Archives for January 16, 2006

I went to Washington, D.C., last week to see the Kennedy Center’s revival of Frank Gilroy’s The Subject Was Roses, mainly because Bill Pullman, one of my favorite not-quite-movie-stars, was in the cast. Recalling his witty, sharply drawn performances in The Last Seduction and Zero Effect, I took for granted that Pullman would be playing the part of the young GI newly returned from World War II, and was surprised to find that he’d been cast as the boy’s father. That’s all wrong, I thought. He’s too young to play the father of a soldier. Then Pullman started talking about himself and I started counting on my fingers, and within a few minutes it hit me that the character he was playing had to be forty-eight or forty-nine years old–my age. No sooner did I return to New York than I looked Pullman up on the Internet Movie Database, where I learned that he was born in 1953.

The perception of age is a tricky business. Most people, for instance, think I’m a good deal younger than I am, and are astonished to learn that I’ve reached the eve of my fiftieth birthday. This is partly because I have a young-looking face, but I suspect it also has a good deal to do with the fact that I never quite got around to embracing adult life: I’m a childless singleton who spends most of his nights on the town and hasn’t held a nine-to-five job for years. You might mistake me for a wastrel if I didn’t work so hard, and you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know me fairly well.

It is, I suppose, an odd life, and it doesn’t always please me. Sometimes I wish I had a job that I could put behind me at day’s end, or that I were comfortably ensconced in a nice suburban ranch house with a loving wife and a child or two. This dissatisfaction has grown more marked in recent years, though never overwhelmingly so: I know how lucky I am, and how well my catch-as-catch-can lifestyle suits my temperament. The trouble is that it isn’t nearly so well suited to the diminished energies of old age, and more and more I wonder whether I may have doomed myself to the fearful fate of Aesop’s grasshopper, who fell on lean times when he finally outlived his good luck.

Robert Frost wrote a poem warning grasshoppers to change their heedless ways:

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!

At least I’ve done one thing to prepare for later disregard: I have an abundance of young friends. Rereading Martin Stannard’s biography of Evelyn Waugh the other day, I came across a remark Waugh made to an interviewer in 1953:

One makes friends up to one’s thirties, quarrels with them between 45 and 55, and makes new ones in the sixties. Between 45 and 55 is an irritable time. In middle age one thinks of the young with distaste as a poor imitation of oneself. When one is older one realises that they are quite different people and they become interesting.

That isn’t quite how I feel–for one thing, it’s been years since I last quarrelled with a friend–but I do think Waugh was right about the nature of the fascination that the young exert on the old. I first started making younger friends around the time I turned forty, and their companionship turned out to be one of the happiest things about the decade that followed. Of course a friend isn’t the same thing as a child or a spouse (or a big fat pension, for that matter). Still, I have a feeling that my young friends will do even more to brighten the next chapter of my odd, interesting life.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been easing my way back into blogging since I got out of the hospital. I’ve also been slow to resume surfing the Web, not because I love it less but because I’m afraid of it. For the recovering workaholic, a computer with a high-speed connection to the Internet is a perpetual temptation to excess, and I’m determined not to succumb. Nevertheless, I’ve started revisiting some of my favorite Web sites in recent days, and I’m struck all over again by how much more interesting they are than most of what I read in the mainstream media.

Here’s some of what I found there:

– Mr. Outer Life dreamed that he was reading his own biography:

My Boswell was nothing if not thorough. But as fact after fact piled up I found it harder and harder to find the me buried beneath. I mean, it’s interesting to note the shoes I wore in sixth grade, or my brand of toothpaste, or the scores I achieved on my SAT, or the friends I was closest to in college, or the books I enjoyed most when I was 32, but after a while it got really distracting, then it got annoying, this fire hose of facts drowning me on every page. I found myself reacting against this, at first trying to forget the facts but after a while simply repeating a mantra to myself, over and over: I am not those shoes, I am not that toothpaste, I am not those scores, I am not those friends, I am not those books….

– Lileks holds forth on Christmas songs:

They’re playing Christmas songs at the coffee shop now; the staff informs me that the selection consists of the same four songs played over and over again, but by different artists. I wouldn’t doubt it. There are only four songs, really–religious, secular songs sung like religious songs, happy upbeat modern tunes, and modern krep in which Grandma is run over by a reindeer or the various members of the family gather to rock around the Christmas tree….

This is nostalgia for some–it’s nostalgia for me, for that matter; I remember these versions from my childhood, although I never liked it–but you have to remember that it was nostalgia then, inasmuch as it refers to the “Currier and Ives” versions of the seasons that people already lamented losing. But that’s Christmas; a mass consensual illusion that the holiday existed in some perfect state, and that this state can be replicated again if we find the right combination of lights, ornaments, songs, nutmeg candles, Pottery Barn CD compilations, pine-scented infusers, kicky shoes and brie spreaders….

– My favorite blogger is in a didactic mood:

There are only three syllables in the word, but oh, they are such dangerous syllables. Pianist. Do you say it pompously, snobbishly, in a way that emphasizes the first syllable as if the word were three sixteenth notes placed squarely on beat one? “You’re a PI-an-ist?” This sounds haughty and condescending to my ears–I do not, after all, play a PI-an-o–but I always smile forgivingly and reiterate, “yes, I am a pianist,” as blandly and evenly as possible. In “notational” terms, out of three sixteenths, I tend to make the first a pick-up, saying the word “piano” and yielding to the “ist” four-fifths of the way through. (Sixteenth – bar line – two sixteenths.) Bleating like a lamb through the middle syllable (essentially giving it the full value of an eighth note) is another sloppy mispronunciation; though when accompanied by rolled eyes and lots of laughter, it’s also the perfect way for partying pi-AAN-ists to make fun of themselves….

– Richard Lawrence Cohen sums up art in a nutshell:

I once knew a man who commanded himself to write a sonnet every day for a year. He liked to say that God told him to. For a long time he wouldn’t show his sacred verses to anyone. At last he put them in a book and gave a reading, and I bought a copy.

The poems were skillfully done and showed a hard-earned knowledge of technique. They were full of smart soundplay and allusion and showed great sensitivity to the insensitivity of being male. He wrote about how strong his father was and how his wife had hurt him and how weak his father was and what a coarse, innocent teenager he had been. He wrote about eBay and iPod in meters Dryden had known. Every poem made me feel I had to tell him how good it was.

But of course there was something missing and he knew it. No need for anyone to say it. It wasn’t anything I could advise him to put in. To do that, I would have had to know where to find it. It was–let me try to think–it was that these were the poems any American man our age would have written if he could write poems. And while it was nice to see those things said with assonance and alliteration and half-rhyme and flexible rhythm, none of the lines was more beautiful than we had a right to ask. Which is, of course, what we have a right to ask….

– Jeannine Kellogg is similarly observant about the dilemma of the modern-day singleton:

All the media images bombarding us everyday imply that most everyone in the world is in love or falling in love. Yet there are many singles internet sites that offer to you the love of millions of singles at your keyboard fingertips. So if love or lust is so prevalent and so easily attained, then why are there millions on the internet paying so much money to search for it?

Our tax forms, insurance forms, employment forms, all ask us if we are “single” or “married.” It is our culture’s great delineator; those of us in love and those of us not. A friend said to me that she hated being asked by coworkers, parent’s friends, and married women, if she was single. When she answers, it’s as though she’s contracted a new incurable personality virus. At which point, the inquirer squints and winces and knows not what else to say. For her, an older single woman, the label of single sometimes just feels like a label adhered to the leftovers….

– Ms. A Glass of Chianti, who hails from Fort Worth, Texas, reads a knuckleheaded art review in the local newspaper and finds herself reflecting on the perpetual problem of where to live:

It’s not just art, of course. There’s not a culture of reading. People read, of course, they just tend not to read things that aren’t written by the new pastor of whatever megachurch recently expanded. The books are great; they teach people how to be more involved with their families and churches and communities and how to make God the center of their life… all of the things that really matter. People go to church on Sunday here. Ask any teacher and he will tell you that there is a lot of pressure not to assign homework that’s due on Thursday (as Wednesday is “church night” for most youth groups here).

Now, all of this isn’t to say that there’s nothing to see here. There’s a ton, but there isn’t anyone with whom to talk about it. On the one hand, an empty gallery makes viewing art much easier but on the other, you kind of start wondering what’s wrong with you that you’re all alone yet again. So, if it’s not a cultural wasteland, but people aren’t really engaged in the “high culture,” why might this be?…

As a small-town Missourian turned big-city aesthete, I often find myself pondering such questions. So did Willa Cather, who wrote about them with great subtlety and sympathy in many of her novels and short stories, never more penetratingly than in “A Wagner Matin

Julia Dollison, who sang with Maria Schneider‘s big band last week, is in town to promote her first CD, Observatory. To that end she’ll be performing tonight at the Jazz Standard, accompanied by Ben Monder on guitar, Matt Clohesy on bass, and Ted Poor on drums, the same band heard on the album.

Regular visitors to this blog won’t need further instructions, but if you’re just now joining us, here’s an excerpt from the liner notes I wrote for Observatory:

“There’s this singer I want you to meet. She’s really, really good.” I must hear at least three variations per month on that tired old theme, but when Maria Schneider spoke those words to me five years ago, I took them seriously. What kind of jazz singer, I asked myself, would be interesting enough to catch the ear of the outstanding big-band composer of her generation?

Here’s the answer.

It starts with the voice: warm, airy, dappled with summer sunshine, technically bulletproof from top to bottom….Such voices are born, not made, and Julia Dollison has one. Yet she never coasts on her chops. Instead, she sings like a horn player in love with lyrics, the way Lester Young knew all the words to every ballad he played. Her solos are pointed and meaningful, little musical stories that take you to places you’ve never been.

Then comes the style, an alchemical blend of jazz and pop that makes Harold Arlen and Rufus Wainwright sound not like strange bedfellows but the oldest of friends. Don’t call it “fusion,” though: that might smack of calculation, and there’s nothing calculated about Julia’s singing. She grew up listening to all kinds of music, and now she just sings what she hears, naturally and unselfconsciously….

Two sets, at 7:30 and 9:30. For more information, go here and scroll down.

“At the beginning of the season, when she was not singing often, she had gone one afternoon to hear Paderewski’s recital. In front of her sat an old German couple, evidently poor people who had made sacrifices to pay for their excellent seats. Their intelligent enjoyment of the music, and their friendliness with each other, had interested her more than anything on the programme. When the pianist began a lovely melody in the first movement of the Beethoven D minor sonata, the old lady put out her plump hand and touched her husband’s sleeve and they looked at each other in recognition. They both wore glasses, but such a look! Like forget-me-notes, and so full of happy recollections. Thea wanted to put her arms around them and ask them how they had been able to keep a feeling like that, like a nosegay in a glass of water.”

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark