

I think that sums up my thinking, and Our Girl’s, fairly well. And I bet Tyler doesn’t really disagree with us, either.

UPDATE: Scroll up from Tyler’s original posting to see incoming responses from his other readers. See also Alex Ross:

I ask this, though: if the ideal critic writes about classical music and nothing but, where would you put G. B. Shaw? E. T. A. Hoffmann? Wagner? The writer who can encompass more than one realm is the one whose words will resonate longest. The best piece of music criticism I’ve read in a decade was Alan Hollinghurst’s TLS review of the Bayreuth Ring in 2000. Why? Because he didn’t write like a parochial expert; he wrote like the major novelist he is. In an ideal world, poets, presidents, painters, and priests would talk about music, and there would be no critics. We’re just filling the void….

– Bookish Gardener has made what at first glance appears to be a very significant music-related discovery about Henry James’ The Portrait of a Lady. Click on the link and see for yourself.

– Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, digests the findings of the important new Pew Internet and American Life study:

27% of internet users say they read blogs, a 58% jump from the 17% who told us they were blog readers in February. This means that by the end of 2004 32 million Americans were blog readers…. At the same time, for all the excitement about blogs and the media coverage of them, blogs have not yet become recognized by a majority of internet users. Only 38% of all internet users know what a blog is. The rest are not sure what the term “blog” means.

His comment:

Hell, at this stage in the birth of the web, I’ll bet just as many people didn’t know what the hell HTML was. The fact that almost 40 percent of online Americans know what blogs are is amazing.

I agree. Read the rest. This is no fad.

– The adorable Maccers spent Christmas in an ashram:

The temperature will go below freezing tonight and the electric heater that I have in the cabin doesn’t seem to be taking the edge off the chill. There are three electric bars which are trying to fight the icy winds coming through the two inch gaps under the door and around the windows. Two other things which have been filling me with a sense of foreboding are the large baskets filled with tambourines (tambourines!) I spied in the meditation hall and the hand holding Hare Krishna chanting we have to do before dinner. All of us in the kitchen. Singing over the vegetable curry. If I have to do that again, I very well might be fasting during my entire stay….

Eeuuww.

– Champion mystery writer Laura Lippman has trenchant things to say about her chosen line of work:

Crime fiction has its share of jerry-built and dilapidated stock, but the genre is sturdy, its possibilities endless. Come on in, but don’t think you’ll transform it via the literary equivalents of granite counter-tops and Viking stoves. Like the rowhouses of Baltimore, thrown up in the 19th century to house the working class, the only thing great crime fiction has transcended is those who would render it transitory….

Take that, Edmund Wilson!

“Greek tragedy is the tragedy of necessity; i.e., the feeling aroused in the spectator is

If you know who I’m talking about, and that he died on Monday, you’ll definitely want to read this appreciation by Michael Barrier.

(Read this, too.)

If you don’t mind, I believe I’ll take Thursday off. I’m feeling a bit fried from the cumulative effects of the past few weeks’ labors, and I’ve got to write my Wall Street Journal column first thing in the morning.

I’m not sure when my trusty co-blogger gets back to Chicago, but when she does I know she’ll have tales of her own to tell. Maybe tomorrow, maybe Friday….

Anyway, later. Go read some other blog. You know where to find ’em.

I was never an admirer, much less a fan, of Susan Sontag, but I confess to being fascinated by the retrospective brouhaha over whether the New York Times should have outed her–which it didn’t–in its long, unabashedly admiring obituary. Not surprisingly, Andrew Sullivan has been linking to much of the relevant post-obit commentary, and today he’s posted a long and telling excerpt from a Sontag interview conducted in 2000:

She says she has been in love seven times in her life, which seems quite a lot. “No, hang on,” she says. “Actually, it’s nine. Five women, four men.” She will talk about her bisexuality quite openly now. It’s simple, she says. “As I’ve become less attractive to men, so I’ve found myself more with women. It’s what happens. Ask any woman my age. More women come on to you than men. And women are fantastic. Around 40, women blossom. Women are a work-in-progress. Men burn out.” She doesn’t have a lover now, she lives alone. The rumours about her and the photographer Annie Leibovitz are, she says, without foundation. They are close friends.

Maybe it sounds foolish, she says. “Maybe everyone will think I have an aberrant life, or a low sex drive. Maybe I am consigning myself to the asexual here. But speaking candidly, and only for myself, there are so many things in my life now that are more important to me than my sexuality. My relationship with my son, David. My writing. Even my moral passions seem to me to be far more defining than my erotic life. People can conclude from this what they want.”

(You’ll find lots of other interesting Sontag-related stuff on Sullivan’s site, but his permalinks don’t always point directly to specific postings, so the best thing to do is go there, scroll down, and keep scrolling.)

Should the Times have described Sontag as a lesbian, or bisexual, or however you want to put it? Speaking as a biographer, I think it’s absurd not to be frank about such matters. Regardless of a person’s wishes, the statute of limitations on candor expires when the death certificate is signed, and when the person in question is important, it’s no less important to tell the truth, insofar as it’s known or can be determined. I once read a long, posthumously published biography of the American composer Samuel Barber in which the words “homosexual” and “gay” were nowhere to be found, even though everybody in the music business knew perfectly well that Barber was gay (and even though the author had written at length about a goodly number of his lovers). That’s just crazy.

At the same time, though, I think biographers–and writers of obituaries–should be careful about engaging in the sort of idiot reductionism one typically finds in what Joyce Carol Oates has called “pathography.” What Sontag said in that interview is worth taking to heart–and not just in her own case. Whatever else she was or wasn’t, she was definitely a complicated woman, too complicated to be summed up in a single word. So am I. So are you.