Archives for January 2006

“I was driven to writing because I found it was the only way a lazy and ill-educated man could make a decent living.”

Evelyn Waugh, “General Conversation: Myself” (1937)

At of 9:13 a.m. Sunday, “About Last Night” was being read in Argentina, Australia, China, England, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Iraq, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, the Phillipines, and Poland.

Hello, everybody!

“Heavy apparatus has been at work in the last hundred years to enervate and stultify the imaginative faculties. First, realistic novels and plays, then the cinema have made the urban mentality increasingly subject to suggestion. It lapses effortlessly into a trance-like escape from its condition. Great popularity in fiction and film is only attained by works in which reader and audience can transpose themselves and be vicariously endangered, loved and applauded.”

Evelyn Waugh, “St. Helena Empress” (1951)

It’s Friday, and I’m back in town and booming and zooming (but sensibly, you understand!). In today’s Wall Street Journal I review two off-Broadway shows, In the Continuum and the Atlantic Theater’s double bill
of Harold Pinter’s The Room and Celebration:

What is political theater? Sometimes, as in the case of such relentlessly preachy exercises in agree-or-you’re-evil propaganda as “Guantanamo” or “The God of Hell,” the answer is painfully clear. While these plays may be presented in an artful way, they typically use art as little more than a means to a political end, and thus tend to be both unserious and unpersuasive. On the other hand, it’s perfectly possible to create a serious work of art that is informed by politics. Heather Raffo did it in “Nine Parts of Desire,” her beautiful one-woman show about life in Iraq, and now Danai Gurira and Nikkole Salter have done it with “In the Continuum,” a play whose subject matter–the effect of AIDS on black women in Africa and America–would seem at first glance to be wholly unpromising.

AIDS is notorious for bringing out the worst in issue-oriented playwrights, which is why I passed up “In the Continuum” when it opened at 59E59 last October. On paper it sounded like a parody of everything I like least about political theater, and it was only at the emphatic urging of friends whose taste I trust that I caught the show, which has since transferred to the Perry Street Theatre, one of Off Broadway’s most attractive performing spaces. They swore it was a must-see event, and sure enough, they were right….

Harold Pinter gave up playwriting for preaching many years ago. The most recent of his sermons, the hate-America-first rant he delivered last month after receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, was so cringe-making that it undoubtedly led many younger playgoers–including more than a few who share his extreme views–to wonder whether he was ever any good. To them I suggest a trip to the Atlantic Theater, whose double bill of two one-act Pinter plays, “The Room” and “Celebration,” has been extended through Jan. 21. It isn’t perfect, but it’s still a worthy introduction to the Pinter who matters….

No link, as usual, so kindly go to the nearest newsstand and fork out a dollar for a copy of the Journal, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will provide you with instant access to the complete text of my review (along with lots of other art-related stories). It’s a fabulous deal–try it!

Not only do I feel great, but I’m behaving sensibly, too, so much so that I actually kept my promise and spent the whole week going through my my snail mail and cleaning up my apartment. (The old, unregenerate me would have done it all in a single day, then gone out to a nightclub.) Yes, I wrote two Wall Street Journal pieces, saw two off-Broadway shows, and updated the Top Five section of the right-hand column, but I also spent plenty of time doing plenty of nothing. Hooray for me!

Now here’s a sneak preview of my next “Sightings” column, “Sue and Be Doomed,” which will appear in the “Pursuits” section of Saturday’s Wall Street Journal:

What would you do if your favorite radio station stopped playing your favorite music? In Detroit, seven irate listeners sued. They’ve filed a class-action suit against WDET-FM, the public-radio station of Wayne State University, claiming that the NPR affiliate committed fraud by encouraging them to make donations in support of locally produced weekday music shows, then cancelling those shows and replacing them with national public-affairs programs…..

As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

That’s all, folks. I’ll be back on Monday, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and properly rested. See you then.

I used to think it might be fun to be

Anyone else but me.

I thought that it would be a pleasant surprise

To wake up as a couple of other guys.

But now that I’ve found you,

I’ve changed my point of view,

And now I wouldn’t give a dime to be

Anyone else but me.

What a day,

Fortune smiled and came my way,

Bringing love I never thought I’d see,

I’m so lucky to be me.

What a night,

Suddenly you came in sight,

Looking just the way I’d hoped you’d be,

I’m so lucky to be me.

I am simply thunderstruck

At the change in my luck:

Knew at once I wanted you,

Never dreamed you’d want me, too.

I’m so proud

You chose me from all the crowd,

There’s no other guy I’d rather be,

I could laugh out loud,

I’m so lucky to be me.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green, “Lucky to Be Me” (music by Leonard Bernstein)

No matter who you are. No matter what it is.

If you’ve never lived in New York City, you probably don’t realize how small most apartments here are. I dearly love my little home, but it’s very cozy, and I share it with two dozen works of art, several hundred books, and three thousand CDs. As of this week, I’ve also been sharing it with a month’s worth of accumulated snail mail. I took out ten garbage bags of trash yesterday, and I’m about to haul another four bags downstairs (I live on the third floor, which is quite a trip for a heart patient). My shelves are full. My drawers are full. My closets are full. Hence this desperate plea. From here on out it’s a zero-sum game: I can’t keep anything new without throwing away something old.

To be more specific:

– If you send me a CD without asking first, I won’t listen to it.

– If you send me a book without asking first, I won’t read it.

– If you send me unsolicited press releases, I’ll toss them in the nearest wastebasket.

Forgive me for being so blunt, but I simply can’t cope anymore. I know you’ll understand.

From the second sentence of his I read, I’ve been a devoted admirer of Michael Ruhlman. When I discovered him I was at a low moment, in dire and specific need of a fix of good writing. Last fall, you see, I had to read four books in damn short order and write a group review of them for a newspaper. These were all nonfiction books, personal narratives that each addressed, in one way or another, the subject of marriage. They were an interesting lot in many ways, but the first two I read were not exactly music to the ears, stylistically speaking. The first was workmanlike, earnest–it got the job done, but it bumped and bruised my sensibilities along the way. The next was so overwritten and overwrought I actually flung it across the room once or twice in despair. (Didn’t do any good.)

So my expectations were damped down flat when I moved along dutifully to the third in the set, a book of which I knew nothing going in. It was with resignation that I opened it, the resignation to continue plowing through–but I discovered almost instantly that, in this case, I would be not be plowing but gliding. With Ruhlman’s House: A Memoir I was recognizably in the hands of a genuine writer, and surprised by the extent to which a stiff dose of turgid prose can make you forget what that even feels like. Here are the opening sentences that made the clouds part–they don’t smack you upside the head with their brilliance, David Foster Wallace-style, but they’re finely crafted in an understated way that seemed then, and does now, attuned to the needs of the reader:

It was our house now–I had the key in my pocket. I steered into the empty driveway for the first time; until this moment Donna and I had been visitors, and we felt as welcome as a threat. But all that was over. They were gone at last. The old brick house on the shady street was empty.

“As welcome as a threat”: after the clotted prose I’d so lately been subjected to, the clean elegance of the phrase made my heart leap up. It may not seem like much, but it’s right, and it struck me as a clear if small sign that I was in good hands. Other such signs followed, and the book proved a fascinating original. It tells of buying and rehabbing a Victorian house in Cleveland Heights and mounts an eloquent defense of the American suburbs and, yes, meditates on marriage and its settings. By virtue of writing that seems always to have the reader’s best interests in mind, as well as the particular demands of its subjects, a hybrid book that could all too easily have been a mundane or messy melange turns out to be wonderfully inviting, rewarding, and elegant. I know that calling a writer a consummate professional will sound to some ears like backhanded praise, but this book made me feel–as I wrote in my review–that in the very best sense, professionalism is a form of kindness. What I primarily felt while reading this book was well taken care of.

One of the unlikeliest but most winning chapters of House simply narrates a tour the Ruhlmans took of their prospective house. They were starting to get serious about buying and engaged the services of a home inspector. Through physical description but mainly through uncannily capturing the way he talks, Ruhlman makes this mildly odd character jump straight off the page.

With what seemed like pleasant anticipation, he then said, “Let’s march on down to the basement, shall we?”

“You like the basement,” I said.

“It’s where I spend most of my time,” he said, taking long, duck-footed strides toward the back door. “Most of a house’s mechanical systems–plumbing, electric, heat–originate and extend out through the house from there. It’s where the foundation of the house is visible.”

“The foundation is one of the main things you inspect.”

He stopped and turned at me. “The entire house rests on…the foundation.”

“Right,” I said.

The inspector’s bare yet cordial tolerance of his clients’ ignorance, here and throughout the chapter, is funny and endearing. I doubt most writers would have hit on him for a likely subject, and the good results reminded me a bit of my favorite M.F.K. Fisher essay, the one about the very exacting waitress (“she’s a funny one”). This chapter also catches Ruhlman sneaking into a mostly anomalous book a taste of the subject he more typically writes about: men at work.

In his books about cooking, The Making of a Chef and The Soul of a Chef, and his book about pediatric heart surgeons, Walk on Water, Ruhlman delves into the working lives of specialists who have to perform under stressful circumstances at incredibly high levels of expertise and manual skill. It’s a fascinating fascination. I ordered all three books before I had finished reading House and ripped through The Making of a Chef as soon as it arrived. I’m now near the end of Walk on Water, a book about surgeons who operate on heart defects in children and infants, a line of work that on paper looks just about impossible. And I’ve already taken a sneak peek into the next in this queue, The Soul of a Chef. As someone who has been known to while away an afternoon reading cookbooks without the slightest intention of chopping or heating anything, I’m having to resist the temptation to try to read both this and Walk on Water at the same time.

It’s been a while since I went on a one-author tear this way, and I’m really enjoying it. All of the features of my first encounter with Ruhlman’s work that hooked me on it have been borne out in these other books: the smart, modest, incisive writing, and the author’s knack for generating fascination and granting comprehension. Reading these books reminds me of seeing a great documentary film, offering the same combination of a new window on some corner of the world quite remote from your own and aesthetic pleasure. I’m looking forward to his about-to-arrive Charcuterie: The Craft of Salting, Smoking, and Curing (though not quite as much as a certain fishy friend who is himself an inveterate salter, smoker, and curer and will no doubt make his thoughts known in the fullness of time). In the meantime, read this lively interview Ruhlman did with Dan Wickett a while back and, of course, read the books.