Archives for 2007

“Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.”
José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

My companions at Martha’s Vineyard, Hortense and Boozy, used to work together as editors at a publishing house in New York. One of their work jokes was a video concept called “Girls in Publishing Gone Wild,” which would feature scintillating footage of girls who wear glasses unbuttoning their cardigans and struggling to extricate themselves from their turtlenecks as buds of crumpled Kleenex emerged provocatively from their shirt cuffs.
Our weekend together had a similar quality. We drank a lot of tea, and stayed up late watching Room With A View and eating candy-colored macaroons from Chelsea. At the beach, we clambered around talking about Enid Blyton and Isabella Blow. We visited three bookstores, and my souvenirs from the trip are roughed-up copies of John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and a book called The Sea-Horse and Its Relatives. The latter, written by two Australian museum curators and published in 1958, reads like something a character in Wodehouse might write. A chapter called “Interesting Habits” begins, “What is the most remarkable member of the Animal Kingdom? Few would disagree with awarding the palm to the female of the human species, but of all the marine creatures, as Sir J. Arthur Thomson has written, Sea-horses … ‘are the most “kenspeckle” creatures of the sea, and this is saying a good deal …'” Indeed.
This weekend I’m traveling again, this time to the Wienerschnitzel family reunion. This is a reunion of my mom’s umpteen brothers and sisters held biennially on my grandfather’s farm in southern Indiana. Lots of croquet and volleyball, and gathering in the living room to hear my musical cousin pound out “House of the Rising Sun” on the piano. As the finale, the uncles, who will have been drinking beer in the barn all afternoon, will troop out to a distant field and set off fireworks for the delight of the crowd that is watching, amid fragrant clouds of bug spray, on the lawn — a display that always marks for me the official close of summer.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:

• Avenue Q (musical, R, adult subject matter and one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex, reviewed here)

• A Chorus Line * (musical, PG-13/R, adult subject matter, reviewed here)

• The Drowsy Chaperone (musical, G/PG-13, mild sexual content and a profusion of double entendres, reviewed here)

• Grease (musical, PG-13, some sexual content, reviewed here)

• The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection, reviewed here)

OFF BROADWAY:

• The Fantasticks (musical, G, suitable for children old enough to enjoy a love story, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK:

• A Midsummer Night’s Dream (play, G, suitable for very bright children, reviewed here)

“Her teeth parted and a faint hissing noise came out of her mouth. She didn’t answer me. I went out to the kitchenette and got out some Scotch and fizzwater and mixed a couple of highballs. I didn’t have anything really exciting to drink, like nitroglycerin or distilled tiger’s breath.”
Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

• AUGUST 6 To Stonington, Maine, memorably portrayed by John Marin in two gorgeous watercolors hanging in Colby College’s Marin Collection. (Go here and click on the seventh image to get an impression of what this delightful coastal fishing town looks like.) Then via mail boat to Isle au Haut, seven miles off the Maine coast, which I last visited in 2003 in order to write the following Wall Street Journal column:

Six months ago, I bought a Fairfield Porter lithograph. Two weeks ago, I stood at the edge of a rocky cove near the southern tip of a remote island off the coast of Maine, looking at the same scene Porter viewed when he sketched “Isle au Haut.” To get there, I hiked for two sweaty hours along a narrow woodland trail, stepping over snakes and trying not to turn an ankle. What possessed a flabby, chair-bound critic like me to make such a journey? It seemed like a good idea as I sat in the air-conditioned comfort of my home office, but I started having second, third and fourth thoughts as I trudged up the Goat Trail of Isle au Haut.

Porter isn’t exactly a household name, but many connoisseurs consider him one of the greatest American artists (and art critics) of the 20th century, an astonishingly original representational painter whose style fuses two seemingly disparate idioms: the intimate domestic realism of Bonnard and Vuillard and the excitingly free brushwork of Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists. I knew I wanted to own something by Porter when I first started buying art, and I was lucky to find a good impression of this, the last lithograph he made before his death in 1975 at the age of 68. In it, a cove rimmed by pine-topped cliffs is loosely rendered in flat, irregularly shaped blotches of green, grey, tan and dusty pink. It is at once abstract and representational, a heightened vision of the craggy Maine landscapes Porter loved. When I heard that the Portland Museum of Art was showing a retrospective exhibition of his paintings, I got the idea of visiting the show, then looking for the actual cove portrayed in “Isle au Haut.”

This turned out to be rather more complicated than trying to find the well-known spots where Monet or Cézanne stood when painting their celebrated plein air landscapes. The isolated Isle au Haut is no resort. It consists mainly of rugged wilderness, though it is also home to 47 year-round residents who pronounce its name “eye-la-HOE.” The only place for visitors to stay is the tiny Keeper’s House Inn. Unfazed by the lack of electricity or telephones, I booked a room, and a few weeks later clambered aboard the mail boat from Stonington to Isle au Haut. Just two days before, I’d been walking through the Portland Museum, where I found a 1974 painting by Porter called “Cliffs of Isle au Haut,” the original version of my lithograph. The painting is three times larger and more brightly colored, but the composition is identical, and I felt sure it was a good omen.

Once I got to Isle au Haut, though, I realized I was in over my head. The 4,700-acre island was bigger than I’d thought (New York’s Central Park covers just 843 acres), and the shoreline contained a wealth of coves accessible only on foot. How to find the right one in the four days I’d allotted–if at all? I showed my kindly hosts a photo of “Isle au Haut” included in a book of Porter’s prints. They told me where it might be and swore I could find the spot without unreasonable difficulty. The next morning, I climbed into a battered SUV and rattled down a dirt road to the long hikers’ path known as the Goat Trail that was supposed to lead me there.

About the next two hours I will say nothing other than that I spent much of it cursing for having embarked so casually on so self-evidently impossible a task. Then I stumbled over a ridge, stepped between two trees and onto a huge flat rock, and knew at once that I was standing more or less where Porter had stood. The pines were taller, making the cliffs somewhat less imposing, and three decades’ worth of waves had gnawed at the shoreline. But the cool white light was the same, and so were the rocks, tan and green and–yes–pink, just as Porter had painted them. I pulled a disposable camera out of my backpack, composed a scene in the viewfinder that resembled “Isle au Haut” and took a snapshot.

As I staggered back down the Goat Trail, the baritone rumble of the offshore lobster boats ringing faintly in my ears, I remembered the remark by Porter that Justin Spring chose as the epigraph of “Fairfield Porter: A Life in Art.” “When I paint,” he wrote, “I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful.” Once I returned to New York and looked at “Isle au Haut” with new eyes, I understood at last the profound truth behind those deceptively simple words. Yes, Porter’s lithograph was realistic in the sense that it portrayed a real place recognizably–but the amazing freedom with which he transformed its contours into fields of color summed up the difference between life and art.

In the pocket of my jeans was a stone I’d found in the cove, its richly mottled surface reproducing with near-perfect fidelity the colors of “Cliffs of Isle au Haut.” Now it rests on my desk, a souvenir of the August morning when I beheld the beautiful reality embodied in that even more beautiful work of art.

The Keeper’s House Inn hasn’t changed a bit since 2003. It’s still far beyond the reach of cellphones and e-mail. The proprietors, Jeff and Judi Burke, still serve the tastiest meals imaginable. The lighthouse still beams its gentle reddish-orange glow through the windows of the candlelit third-floor garret bedroom. You can read all about it in the pages of Island Lighthouse Inn: A Chronicle, Jeff’s engagingly written story of life on Isle au Haut. Alas, you can’t stay there anymore, for Jeff and Judi are putting the Keeper’s House Inn up for sale, and they will no longer be taking guests after the end of this season. I’m glad I got to see them one more time.

• AUGUST 9 Back to Stonington via mail boat, and from there down the coast to Ogunquit, Maine, to see The King and I at Ogunquit Playhouse (about which more here) and eat as many of Flo’s Steamed Hot Dogs as I could stuff down my gullet. Order a jar of Flo’s relish by mail–you won’t be sorry.

Would that I could recommend the Ogunquit Museum of American Art with like fervor, but it was a disappointment, a small museum that prefers hosting second- and third-rate traveling exhibitions to hanging the treasures of its permanent collection. The view is fabulous, but otherwise my visit was a waste of time.

• AUGUST 10 To East Haddam, Connecticut, home of Goodspeed Musicals, which is currently performing High Button Shoes (about which more in Friday’s Wall Street Journal drama column). Housed in an 1876 opera house that overlooks the Connecticut River, Goodspeed Musicals is one of the most picturesque theaters in America, and it also has the near-overwhelming advantage of being just fifteen minutes away from the River Tavern, my favorite of all the restaurants at which I’ve dined in the course of my theater-related travels.

Instructions for maximum pleasure: (1) Don’t eat lunch. (2) Make a 5:30 reservation in order to dine at leisure and get to Goodspeed in plenty of time for an eight o’clock curtain. (3) Order the chocolate soufflé. (4) Spend the night at the Bishopsgate Inn, conveniently located a block from the theater. (5) Drive home the next day, secure in the knowledge that you’ve had a fabulous time.

(Second of two parts)

“Every man who possibly can should force himself to a holiday of a full month in a year, whether he feels like taking it or not.”
William James, “Vacations”

I took a six-month layoff from writing Hotter Than That, my Louis Armstrong biography, to work on the libretto of The Letter. Two weeks ago I picked up the threads of Armstrong’s life, and on Saturday I finished writing a ten-thousand-word chapter about his return to New York in 1929, his Broadway debut, and his emergence as a popular celebrity.
To celebrate, I’m going to share with you the section from “Playing Frantic: Fame, 1929-1930” in which I describe how Armstrong began recording with big bands. Enjoy!
* * *
That afternoon Armstrong returned to the studio to cut two sides with the Luis Russell band, augmented by Eddie Condon on banjo and Lonnie Johnson on guitar. The first was “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love,” a ballad by Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields that had become popular the year before when it was sung in Blackbirds of 1928, the longest-running all-black Broadway revue of the Twenties. This version, which opens with a melancholy, sweet-toned instrumental chorus split down the middle by Armstrong (who uses a straight mute) and J.C. Higginbotham, appears at first glance to have little in common with the daredevil small-group sides that had made the trumpeter’s name a byword among jazz musicians. It almost sounds as if he were sitting in with his beloved Guy Lombardo. But then he puts down his trumpet and croons an ingeniously oblique half-scatted paraphrase of the melody (Armstrong never sang a melody straight) accompanied by three gently mooing saxophones and Pops Foster’s bowed bass, followed by a high-flying trumpet chorus that sheers daringly away from the tune and soars off into the blue, ascending toward (but failing to hit) a climactic high D.
The results exemplified the recipe for a three-chorus solo he had shared with the New Orleans trumpeter Wingy Manone: “The first chorus I plays the melody, the second chorus I plays the melody round the melody, and the third chorus I routines.” They also showed that he could make a ballad sound as jazzy as a blues, a lesson that was not lost on his contemporaries. Ethel Waters paid homage to him in 1932 with a recording of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” in which she imitates with uncanny accuracy the vocal chorus from his 1929 recording, a witty and knowing tribute that also serves as an indication of the extent of his fast-growing celebrity.
What inspired Armstrong to record so sentimental a song in so personal a manner? The credit, amazingly enough, seems to belong to Tommy Rockwell, his tone-deaf producer. Years later Armstrong discussed the session with George Avakian:

Rockwell knew it had to be different. The song had been on the radio for almost a year, and everybody did it like cheerful–“One day I’ll buy you diamond rings, baby,” and all that. Rockwell thought I should do it like life really is–the guy really can’t give her anything but love. So he had Brother Higginbotham and the saxophones play it way down low, and I sang it that way, too.

And whose idea was it for Armstrong to record a show tune? His autobiographical writings shed no light on the matter, but three months earlier he had accompanied Lillie Delk Christian on her OKeh recordings of “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “I Must Have That Man,” another song from Blackbirds of 1928. Though he had never before recorded such fare under his own name, he had been playing it in public since his Sunset Cafe days in Chicago. Thus he might have suggested it to Rockwell, just as he was undoubtedly responsible for picking the last song recorded that day, a rocking instrumental named after a celebrated Storyville whorehouse whose black madam he remembered fondly: “Lulu White was a famous woman of the sporting world in Storyville…She had a big house on Basin Street called Mahogany Hall…The song was written after her house had gotten so famous…Rich men came there from all parts of the world to dig those beautiful Creole prostitutes…And pay big money.” “Mahogany Hall Stomp” shows off the Russell band at its swinging best, with Pops Foster thumping out a fat-toned bass line as Armstrong romps through three muted solo choruses (one of which consists solely of a sunlit high B flat stretched out for ten breathtaking bars) whose pellucid simplicity would be echoed at one time or another by virtually every jazz trumpeter of the Thirties.
But even if it was Armstrong’s own idea to record “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” and “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” he could not have done so without Rockwell’s approval, and it was probably the OKeh executive’s idea to pair him with Luis Russell’s band as well. The success of the collaboration sealed his artistic fate: from 1929 to 1947 he would be the nominal leader of a big band, criss-crossing the country to play show tunes and pop songs for dancers who knew little or nothing of jazz. Many jazz fans came to feel that Armstrong had “sold out” by switching to big-band accompaniment, but in fact he had been fronting such groups ever since he quit King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band in 1924. Had he done otherwise, he would never have become a star, though it would not have occurred to him, or the other well-known jazz instrumentalists of his generation, to do anything else. Dancing was where the money was. Even such stalwarts of the New Orleans style as Joe Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton bowed to the inevitable and added saxophone sections to their bands. Most of the important small-group jazz recordings made between 1925 and 1940 were the work of studio-only pickup ensembles whose members were drawn from the ranks of the big touring dance bands.
Not until World War II laid waste to those ranks did small-group jazz become a big-time business, and even then the cautious Armstrong waited until two years after the war was over to dispose of his expensive orchestra and start working with a six-piece combo. He loved the Hot Five, but he saw no reason why he couldn’t make equally good music with a big band–and he was right.

“An announcement once appeared in a quarterly, against the name of the present writer, of an article to be entitled Conrad, the Soul and the Universe. The exasperation registered in this formula explains, perhaps, why the article was never written.”
F.R. Leavis, “Joseph Conrad” (courtesy of The Rat)