Archives for 2007

I’ve been working like a fiend all week in anticipation of a trip to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend with my friends Hortense and Boozy (who live in New York). Although, I’ll admit, the furious pace of this work flow may have been compromised by my trotting to the bathroom every ten minutes to see if my Dr. Denese self-tanner had taken effect. It (the self-tanner) did eventually kick in, and I now emanate a lustrous St. Tropez glow, especially if viewed at night, in a well-curtained room, illumined by the benevolent light of a lone flickering candle. Alas, in direct sunlight the effect is somewhat diminished. In short: If you’re in Martha’s Vineyard this weekend, and you spot a woman whose unevenly streaked skin suggests recreational hours spent rolling joyfully in a basin of coffee grounds, I hope you’ll say hello.
Still: the beach, ocean! Gin! Our trio’s required reading for the trip is Joan Aiken’s Nightbirds of Nantucket (a Dido Twite special), with additional reading on the subjects of whaling, cannibalism and tragic shipwreck strongly encouraged. I have Moby Dick packed (my second trip through), along with Kate Christensen’s Great Man (see Terry’s recommendation in the Top Five at right) and Northanger Abbey, for a bit of Gothic before bedtime.
I’m not taking my laptop, so not a peep from me till Tuesday. See you then!

I went to hear Osvaldo Golijov’s Pasión según San Marcos at the Mostly Mozart Festival last Sunday night. Allan Kozinn’s New York Times review describes it accurately, if coolly. My Washington Post review of the 2002 New York premiere, by contrast, is stronger on enthusiasm than detail:

As for the New York premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Pasión según San Marcos” at the BAM Opera House in Brooklyn, well, I’d have flown back from Tierra del Fuego on a two-seater to hear it, in part because I’d heard so much about it. No recent piece of classical music has been talked up more enthusiastically than this singularly ambitious setting of the Passion According to St. Mark. Not having been able to get up to Tanglewood last spring to check it out, I was eager to confirm or refute the fast-building buzz.
Guess what? It’s all true. Golijov’s St. Mark Passion is a rich musico-dramatic stew in which seemingly incompatible styles are jammed together like the sounds you might hear through the open window of a fast-moving car on a hot summer night. Classical strings, chattering brass, Afro-Cuban percussion, flamenco guitar, a Venezuelan chorus that struts and hollers like a black gospel choir–you name it, Golijov has stirred it in, not merely for effect but with the shrewd self-assurance of a composer who knows exactly what he’s about.
At the heart of the piece are two sharply contrasted female vocal soloists, and though it was Dawn Upshaw who had the most memorable aria, the elegant “Colorless Moon,” Luciana Souza stole the show anyway. Souza (pronounced SOH-za), a Brazilian jazz singer based in New York, has been mentioned in this space fairly frequently in the past year (Brazilian Duos, her latest CD, is my favorite vocal album of 2002), but this was the first time I had heard her other than in a club, and I was floored by the high drama of her singing. A slight woman dressed in a simple white shift and slippers, she looked and sounded ten feet tall: wild, charismatic, totally present. Even among jazz buffs, Souza is not yet widely known, but I left the theater sure that she is going to become a very bright star.
My hunch is that the same thing will happen to Osvaldo Golijov. The St. Mark Passion, mind you, is not without flaws. It’s a bit harmonically static and somewhat repetitive, and the over-miked Brooklyn Philharmonic failed to make the most of the string writing, though Robert Spano conducted the orchestra to within an inch of its life. Still, these are the merest quibbles over a piece whose total effect is roughly similar to the sensation of being knocked down by a tornado. It’s as if the whole thing comes at you in a single communicative flash and makes itself manifest instantaneously–which is, lest we forget, the mark of a masterpiece. Take note, Kennedy Center: This is a work you need to be presenting right away.
I’ve gone on a bit about Golijov’s St. Mark Passion because–well, just because I wanted to. For me, it was the major event of the year to date….

The St. Mark Passion has been recorded, but I didn’t listen to it again until last Sunday, partly because I was less impressed by the other works of Golijov that I’d heard in the meantime. I wondered whether I’d been bowled over by its sheer shock effect, and was more than a little bit skeptical about how it would strike me the second time around. I admitted as much to Alex Ross, who replied, “It will be interesting to see what you think of the Golijov encore. Listening again last summer (or was it the summer before) I found it less wild and festive, more of a serious, coherent, cannily controlled composition (possibly the result of Spano’s own control of the material). In all, I admired it even more.”
In fact I felt pretty much the same way about the St. Mark Passion on Sunday that I did in 2002. I still find it harmonically static–which is the main problem I have with Golijov’s other music–but the extraordinary textural variety makes up for the lack of strong tonal movement, and the overall effect of the piece is still pretty damned overwhelming, all the more so because I have an ingrained suspicion of the kind of flamboyant excess to which Golijov is inclined. Alex was right, though: a second hearing of the St. Mark Passion suggested to me as well that it is a much tighter, more precisely calculated piece of work than I’d realized.
As for Luciana Souza, I’m pleased and proud to say that I’ve been in her corner ever since I first heard Brazilian Duos late in 2001. My 2002 New York Times profile subsequently helped to put her in the spotlight, and what I said about her in my Post review of the St. Mark Passion, which came out a couple of months after the Times piece, has since been borne out in spades.
A good day’s work, in short. It’s gratifying to look back on an old review and know that you got it on the nose.

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)

• 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)

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.”

Brad Bird, screenplay for Ratatouille

I’ve always wondered about the correct usage of this word, and no wonder:

§ 90. deceptively

Would you dive into a pool that is deceptively shallow? The question gives one pause. When deceptively is used to modify an adjective, the meaning is often unclear. Is the pool shallower or deeper than it appears to be? We asked the Usage Panel to decide. Fifty percent thought the pool is shallower than it appears. Thirty-two percent thought the pool deeper than it appears. And 18 percent said it was impossible to decide. Thus a warning notice worded in such a way would be misinterpreted by many of the people who read it, and others would be uncertain as to which sense was intended. When using deceptively with an adjective, be sure the context leaves no room for doubt. An easy way to remedy the situation is to rewrite the sentence without deceptively: The pool is shallower than it looks or The pool is shallow, despite its appearance.

Per The American Heritage Book of English Usage. My Fowler’s (second edition) is silent on the matter.

• I’ve been reading the second revised edition of Matthew J. Bruccoli’s Some Sort of Epic Grandeur: The Life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a very solid piece of work which I skimmed inattentively not long after its original publication in 1981. I admire Fitzgerald’s best work without reservation–I consider The Great Gatsby the great American novel–but I can’t think of another major writer who led a less edifying life. The story of Fitzgerald’s drunken slide into artistic inertia is so pathetic that it’s hard to take, and the more you read, the more depressed you get.
Speaking as a biographer, it’s interesting to compare the problems Bruccoli faced in writing Some Sort of Epic Grandeur with the ones I face in writing Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Indeed, I’m not at all sure that the word “problem” applies in my case. Armstrong was born into desperate poverty, pulled himself out of the gutter via a combination of genius and iron determination, and eventually became a celebrity who was loved by everyone who knew him. His life became less dramatic as he grew older, but it remained eventful, and when he died, Duke Ellington pronounced the perfect epitaph: “He was born poor, died rich, and didn’t hurt anyone along the way.” In short, you couldn’t ask for a better biographical subject, and insofar as any such book can properly be said to be easy to write, Hotter Than That qualifies.
One of the characters in Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution is a cheerfully disillusioned European émigré composer named Gottfried Rosenbaum whose duties as a professor of music at Benton College include composing scores for the modern dances of the school’s resident choreographer, a gym-teacher-turned-Martha-Graham-clone whose efforts are a trifle short on angst. These Rosenbaum knocks off in a maximum of fifteen minutes apiece, explaining, “Ven idt take more dan fifteen minutes, zell me down the river.”
That’s sort of how I feel about writing the life of Satchmo: if you can’t write a good book about a man like that, you can’t write.
• In my last “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal, I wrote about my love for midcentury modern domestic architecture, which many readers of this blog do not share:

What is it about midcentury modernism that gets under so many people’s skins? In May I toured Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, a glass-walled weekend retreat tucked away in a leafy corner of rural Illinois. Built in 1951, the Farnsworth House is beloved of architects and art critics the world over. It is entrancingly beautiful–but its transparent walls are cruelly unforgiving of the clutter of everyday life. Franz Schulze, Mies’ admiring biographer, admitted that it is “more nearly a temple than a dwelling.” I’m unusually neat and so could (just) imagine living there, but Edith Farnsworth, the house’s original owner, came to loathe its lack of privacy, ruefully admitting that it made her uncomfortable to see so much as a single coathanger out of place.
That’s what’s wrong with the more extreme forms of modern architecture: Too often they tell you how to live instead of helping you live the way you want. But even those modern architects who were sensitive to the needs of their clients often failed to please the public at large. In her brief life of Frank Lloyd Wright, America’s greatest architect, Ada Louise Huxtable, the Journal’s architecture critic, pointed out that his houses “never insisted that their occupants reshape themselves to conform to an abstract architectural ideal.” Yet their distinctive style failed to catch on with ordinary home-buyers, and you can drive for hundreds of miles throughout America without seeing a single Wright-like house by the side of the road….

I got two funny letters from friends in response to this column.
One was from Florida:

I just read your article about 50s modern architecture. Boy, that woman was right. It is maddening to live in a house like that. We’re renting a place here in Tallahassee that’s 50s modern and I have to fight the urge to throw away everything we own and buy chrome furniture. Also–there are pocket doors all over the place and sliding cabinet doors, sliding glass doors–all over 50 years old and all off their tracks & nearly impossible to use. I’ll have to send you some pix…but of course, these houses look awful when someone actually LIVES in them, so I’ll have to tidy up first!! I think if I were super-rich, I’d buy a place like this just to throw cocktail parties in. That’s what they were built for, I think. At night, you get the feeling you’re being watched because of all the huge windows. Weird.

I’ve since seen the pictures, and I confess that I would kill to live in that house, sticky pocket doors notwithstanding.
The other letter was from Manhattan:

Professor Donald Fleming, who looked like a bald friendly turtle peering myopically over the lecturn, said to us undergrads in his course on American intellectual history: “The thing…about…Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses is…that…you can’t have sex in them.”

Alas, I must stand mute.
• Incidentally, I’m told that the photo of the Farnsworth House that ran with my column in the print edition of last Saturday’s Journal was captioned “Gropius House.” Or maybe it was the other way round. I don’t read the Journal on paper–I’m an Online Journal man–nor do I choose the art for my columns, so this was news to me. At least one blogger has already hastened to blame me for the blunder, though, accusing me of first-degree aesthetic stupidity. Not guilty!
• Speaking of elective mutism, I got stuck on the phone the other day with a fast, uncontrollably verbose talker. I’m a pretty good talker myself, but I couldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise with a blunderbuss had I cared to do so. Fortunately, he was (mostly) telling me things I wanted to know, but listening to him was like standing in front of a fire hose. Are such compulsive monologuists aware of the impression they make? I doubt it. For that matter, I doubt they’re aware of much of anything.
Neville Cardus, the English music critic about whom I’ll be writing in Commentary later this year, was a notoriously one-sided conversationalist, but Christopher Brookes, his biographer, tells a funny story of the day that Cardus met his match:

One of his favorite conversational adversaries was John Barbirolli. As well as being close friends, they were both great actors and each enjoyed upstaging the other “for the greater glory of God.” At one of their lunchtime meetings, true to form both spent the first hour talking sixteen to the dozen without taking the slightest notice of what the other might have been saying. The occupant of a nearby table recalled that to his surprise and admiration at one point in this exchange Sir John took out his false teeth but still kept talking. By this time Neville was of course a master of the art of masticating and conversing simultaneously….

I know very well that I talk too damn much, and I hate myself for it, but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten wound up that far.

“Savviness is what journalists admire in others. Savvy is what they themselves dearly wish to be. (And to be unsavvy is far worse than being wrong.) Savviness–that quality of being shrewd, practical, well-informed, perceptive, ironic, ‘with it,’ and unsentimental in all things political–is, in a sense, their professional religion. They make a cult of it.”
Jay Rosen, “Karl Rove and the Religion of the Washington Press” (PressThink, Aug. 14, 2007)