Archives for December 2006

“Traveling takes the ink out of one’s pen as well as the cash out of one’s purse.”

Herman Melville, letter to Evert A. Duyckinck (Dec. 2, 1849)

It’s exactly because Matt Zoller Seitz is such a generous critic that his censure can be a wholly devastating blow–far more devastating than that of his more glib counterparts. That generosity, combined with his intelligence and taste, make his work among the most compelling criticism being written about any art form right now. Reading Seitz’s
review of Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German, posted at The House Next Door yesterday, it’s tempting to call it something along the lines of a drubbing or a takedown, but the piece is really too fine an instrument, and animated by too much good will, to merit such blunt epithets. Seitz goes out of his way to try to understand Soderbergh’s choices and aims. When he calls the movie “painful,” it’s not with a smirk but with something like genuine sorrow for a talent gone missing. Which is not to suggest that the piece doesn’t have any bite to it. But even the sharp bits have a place in the greater attempt to understand what went wrong here:

With its glancing interest in individual vs. collective guilt and its contrast of faux-Old Hollywood gloss and ’70s movie degradation, The Good German seems to want to say, “The language of old Hollywood movies was an outgrowth of bourgeois American morality and the profit motive-ergo, old movie style conceals mundane and unpleasant human truths while protecting the powerful and reproducing their ideology.” But what comes out is more like, “Old Hollywood movies are full of shit. Now watch this crane shot!”

Actually, the latter sounds closer than the former to a movie I’d like to see, but never mind. Seitz goes on from here to make a great point that far transcends the subjects of The Good German the fall of Steven Soderbergh, calling attention to a whole

subcategory of critics’ darling that’s proliferated like toadstools in the past decade, comprised of movies that foreground their influences rather than digesting them and creating something fresh. The short list includes Boogie Nights, the Psycho remake, Velvet Goldmine, Far from Heaven, Road to Perdition, Roman Coppola’s superb and rarely-seen CQ, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Schindler’s List and pretty much any Soderbergh film that’s either set in the past (Kafka) or derived from an older film or films (The Underneath, Ocean’s 11 and 12, Solaris). If you’re up on the director’s references, these sorts of films tend to be superficially interesting even if they fail to engage your emotions (or don’t try to). But through the years I’ve gotten to the point where it’s no longer enough for a movie to amuse me with its academic density and self-awareness; I also want to be moved, or at least enthralled, and the likelihood of that happening decreases in proportion to a director’s tendency to quote other films rather than fully transform them.

He cites The Limey as an example of a Soberbergh movie that’s “both fun and deep.” Notably, The Limey was heavily influenced by John Boorman’s hallucinatory, spellbinding Point Blank–enough so to be considered an homage, really, but it certainly fully digested its major influence and wrought something new. I jumped off the Soderbergh bandwagon about an hour into Ocean’s Eleven myself–a movie I came to as a true believer, convinced its director could do no wrong whether he was delivering something as emotionally potent and fresh-looking as The Limey or simply stylish genre fun. Fun might be the last thing I’d call Ocean’s Eleven, and I still haven’t quite gotten over the letdown.

The other day Terry offered his short list of CDs for stockings. Here are a few more ideas for you from the world of print:

– Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (Amistad). A patiently beautiful book of stories with the unmistakable air of permanence about them. It’s not too much to say they awed me; five months later I think almost daily about the last paragraph of the last story. My book of the year, or perhaps the decade.

– Claire Messud, The Emperor’s Children (Knopf). I devoured Messud’s brilliantly observed, highly companionable book in one weekend during which all my plans to leave the couch came to naught. I did not feel guilty afterward. It is or isn’t “about” 9/11, but among its many revelations it reminded me ten times more palpably than anything else has of what “normal” once felt like.

– Henry Green, Living; Loving; Party-Going (Penguin) and Pack My Bag: A Self-Portrait (New Directions). My current reading, Green throws you straightaway into the deep end of, for instance, the intricate little society of the domestic staff in an Irish castle (Loving). While you slowly sort out relationships and plots, the strange immediacy and piquancy of the language keeps you afloat, along with (and related to) his understated exaltation of everyday experience. A new sensation.

– Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement (Chicago). Because the whole thing won’t fit in a stocking, silly! But seriously, if you’re feeling generous, by all means buy the whole four-volume set and stick it under the tree. Powell’s twelve-novel epic can prove addictive. A friend who’s approaching the end of the third movement has determined to ration the remainder, clutching onto the vain hope that he can stretch out the experience indefinitely.

Nothing else I read (for the first time around) this year affected me like these four books.

– Bethlehem Down (Peter Warlock, recorded by the King’s Singers). Poor Peter Warlock, who put out the cat and turned on the gas at the end of a turbulent, too-short life, left behind a goodly number of modern Christmas carols, of which the modally flavored “Bethlehem Down,” written in 1927, is the most frequently performed and (in my opinion) the prettiest. This performance is part of an unusually wide-ranging program of carols that also includes an exquisitely sung version of Praetorius’s “Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen,” which might just be my all-time favorite traditional carol.

– Bounce of the Sugar Plum Fairy (Tchaikovsky-Shavers, recorded by the John Kirby Sextet). I have a sweet tooth for jazzed-up classics from the swing era, and this riffy, dapper version of “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” charms my socks right off.

– A Ceremony of Carols (Benjamin Britten, recorded by Osian Ellis, Sir David Willcocks, and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge). If you’ve never heard it, order this CD right now.

– The Christmas Song (Mel Torm

The other night I walked into the lobby of an off-Broadway theater and ran into a woman who said to me, “Are you Terry Teachout?” I reluctantly admitted that I was. “There’s something I’ve got to know,” she said. “Where’s Smalltown?”

Of course it’s no secret, or at least not much of one. Among other things, I’ve strewn my postings from Smalltown, U.S.A., with innumerable clues to the identity of the place where I grew up, and whose name I suppress not out of the urge to conceal but in the hope that doing so will make it easier for readers who come from similarly small towns of their own to identify with my memories of the one that I still think of as my home. It pleases me to write about Smalltown as if it were Anytown, or Everytown, but if you really want to know where it is, all you have to do is ask.

Should you ask me tomorrow, your answer will come via e-mail from the place itself. I’m hitting the road first thing Wednesday morning to spend eight happy days in the bosom of my family. I expect I’ll be posting a lot less during that time (at least until my sniffles dry up), though I don’t plan to shut down altogether. In any case, I have clothes to fold and presents to buy, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll return to my chores.

See you around.

“The city is recruited from the country. In the year 1805, it is said, every legitimate monarch in Europe was imbecile. The city would have died out, rotted, and exploded, long ago, but that it was reinforced from the fields. It is only country which came to town day before yesterday, that is city and court today.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Manners”

I’m not over my cold yet, but I’m somewhat better. As usual, though, I sound much worse than I feel, so if you’re expecting me to call you today, don’t.

See you Tuesday.

A reader writes:

What would be your top three choices for classical CDs for Christmas? What would be your top three choices for jazz CDs?

That’s the e-mail in its entirety. It’s completely free-form–no specifications or limitations of any kind. In particular, my correspondent doesn’t specify whether he has in mind newly released CDs, which makes his questions a bit trickier. Nevertheless, I’ll assume, rightly or wrongly, that he’s interested in recordings that first came to my attention, new or not, in 2006.

That said, here are my picks, with three pop albums thrown in for good measure.

CLASSICAL:

– Malcolm Arnold, Overtures, recorded by Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic (Chandos)

– Alban Berg, Lyric Suite, recorded by the Juilliard String Quartet in 1959 (Testament)

– Paul Moravec, The Time Gallery, recorded by eighth blackbird (Naxos)

JAZZ:

– Bob Brookmeyer and the New Art Orchestra, Spirit Music (ArtistShare)

– Medeski, Scofield, Martin & Wood, Out Louder (Indirecto)

– Deidre Rodman and Steve Swallow, Twin Falls (Sunnyside)

POP:

– Rosanne Cash, Black Cadillac (Capitol)

– Mary Foster Conklin, Blues for Breakfast: Remembering Matt Dennis (Rhombus)

– Donald Fagen, Morph the Cat (Reprise)

If none of these CDs rings your bell, here are some others that also gave me great pleasure:

– Benjamin Britten, Orchestral Song Cycles, recorded by Ian Bostridge, Simon Rattle, and the Berlin Philharmonic (EMI Classics)

– Hot Club of Detroit (Mack Avenue)

– Roger Kellaway Trio, Heroes (IPO)

– Nancy King, Live at Jazz Standard with Fred Hersch (MaxJazz)

– Erin McKeown, Sing You Sinners (Nettwerk)

– Nickel Creek, Reasons Why (The Very Best) (Sugar Hill)

– Madeleine Peyroux, Half the Perfect World (Rounder)

– Rachel Ries, For You Only (Waterbug)

– Stephen Sondheim, Sweeney Todd (the original-cast album of the 2005 Broadway revival) (Nonesuch)

– Trio Beyond, Saudades (ECM)

– Fats Waller, If You Got to Ask, You Ain’t Got It! (Bluebird/Legacy)

– Cy Walter, The Park Avenue Tatum (Shellwood)

Happy listening!