I thought I ought to leave some reading matter behind to tide you over until I get back, so here’s a bunch:

– John Lahr is onto something here:

Bannered across the poster for London’s new hit musical “Billy Elliot” (at the Victoria Palace)–a collaboration between two of the country’s mightiest showmen, the director Stephen Daldry and the composer Sir Elton John–is an unbuttoned quotation from the usually buttoned-down British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. “The greatest British musical I have ever seen,” it says. What, I wonder, are the other great British musicals? “Salad Days”? “The Boy Friend”? “Cats”? The British love musicals; they just don’t do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity–the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it….

– On the other hand, this is one of the most vulgar pieces about theater (or anything else) that I’ve run across in ages:

The true legacy of Shakespeare in the Park is not the education of the unlettered masses; nor did [Joseph] Papp create (or desire to create) a stateside equivalent of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Shakespeare in the Park is a benediction for intellectual daytrippers–an attempt to convince us that a few hours spent sweating in Central Park is culture earned the hard way….

(The inspiration for this pissy little essay, by the way, was Mark Lamos’ production of As You Like It. To be sure, I haven’t seen it yet, and I’ve written some very sharp things about the past couple of years’ worth of Shakespeare in the Park productions. On the other hand, Lamos is one of the best stage directors we have, which suggests to me that the author wrote his piece before he saw the show–not an unheard-of practice among journalists.)

– I’ve done this–though never on the way to a show! (If the reference doesn’t ring a bell, go here for, er, enlightenment.)

– Mr. Modern Art Notes
drew my attention to this painter, and now I’m soooo curious to see his stuff in the flesh. Take a look and see if you don’t feel the same way.

– For those who wonder why I’m forever singing the praises of Bob Brookmeyer, go straight to this amazon.com list of his best CDs and buy one. You can pick at random–they’re all terrific.

– Ms. Bookish Gardener has gone all warm and fuzzy over the great jazz pianist Hank Jones….

– …while Jonathan Yardley waxes appreciative of Wilfrid Sheed’s half-forgotten comic novel Office Politics:

Its singularly unheroic protagonist, George Wren, is “number-four editor” at a little magazine called the Outsider, based in shabby New York offices, that boasts “21,000 subscribers (it used to be 27,000), a small, nagging deficit, a reputation that shrank a little every time a subscriber died.” It’s “just another little magazine . . . staggering through life in an endless dribble of opinion,” but–ta-da!–it “had once been endorsed by Adlai Stevenson and Madame Pandit Nehru” and George believes in it passionately, so much so that three months ago he took a pay cut from $13,000 (at CBS) to $7,500 just for the privilege of becoming a part of it.

Actually, put that in the past tense, because George is no longer sure there’s much at the Outsider worth believing in. Its charismatic editor, a transplanted Brit named Gilbert Twining, has loads of facile charm and wields a keen editorial pen, but whether there’s anything behind the charm is open to question. The rest of the magazine’s tiny staff is a conglomeration of oddballs and misfits “hand-picked” by Twining, apparently “on some principle of interlocking incompatibility.”…

To which I would only add that Sheed’s Max Jamison is at least as good.

– In case you haven’t read The Skeptic, you may not know that H.L. Mencken translated Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. I recently stumbled by chance across a Web-based e-text of his English-language version, complete with an utterly characteristic preface in which Mencken’s good and bad sides are placed on simultaneous display. (Rarely has his weirdly idiosyncratic anti-Semitism, for example, been epitomized so concisely.) It’s one of his least well-known essays, and shouldn’t be.

– Finally, some thoughts from Lileks about the joys of staying off interstate highways:

Ten connects Minneapolis to Fargo. And vice versa, of course. It always has. Before the Interstate, Ten was the road between here and there, two lanes of concrete slabs that bothered your shocks and made the wheel jump in your hands. But it kept your attention. Strung along Ten were all the towns set up in the early days of the trains, improbable hamlets with names like Motley and Dilworth. Each larger town was halved by a perpendicular artery, and each of those roads split off into endless capillaries. If you wanted to get lost, you started on Ten and kept going until the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel turned to dirt. If you wanted to, that is. We didn’t; we were headed to Fargo.

It’s three and a half hours by Interstate, if you speed, and you get out of the city in good time. It’s four and a half on the Highway. You spend part of that hour slowing to limp through towns great and mean, places that have a swinging yellow light and a bar and a gas station, places that creep up to the road like some old wounded beast, places that had the lucky to have Ten march right through the center of things so you could sample the signage: Kiwanis Lions Elks Guns Gas Food Camping Liquor Motel Bait Feed, and incidentally speed limits are strictly enforced. You don’t doubt it. You slow. Everyone does. Then the sign says 65 and you do 75. Twenty miles later there’s another. These are the towns you usually know only as a name on the Interstate signs. It’s nice to finally meet them….

By the time you get around to reading these words, I’ll be doing the same thing, only in a different place. I hope I enjoy it half as much. (I expect to.)

I thought I ought to leave some reading matter behind to tide you over until I get back, so here’s a bunch:

– John Lahr is onto something here:

Bannered across the poster for London’s new hit musical “Billy Elliot” (at the Victoria Palace)–a collaboration between two of the country’s mightiest showmen, the director Stephen Daldry and the composer Sir Elton John–is an unbuttoned quotation from the usually buttoned-down British broadsheet the Daily Telegraph. “The greatest British musical I have ever seen,” it says. What, I wonder, are the other great British musicals? “Salad Days”? “The Boy Friend”? “Cats”? The British love musicals; they just don’t do them very well. The problem, it seems to me, is spiritual. The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity–the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it….

– On the other hand, this is one of the most vulgar pieces about theater (or anything else) that I’ve run across in ages:

The true legacy of Shakespeare in the Park is not the education of the unlettered masses; nor did [Joseph] Papp create (or desire to create) a stateside equivalent of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Shakespeare in the Park is a benediction for intellectual daytrippers–an attempt to convince us that a few hours spent sweating in Central Park is culture earned the hard way….

(The inspiration for this pissy little essay, by the way, was Mark Lamos’ production of As You Like It. To be sure, I haven’t seen it yet, and I’ve written some very sharp things about the past couple of years’ worth of Shakespeare in the Park productions. On the other hand, Lamos is one of the best stage directors we have, which suggests to me that the author wrote his piece before he saw the show–not an unheard-of practice among journalists.)

– I’ve done this–though never on the way to a show! (If the reference doesn’t ring a bell, go here for, er, enlightenment.)

– Mr. Modern Art Notes
drew my attention to this painter, and now I’m soooo curious to see his stuff in the flesh. Take a look and see if you don’t feel the same way.

– For those who wonder why I’m forever singing the praises of Bob Brookmeyer, go straight to this amazon.com list of his best CDs and buy one. You can pick at random–they’re all terrific.

– Ms. Bookish Gardener has gone all warm and fuzzy over the great jazz pianist Hank Jones….

– …while Jonathan Yardley waxes appreciative of Wilfrid Sheed’s half-forgotten comic novel Office Politics:

Its singularly unheroic protagonist, George Wren, is “number-four editor” at a little magazine called the Outsider, based in shabby New York offices, that boasts “21,000 subscribers (it used to be 27,000), a small, nagging deficit, a reputation that shrank a little every time a subscriber died.” It’s “just another little magazine . . . staggering through life in an endless dribble of opinion,” but–ta-da!–it “had once been endorsed by Adlai Stevenson and Madame Pandit Nehru” and George believes in it passionately, so much so that three months ago he took a pay cut from $13,000 (at CBS) to $7,500 just for the privilege of becoming a part of it.

Actually, put that in the past tense, because George is no longer sure there’s much at the Outsider worth believing in. Its charismatic editor, a transplanted Brit named Gilbert Twining, has loads of facile charm and wields a keen editorial pen, but whether there’s anything behind the charm is open to question. The rest of the magazine’s tiny staff is a conglomeration of oddballs and misfits “hand-picked” by Twining, apparently “on some principle of interlocking incompatibility.”…

To which I would only add that Sheed’s Max Jamison is at least as good.

– In case you haven’t read The Skeptic, you may not know that H.L. Mencken translated Nietzsche’s The Antichrist. I recently stumbled by chance across a Web-based e-text of his English-language version, complete with an utterly characteristic preface in which Mencken’s good and bad sides are placed on simultaneous display. (Rarely has his weirdly idiosyncratic anti-Semitism, for example, been epitomized so concisely.) It’s one of his least well-known essays, and shouldn’t be.

– Finally, some thoughts from Lileks about the joys of staying off interstate highways:

Ten connects Minneapolis to Fargo. And vice versa, of course. It always has. Before the Interstate, Ten was the road between here and there, two lanes of concrete slabs that bothered your shocks and made the wheel jump in your hands. But it kept your attention. Strung along Ten were all the towns set up in the early days of the trains, improbable hamlets with names like Motley and Dilworth. Each larger town was halved by a perpendicular artery, and each of those roads split off into endless capillaries. If you wanted to get lost, you started on Ten and kept going until the pavement turned to gravel and the gravel turned to dirt. If you wanted to, that is. We didn’t; we were headed to Fargo.

It’s three and a half hours by Interstate, if you speed, and you get out of the city in good time. It’s four and a half on the Highway. You spend part of that hour slowing to limp through towns great and mean, places that have a swinging yellow light and a bar and a gas station, places that creep up to the road like some old wounded beast, places that had the lucky to have Ten march right through the center of things so you could sample the signage: Kiwanis Lions Elks Guns Gas Food Camping Liquor Motel Bait Feed, and incidentally speed limits are strictly enforced. You don’t doubt it. You slow. Everyone does. Then the sign says 65 and you do 75. Twenty miles later there’s another. These are the towns you usually know only as a name on the Interstate signs. It’s nice to finally meet them….

By the time you get around to reading these words, I’ll be doing the same thing, only in a different place. I hope I enjoy it half as much. (I expect to.)