Archives for June 2007

Yesterday’s new piece of music was Darius Milhaud’s First Symphony, Op. 43, subtitled “Printemps.” It was composed in 1918 and recorded for Koch Schwann in 1990 by Karl Anton Rickenbacher and Capella Cracoviensis.
(“Printemps” is the first of Milhaud’s six three-movement “little symphonies,” each of which is roughly five minutes long.)

“I have a talent for silence and brevity. I can keep silent when it seems best to do so, and when I speak I can, and do usually, quit when I am done. This talent, or these two talents, I have cultivated. Silence and concise, brief speaking have got me some laurels, and, I suspect, lost me some. No odds. Do what is natural to you, and you are sure to get all the recognition you are entitled to.”
Rutherford B. Hayes, diary entry, Nov. 20, 1872

• I’ve been meaning to link to this post by Chloe Veltman for some time now:

A group of six theatre people in San Francisco–Rob Avila (theatre critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian), Mark Jackson (director and co-founder of Art Street Theatre), Beth Wilmurt (actor, singer and co-founder of Art Street Theatre), John Wilkins (co-founder of Last Planet Theatre), Kimball Wilkins (ditto) and myself–had been mulling over how to get people within the community to talk to one another more. We wanted to inject a bit of fun and much-needed glamor into the local arts scene and make people reconnect with the reasons behind why they do their work and what it means in terms of the world at large.
So we decided to hold a Theatre Salon. We invited around 40 performing arts people including directors, actors, producers, critics etc to a gathering at Last Planet Theatre. John and Kimball spearheaded an amazing feast. Somehow we managed to cook a five-course, sit-down meal for everyone as well as coordinate entertainment….
It’ll be interesting to see how these developing relationships with the people I write about as a critic affect my writing. I think that it can only nourish it for I always get a better understanding of the culture from talking to people about their work. I do not subscribe to the New York Times philosophy of criticism that says critics need to keep their distance from artists in order to remain objective. There is no such thing as objectivity. I have always been able to write honestly about artists I know. The reason this is possible is because I wouldn’t be interested in hanging out with and getting to know anyone whose work was mediocre or who didn’t have the intelligence to understand that my words as a critic–both positive and negative–essentially come from a place of love and respect. I believe this state of affairs makes it possible for me to both write honestly and engagingly about theatre.

I agree on all counts–and I wish I’d been there.
• Four years ago I posted the following reminiscence:

Back when I was a wee thing, one or two light years ago, an extremely smart smartass who edited the “Goings On About Town” section of The New Yorker got tired of writing new capsule summaries of The Fantasticks, which by that time had been running off Broadway since shortly before the birth of Christ. Much the same problem had manifested itself years before: Robert Benchley, who used to be The New Yorker‘s drama critic, got equally tired of writing capsule summaries of Abie’s Irish Rose, the Fantasticks of the Thirties, and started coming up with cute one-liners like “No worse than a bad cold.” Forty years later, Mr. Anonymous Smartass approached the problem differently. In place of summaries, he serialized Ulysses…one sentence at a time.

None of my readers remembered this, and I began to wonder whether I’d dreamed it. Now Ms. Emdashes has confirmed my vague recollection. Scroll down and read all about it.
• Speaking of magazines, the entire run of Time is now available on the Web in freely searchable form. To go hunting in the stacks, Google the phrase “Time magazine,” followed by whatever you want to look up. It’s positively astonishing what the editors of Time considered publishable once upon a time, as you’ll discover by going here and here. (If you’ve never heard of the man mentioned in the second story, go here and sample his wares.)
• Courtesy of Ms. Asymmetrical Information, you can now see Salvador Dali’s appearance as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? by going here.
• This you’ve got to see. (Who on earth put it together?)
• Still more video: go here to watch Jim Hall, the greatest living jazz guitarist, playing “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” in 1964…
• …and here to watch Bud Powell playing “Get Happy” in 1959. (That’s Kenny Clarke on drums.)
• Not quite for pianists only: this site contains PDF files of transcribed sheet-music versions of all of Vladimir Horowitz’s piano arrangements, none of which he ever published. The transcribers took them down note for note from Horowitz’s recordings. No, you can’t play them, not unless you have eleven or twelve fingers, but they sure are interesting to see.
• Here’s a newly posted audio snippet of the speaking voice of G.K. Chesterton.
To hear Chesterton read one of his poems, go here.
• Courtesy of Maud, here’s another audio file of the speaking voice of an eminent Edwardian, W. Somerset Maugham. It comes from the soundtrack of Quartet, which was broadcast last week by Turner Classic Movies.
(Incidentally, if you know the URL of a similar online audio file of Max Beerbohm, please drop me an e-mail at once!)
• Finally, DVD Journal has a “Missing in Action” list of films that have yet to be released on DVD (or were available at one time but subsequently withdrawn). Readers are invited to submit their picks, and I did so. Can you guess which one is mine?

• The other day I assured a twentysomething friend of mine that once upon a time, art museums sought to raise the public to their level, rather than lowering themselves to the public’s level. She looked pityingly at me and said, “How can you be so naïve? Everything’s all about money.”

• We are never so funny to others as when we are least funny to ourselves. This seeming paradox is the piston that drives the engine of comedy. In the greatest of all comedies–the Shakespearean tales of romantic reconciliation and their operatic counterparts, Verdi’s Falstaff and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte–a pompous man’s thick carapace of earnestness is penetrated by humiliation. All at once, the unwitting butt of the joke realizes that he, too, partakes of the human condition, and is thereby made whole. It is in these transformative moments that the moral force of comedy is most evident, for it reminds us that we are not gods, merely men.

That’s one way to be funny. Another is to show us serious people who not only don’t realize how funny they are but never acquire any insight into their condition, wrapped as they are in their own bulletproof dignity. This sheer obliviousness is what makes them funny to us, but it also tempts us to feel superior to them, and that is a dangerous business, an invitation to vanity.

It is also the reason why women as a group tend to squirm at pure farce, which is a peculiarly hopeless kind of comedy, one in which the dignified boob learns nothing from his elaborately prepared Calvary of embarrassment. Instead, he is utterly vanquished by the other characters–and by the audience. Most men naturally think in such triumphalist terms, but my impression is that most women don’t. They want the victim (if he is a man) to learn from his misfortune, and be the better for it.

• Is there a more purely carefree record than Billie Holiday’s Miss Brown to You? The emotions that musicians express through their art are radically ambiguous and almost never readily reduced to verbal paraphrase, but if Holiday, Cozy Cole, Roy Eldridge, Benny Goodman, John Kirby, John Trueheart, Ben Webster, and Teddy Wilson weren’t having the time of their lives when they cut that 78 side in 1935, then I’m deaf. Just listen to the way Holiday sings “Don’t you all git too familiar!” and see if it doesn’t make you smile.

• Wallace Stevens once wrote a poem called “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself.” That’s how I like my movies. I don’t like sequels, remakes, homages, paraphrases, or ironic commentaries, least of all when they exude the stale smell of postmodernism, which is to art what theme parks are to county fairs.

Last Friday’s new piece of music was Anton Webern’s Drei kleine Stücke, Op. 11, composed in 1914 and recorded for Sony by Gregor Piatigorsky and Charles Rosen.
(When Webern said “little,” he meant little!)

“All biography is fiction, but fiction that has to fit the documented facts.”
Donald Raysfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life

More from the road: I review the Huntington Theater Company’s production of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter and American Repertory Theatre’s production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land in this week’s Wall Street Journal theater column. The first is a somewhat mixed but basically good bag, the second a 100% winner:

Noël Coward never wrote a funnier play than “Present Laughter.” So why does everybody do “Private Lives” instead? Because “Present Laughter” requires a cast of 11, an extremely fancy set, and an actor of the highest possible candlepower to play the showy star part that Coward wrote for himself. Only three other men have played Garry Essendine, the author’s alter ego, on Broadway: Frank Langella, George C. Scott and Clifton Webb. Now Victor Garber is trying his hand at the role in a new production directed by Nicholas Martin for the Huntington Theatre Company, and Variety says that it “could have a future commercial life, depending on the availability of its star.”
That means Broadway, where few straight plays can hope to be revived without the added luster of a Hollywood name. Mr. Garber, an old Broadway hand who spent the past five years playing opposite Jennifer Garner on ABC’s “Alias,” definitely fills the bill–but can he also fill the size-100 shoes of his predecessors? I’m not so sure, nor am I convinced that this production is quite ready for prime time.
The best thing about any production of “Present Laughter” is, of course, the play itself, a three-act farce that purports to show us the backstage life of an aging but still irresistible matinée idol. Garry Essendine resembles Coward in every way but one, which is that he (usually) prefers girls. Otherwise he is, as Coward acknowledged in later life, a self-portrait of the artist as monstre sacre…
Mr. Garber looks more like an exasperated uncle than a matinée idol, and for all the wit and precision of his performance, he isn’t glamorous enough to be the Garry Essendine of anyone’s dreams….
Across the river in Cambridge, the American Repertory Theatre is presenting the latest in a long and distinguished series of Harold Pinter revivals directed by David Wheeler. “No Man’s Land” has been seen twice on Broadway, with John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson and with Christopher Plummer and Jason Robards, and it is the highest possible tribute to Max Wright and Paul Benedict that their eloquent acting doesn’t make you long to step into the Wayback Machine and set the controls for 1976 or 1994….

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Says the Little Professor:

Generally speaking, it is easier to write an article of the appropriate length than it is to edit an article of, oh, 11000+ words down to something resembling a not altogether inappropriate length.

This is–to put it mildly–my experience exactly. So much so, in fact, that it was one of the major points I tried to get across in the classes in journalistic criticism that I taught a few years ago at Rutgers/Newark. Having spent a good deal of my life writing short pieces on serious subjects for newspapers and magazines, I’ve learned from experience to write organically short–that is, to write a five-hundred-word draft of a five-hundred-word piece instead of writing a thousand-word draft and cutting it in half. Not only does this reduce waste motion, but the finished product is almost always better. When you write a long piece and chop it down to size, it tends to read…well, choppily.

So why do inexperienced authors write long? I suspect it’s because they assume that they’ll get only one chance to impress the editor, which causes them to empty their bag of tricks every time they write a piece. (This reminds me of another of my critical commandments: Don’t tell everything you know.) Flashiness is a sin of youth. The older and more self-assured a writer is, the more likely he is to appreciate the virtues of simplicity and economy.

I don’t know whether it’s possible to teach this lesson to young writers. The older I get, the more I wonder whether anything can be taught to anyone. Still, I did my best to get it across to my students, and I like to think that at least some of them were paying attention.