Archives for August 2006

The lovely Cinetrix took herself to see Little Miss Sunshine and confirms my strong preconception based on a viewing of the trailer: not so much indie-rific or indie-lightful as indie-rivative. (And. Can we talk about those terribominable Snickers ads that are dumbing up our freeways this summer and apparently causing me to write stuff like that? I mean, honestly: “Satisfectellent”? Tear them down now, please.)

Anyway, not only does the Cinetrix remove any lingering doubts I might have had about my summary dismissal of Little Miss Sunshine, she gives a welcome nod to a TT and OGIC fave from way back, The Daytrippers. We both liked this movie on general principles, but that Hope Davis-Parker Posey combo really hits Terry where he lives. Understandably enough–they’re both wonderful actresses, and casting them as sisters was a truly inspired move.

UPDATE: Jan Freeman of the Boston Globe is on the case of Snickers’ recent crimes against the English language:

Satisfectellent, similarly, is a monster mashup of an adjective. If it’s satisfaction plus excellent, then what’s the fect? And where’s the X that excellent so badly needs? Fectellent sets the analogizing mind adrift in the realm of infection, repellent, and other not-so-XLNT associations. Still not salivating here!

Yep, I had insect repellent rattling around in my head after seeing that one, too. Messaging mission unaccomplished, I’d say.

Now that I spend so much time on the road, I have to take my workouts where and when I can find them. That’s why I went straight from Penn Station to my Upper West Side gym last Friday at eight-thirty, an hour when I’m usually sitting on the aisle of a Broadway theater. It felt more than a little bit weird. Manhattan is full of busy people whose schedules oblige them to operate at oblique angles to the clock, but even so, a gym still isn’t the sort of place where most of us care to be seen on a Friday night. I caught myself looking out of the corner of my eye at the other refugees from normal life who were taking exercise after hours, and wondered whether they in turn were looking at me and muttering to themselves, Poor guy, he can’t get a date! Smiling wryly, I inserted my Ultimate Ear in-ear monitors, fired up my iPod, and withdrew from the world for the next forty-five minutes, tugging violently at the handle of a rowing machine in order to defer for as long as possible my ultimate appointment with the distinguished thing.

I spent Saturday and Sunday chewing through a mountain of piled-up mail, straightening out my reviewing calendar, dining with Supermaud, and going to a couple of plays, one in Manhattan and the other in New Jersey. I was pleased to find in the mail a copy of the bound manuscript of Somewhere, Amanda Vaill’s forthcoming biography of Jerome Robbins, and promptly set to reading it in between appointments. One of the pleasures of my line of work is that I get to read books like Somewhere prior to publication and listen to CDs in advance of their street dates. (In recent weeks I’ve been sampling a stack of preview copies of soon-to-be-released albums by Ani DiFranco, Bill Frisell, Roger Kellaway, Diana Krall, Audra McDonald, and Chris Thile.)

Just as I was getting ready to pick up a Zipcar on Saturday and drive out to Madison to see the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, I got a call from a TV producer who wanted to know whether I’d seen World Trade Center and would come to the studio to chat about it. “No and no,” I told her. As I mentioned in this space the other day, I haven’t gone to the movies since I got out of the hospital, and I saw no good reason to break that record for a movie about 9/11, no matter how fine it may be, and least of all in order to talk about it on TV. Most TV “conversations” are semi-staged pseudo-debates whose participants are picked with the intention of generating heat rather than shedding light. Me, I prefer radio, where you’re occasionally allowed to speak without interruption for more than ten seconds in a row and there’s a pretty good chance that your interviewer doesn’t already know what you’re going to say.

Truth to tell, though, I didn’t really want to be doing much of anything at that particular moment. I love flying from city to city to see new shows, but I also like to spend a certain amount of time curled up on my living-room couch, looking at the Teachout Museum and thinking about nothing in particular. I’ve learned how to get things done on planes, trains, and buses, but they’re always going somewhere, and sometimes I prefer to be going nowhere.

I’m definitely going somewhere today: I have an appointment with my cardiologist, after which I’m headed for Connecticut, where I’ll spend the middle part of the week working on Hotter Than That. (Reading the manuscript of Somewhere whetted my creative edge.) I’ll be leaving the blog in the capable hands of Our Girl until Friday, so don’t be alarmed by my disappearance. On Friday it’s back to New York for The Fantasticks, Mr. Dooley’s America, and Fame Becomes Me. That’s my life, and I like it, usually.

Just in case you’re wondering, you’ll find me at the gym in between shows. Dead men write no books, nor do they get to curl up on their living-room couches and look lovingly at their lithographs. Given the alternative, I prefer sitting on a rowing machine and listening to my iPod. The Teachout Museum will keep.

UPDATE: Maud just blogged about her latest visit to the Teachout Museum. And my cardiologist (bless him) says I’m in the pink.

Here’s what I listened to at the gym last Friday:

– Woody Herman, “Your Father’s Mustache” (with Buddy Rich on drums)

– Tommy Dorsey, “Well, Git It!” (ditto)

– Mel Powell, “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” (with Benny Goodman on clarinet)

– Lou Reed, “White Light/White Heat” (the live version)

– Del McCoury Band, “What Made Milwaukee Famous”

– Warren Zevon, “Werewolves of London”

– Steely Dan, “What a Shame About Me”

– The Band, “We Can Talk”

– Dan Hicks and His Hot Licks, “Walkin’ One and Only”

– The Bangles, “Walk Like an Egyptian” (courtesy of Gilmore Girls)

– Metronome All-Stars, “Victory Ball” (with Charlie Parker on alto sax and Lennie Tristano on piano)

– Pat Metheny Trio, “Unquity Road” (with Jaco Pastorius on bass)

– Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Up Around the Bend”

“He had plenty more drinks and then supped and retired early to bed, where for the first time for many many nights he enjoyed the kind of deep, refreshing slumber that little children have, and the very good, and the very wicked.”

Honor Tracy, The Straight and Narrow Path

I know, the One Book meme is sooooo last week, but here I go anyway…

– One book that changed your life. I’ve blogged about it a lot already, but I’m going to say Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus. Maybe to say it changed my life is a little melodramatic, but I can say that it changed my sense of the possibilities of the realist novel. No, it changed my sense of the possibilities of language. Yes, language. I kept pinching myself while reading it–not literally, but you get the idea.

– One book that you’ve read more than once. A friend recently told me that he’s reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time, and I realized that this is a condition I aspire to. In other words, I wanted for a second to claw his eyes out, but the second passed and I masked my jealous rage nicely, I thought. It used to be every Christmastime that I read P&P. Now my readings are further spaced out, every three or four years instead of every single one as I try (without hope) to regain a state of innocence vis-

I wonder how kindly Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, who died yesterday at the age of ninety, will be treated by posterity. In her lifetime she was widely–if by no means universally–regarded as one of the greatest sopranos of her generation. Yet even at the height of Schwarzkopf’s career, there were plenty of critical naysayers who found her singing fussy and mannered to the point of archness, and since her retirement in 1975, it’s my impression that their point of view, which I share, has come to prevail.

Schwarzkopf was also a great beauty, which doubtless contributed to the effect she had on live audiences. Alas, I never saw her on stage or in recital, only on film, so I can’t say whether she made a stronger impression in person. I’ve heard most of her major recordings, though, and I find that I rarely return to any of them save to listen to her colleagues. For my money, Herbert von Karajan’s first recordings of Falstaff and Der Rosenkavalier are the best things she ever did in the studio, and her singing is by no means the most memorable aspect of those deservedly admired performances.

As for her private life, suffice it for now to say that she was a Nazi, that she lied about it for as long as she could get away with it, and that she admitted her youthful affiliation with the Nazi Party grudgingly, evasively, and only when confronted with incontrovertible documentary evidence. Sooner or later a frank, fully informed biography of Schwarzkopf will be written, and my guess is that it will prove devastating to her reputation. (Alan Jefferson’s 1996 book didn’t fill the bill, but it was a start.)

Such things may not matter to you, but they do to me, all the more so in light of the fact that Schwarzkopf was so gifted and admired an artist. As I wrote in Commentary a few years ago apropos of those French artists who collaborated with the Nazis:

One thinks, for instance, of Colette, who blithely published in anti-Semitic magazines during the German occupation, or of the great pianist Alfred Cortot, who went so far as to serve as Vichy’s High Commissioner of Fine Arts and to perform in Nazi Germany….Indeed, the most troubling thing about Colette, Cortot and their fellow collaborationists is that they were not second-tier figures but creative and recreative geniuses whose work remains to this day representative of the quintessence of French art.

On the other hand, none of that stops me from reading Colette’s novels or listening to Cortot’s recordings. We are all flawed creatures, and one of the impenetrable mysteries of beautiful art is that it can be made by ugly souls. So feel free to mourn the death of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, and to speak admiringly of her artistry–but when you do so, remember that there was more to her than the music she made.

As Clement Greenberg told an interviewer in 1969:

There are, of course, more important things than art: life itself, what actually happens to you. This may sound silly, but I have to say it, given what I’ve heard art-silly people say all my life: I say that if you have to choose between life and happiness or art, remember always to choose life and happiness. Art solves nothing, either for the artist himself or for those who receive his art.

UPDATE: Anthony Tommasini’s New York Times obituary, which is both lengthy and candid, is here.

For a sympathetic but equally candid appreciation by Tim Page of the Washington Post, go here.

Here’s my first official report from last weekend’s voyage to the outskirts of hell, a review of Shakespeare & Company published in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. As you can see, I didn’t let my manifold travails interfere with the pleasure I took in what I saw on stage:

Western Massachusetts has long been a center of classy summer theater. In the past two seasons I’ve seen Barrington Stage Company and the Berkshire and Williamstown Theatre Festivals, and last week I made it to Shakespeare & Company, where I saw back-to-back performances of “Hamlet” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” two Shakespeare plays that have about as much in common as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Nor were the productions alike save for their excellence–a sign of the adventurousness of the 29-year-old Lenox-based company, which more than lived up to its reputation.

I admit to having had my doubts about Eleanor Holdridge’s staging of “Hamlet.” To begin with, Jason Asprey, who is playing the title role in Shakespeare & Company’s first-ever production of that most familiar and formidable of tragedies, just happens to be the son of Tina Packer, the company’s founder and artistic director, who in turn is playing Queen Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. As if that weren’t suspicious enough, Ms. Packer’s husband, Dennis Krausnick, is playing Polonius. Having digested all this information, I opened my program and found a note explaining that the production “centers the play in the electrical synapse impulses of Hamlet’s dying brain.” This is a family newspaper, so I won’t tell you what I muttered to myself as I read those words, but it wasn’t optimistic.

All at once the theater went dark, followed by an explosion of chilly fluorescent light and a mega-decibel electric-chair zzzzap! Young Hamlet started reciting “To be or not to be.” Then the rest of the cast appeared, bedecked in stylized modern dress with mod touches

In my next “Sightings” column, to be published in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I take note of two developments in Atlanta:

– The Atlanta Ballet has fired its orchestra and will henceforth dance to recorded music.

– The Atlanta Opera is selling its midtown headquarters and moving to a new suburban arts center, in which it will give all of its performances.

Both companies are in financial trouble–but whose fix is smarter? For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow’s Journal, where you’ll find my column in the “Pursuits” section.