Archives for September 2006

“We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts.”

Harold Macmillan, speech, Aug. 16, 1950

Says Lileks:

Outside. Gazebo, waterfall, crickets. Late at night. No planes. At this time of night you can hear the whine of the highway in the distance. I wonder if it’s one of those sounds no one ever heard before the car was invented, just as the sound of the internal combustion engine was probably unique when the first one was fired up. All these sounds, waiting to be born….

It’s remarkable how fast we forget sounds, and how quickly we recall them–when I was digitizing old VHS tapes, I realized I’d forgotten the series of labored sounds that preceded a show. The thick clunk of the tape dropping in the slot, the perfunctory whine of the tape queuing up, the pained inhalation of the motors as they rolled the spindles. It was the sound of Brave Modernity in 1984, and a tiresome reminder of old technology twenty years later….

You could take any scholar of the Twenties back in time, put him on Twenty-Third street at eleven p.m., and he’d pick out the vehicles, the buildings, the mode of dress, and most of the slang; if he heard a song waft from an apartment above, he might know what it was. If he picked up a newspaper, he might know a tenth of the names on the front page. But none of the names in the back, I’d guess. And then someone would walk past and mention a bar he’d never heard. Down the street there would be a sound–barrels rolling down a staircase? Lumber unloading? If you go an inch beyond the stratum of things we know, the mysteries are as quotidian and innumerable, and lost. The past is the unrecovered country.

I think if you actually found yourself in a silent movie theater in 1926, your first impression wouldn’t be the architecture or the clothing or the candy or the conversation; it would be the way things smelled. No one knows what the Twenties smell like.

This wonderful posting reminded me of one of the things that sets film apart from live theater: it has an unparalleled capacity to recreate the past. It’s the closest thing to a time machine that we have.

I thought about this the other night while watching one of my favorite movies, Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy. Here’s part of what I wrote after Our Girl and I saw it for the first time in a Chicago theater six years ago:

Contrary to whatever you may have heard or read, Topsy-Turvy is not simply, or even primarily, a backstage movie about the partnership of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan and the making of The Mikado. It is, rather, a scrapbook of Victorian life, a miraculously evocative attempt to suggest the tone and texture of what it felt like to live in London in 1885.

This latter emphasis explains why so many smart filmgoers of my acquaintance have disliked Topsy-Turvy: it is not plot-driven. We know, after all, that librettist and composer will finally overcome their differences and that The Mikado will be a hit, so instead of trying to trump up false suspense, Leigh ambles from vignette to vignette, interested not in the plot but the scenery. We stroll into the office of Richard D’Oyly Carte, and notice with surprise that he has a telephone on his desk; we accompany Sullivan to a Paris bordello, and gaze with wonder upon the elaborate decor. We dine in Victorian restaurants, sit in Victorian living rooms, peer into Victorian rehearsal halls, go backstage at the Savoy Theater and watch a prop man shake a piece of sheet metal to simulate the sound of thunder. Detail is piled on imaginatively recreated detail, and at film’s end you feel that you have entered a lost world, peopled with real people who behave in plausible ways….

Theater can do wonderful and irreplaceable things–but not that.

ELSEWHERE: To read an exceptionally fine Salon interview with Mike Leigh about the making of Topsy-Turvy, go here.

“I think some young people want a deeper experience. Some people just wanna be hit over the head and, you know, if then they [get] hit hard enough maybe they’ll feel something. You know? But some people want to get inside of something and discover, maybe, more richness. And I think it will always be the same; they’re not going to be the great percentage of the people. A great percentage of the people don’t want a challenge. They want something to be done to them–they don’t want to participate. But there’ll always be maybe 15% maybe, 15%, that desire something more, and they’ll search it out–and maybe that’s where art is, I think.”

Bill Evans, interview, 1980 (courtesy of The Bill Evans Web Pages)

– Heard at the gym today:

TRAINER So, I had my birthday party at this bar downtown where they have half-naked girls who breathe fire–and they hustle you!

CLIENT (shaking his head) That’s entertainment.

– I mentioned the other day that Mr. My Stupid Dog and I recently went to see Othello together at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. Since then he’s posted a two-part account of our evening, which includes this description of me:

His face suggests that he is open, frank and pleasant, but not altogether easy to peg. The bearing suggests a little of Felix Ungar, a little of Oscar Madison, frequently both at once. You wouldn’t take him for a Missourian right away (although he has written extensively about his small-town upbringing), but you wouldn’t think him a native New Yorker either: There is something about him that always seems betwixt and between, though never in a disquieting or uncomfortable manner. His Southern accent can fade in and out as the situation dictates….

I don’t know how I look to other people, but that’s definitely what I see in the mirror. Could it be that I know myself? Or am I just good at playing myself?

When the White House asked if I’d be willing to sit on the National Council for the Arts, one of the things that briefly gave me pause was the length of my paper trail. The FBI investigated me prior to the announcement of my nomination, and they wanted to know whether I’d ever done, said, or written anything that might embarrass the president. What made this question funny–sort of–is that I’ve been a professional writer since 1977, during which time I’ve been more or less closely associated with four different newspapers and God only knows how many magazines. (Let’s not even think about the blog.) No doubt I wrote something that might embarrass the president. What’s more surprising is that I’ve written so few things that in retrospect embarrass me.

It’s not that I haven’t changed my mind about anything since 1977. I have, many times, and when I do I try to be as open and honest about it as possible. I was having lunch with one of my Wall Street Journal editors just the other day, and he mentioned that he’d especially liked this passage from last week’s drama column:

I got off on the wrong foot with August Wilson. I wasn’t living in New York when he was in his prime, and “Gem of the Ocean,” the first of his plays that I saw on Broadway, struck me as self-consciously poetic to the point of flatulence. It wasn’t until the Court Theatre’s revival of “Fences” in Chicago this past January that I finally understood what all the fuss was about….

My editor said he liked it when the critics who wrote for him didn’t pretend to omniscience. I feel the same way, and even more so when it comes to fits of outright stupidity. One of mine was a 1995 Daily News review of the Lincoln Center premiere of Mark Morris’ L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato in which I called it “impressive in its seriousness, stunning in its inventiveness–and, ultimately, disappointing in its emotional flatness.” This was a willfully wrongheaded judgment that I have since publicly retracted, with parsley.

It thus occurs to me that I really ought to say something in this space regarding the only piece reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader about which I’ve had second thoughts–of a sort. In 2001 I published an essay in the Sunday New York Times called “The Myth of Classic TV” (they called it something else, but I restored my original title when I put it in the Teachout Reader). In it I wrote:

As it happens, only thirteen episodes of The Sopranos are aired each season, and the series is expected to have a fairly limited run. More typical is St. Elsewhere, which ran for 137 consecutive episodes, each of which grew organically out of its predecessors. Such long-running series can only be experienced serially, which for all practical purposes means during their original runs; once they cease to air each week in regular time slots, they cease to be readily available as total artistic experiences, and thus can no longer acquire new viewers, or be re-experienced by old ones. This is why there is no such thing as a “classic” TV series: we never see any series enough times to know whether its overall quality justifies the multiple viewings which are the hallmark of classic status. (Needless to say, I’m not talking about those fanatical cultists who have seen each episode of Star Trek a hundred times and can recite the dialogue from memory. To them, my heartfelt advice is: get a life.)

Some think The Sopranos will break this iron rule of ephemerality. I understand that a great many videocassettes of the first thirteen episodes have been sold, presumably to latecomers who weren’t subscribing to HBO in 1999 and wanted to find out what they’d missed. But if you aren’t already watching The Sopranos, you’re probably not going to start now, unless you’re prepared to sit through reruns of 26 additional episodes between now and next March, when the fourth season begins. Nor are even rabid fans likely to watch The Sopranos from beginning to end more than once. Who has the time?

Since I wrote those words, the DVD has replaced the videocassette, innumerable TV series of the past have been released either in their entirety or in large chunks, and the most popular of these box sets rank among the hottest items on the home-video market. Nevertheless, I persisted until very recently in thinking that the success of TV series on home video was a fad, and that such box sets would end up gathering dust on the shelves of countless collectors, not unlike the innumerable copies of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization that found their way into the homes of members of the Book-of-the-Month Club a generation ago.

I now know I was wrong, not least because other bloggers, among them Our Girl, have told me so. What I don’t understand is why I was wrong. More than most critics of my generation, I’ve been conscious of and sensitive to the effects of technology on culture. (That’s why this blog exists.) Along with “The Myth of Classic TV,” the Teachout Reader contains “Life After Records,” a lengthy essay in which I sum up several years’ worth of thinking on the subject of how the new media will affect the recording industry. So far as I know, I was the first mainstream music critic to predict the coming of downloadable music, and as any number of my artist friends will testify, I was among the first to tell them to launch Web sites, start blogs, check out ArtistShare and satellite radio, and look into iTunes and podcasting. Whatever the opposite of a Luddite is, that’s me.

So why did I fail to foresee the explosion of interest in TV series on video? I don’t have an easy answer to that one, but I suspect I made the biggest mistake a cultural critic can make, which is to confuse himself with the public at large.

I stopped watching series TV midway through the run of The Sopranos, in large part because I was spending so many of my nights on the town, first as an all-purpose critic-boulevardier for the Washington Post and later as the Journal‘s regular drama critic. On occasion I’d take a short-lived interest in a new show, but I was never willing to make the commitment of time necessary to keep up with any series on a week-to-week basis, and when full-season DVD collections came along, I was no more inclined to spend thirteen-hour chunks of my life working my way through them.

The only times I immerse myself in series TV are when I visit Our Girl in Chicago and spend a rainy Sunday immersing myself in her latest TV-related enthusiasm, whatever it may be. Over the years the two of us have gorged ourselves on day-long marathon viewings of Freaks and Geeks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, and House, all of which I took seriously and enjoyed hugely. Alas, I was never able to stick with any of them for more than a few weeks after returning to New York. I had too many other things to do.

I still think I’m “right” about series TV, but to be right, as Franz Kline said to Frank O’Hara, is “the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in.” The fact is that lots of smart people feel otherwise. Just last week, for instance, Our Girl linked to a very smart posting by Peter Suderman in which he took issue with a recent essay Mark Steyn wrote for The Atlantic. Steyn claimed in his piece that I was right about classic TV:

Indeed, the more “classic” your show, the more ephemeral it is. Getting into Ovid or Gregorian chant is a piece of cake next to getting into thirtysomething fifteen years on. Conceivably, one might find oneself in a motel room unable to sleep at four in the morning and surfing the channels come across St. Elsewhere. But they made 137 episodes of multiple complex interrelated plotlines all looping back to Episode 1: if you’ve never seen it before and you stumble on Episode 43, who the hell are all these people and what are they on about?

To which Suderman replied:

Steyn is certainly correct to say that shows like Homicide don’t lend themselves to the trivialities of syndicated kitsch. The bland background hum required for good afternoon cable and late-night channel surfing isn’t really a good mix with the drawn-out ambiguities and complexities of these shows. And if cable reruns were all we had, then that would be that.

But television, especially of the HBO variety, is becoming more novel-like, and DVD box sets are allowing us to approach these shows in a way that preserves–even enhances–their novel-like aspects. Binge-watching these shows in commercial free, multi-episode gulps is a perfect way to experience the “multiple complex interrelated plotlines” that Steyn sees as a flaw in regular broadcast viewing. The rise of the DVD medium means that a show like Homicide, which, as with an excellent novel, provides both an accurate portrayal of a place in time and a gripping narrative populated by scads of well-crafted characters, is no longer consigned to the wastelands of syndication.

So…who’s right? In the very long run, I suspect I am. No matter how “novel-like” Homicide may seem to be, there’s simply too much of it to embrace in the all-absorbing way we embrace a novel.

To return once more to my original essay:

Hill Street Blues was the first TV drama I ever went out of my way to see, and were there world enough and time, I might even consider watching the first few dozen episodes again. But while I still remember how much I liked Hill Street Blues, I can’t recall much else about it–only a few isolated moments from two or three episodes–whereas I could easily rattle off fairly complete synopses of, say, Citizen Kane or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or whistle the exposition to the first movement of Mozart’s G Minor Symphony. To qualify as a classic, a work of art must first of all be good enough to make you want to get to know it at least that well. Will any TV series ever be good enough to fill that exalted bill?

I don’t think so–but for the moment, I’d say I’m outvoted.

ELSEWHERE: I wrote a piece about Freaks and Geeks for the Sunday New York Times in 2001. It’s not in the Teachout Reader, but you can read it by going here.

UPDATE: Peter Suderman replies–and very interestingly, too.

“Music gazes at its listener with empty eyes, and the more deeply one immerses oneself in it, the more incomprehensible its ultimate purpose becomes, until one learns that the answer, if such is possible, does not lie in contemplation, but in interpretation. In other words, the only person who can solve the riddle of music is the one who plays it correctly, as something whole.”

Theodor Adorno, The Relationship of Philosophy and Music (courtesy of Think Denk)

For some relevant memories, go here and here.

– “Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man’s recognition of his own negative potential–with his sense of what he is capable of.”

Joseph Brodsky, “On Grief and Reason”

– “Tragedy is like strong acid–it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth.”

D.H. Lawrence, letter to James T. Boulton (April 1, 1911)

– “Now, the more I distrust my memory, the more confused it becomes. It serves me better by chance encounter; I have to solicit it nonchalantly. For if I press it, it is stunned; and once it has begun to totter, the more I probe it, the more it gets mixed up and embarrassed. It serves me at its own time, not at mine.”

Michel de Montaigne, “Of Presumption”

– “The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.”

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

– May memory restore again and again

The smallest color of the smallest day:

Time is the school in which we learn,

Time is the fire in which we burn.

Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly we walk through this April’s day”