Archives for 2007

Today is the publication date of New York Review Books’ new paperback edition of Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, which features an introduction by me. I showed it to Maud Newton shortly after she wrote it, and she asked if she could post it on her blog, to which I assented happily. To read what I wrote about Dundy and her wonderful book, go here.
Kate Bolick recently interviewed Dundy for the Boston Globe. Go here to see what they had to say.

• In America, only pretty young women become movie stars. Middle-aged male actors who are unattractive–or at least Bogart-ugly–can and do play romantic leads, but no actress who is much short of beautiful or much older than thirty has much chance of seeing her name above the title of a big-budget movie, save as part of a package deal. This harsh reality is, of course, a flagrant and fundamental contradiction of all that the members of the film industry hold most politically dear. I sometimes wonder whether one of the reasons why Hollywood is so liberal might be that its male inhabitants are secretly ashamed of the sexual double standard by which they live. They will sign any petition, contribute lavishly to any sympathetic-sounding candidate, perform any act of political penance–anything, in fact, but sleep with an ordinary-looking woman of a certain age, much less cast her as the love interest in a major motion picture.

• Speaking of double standards, I’ve been reading The Land Where the Blues Began, a memoir by Alan Lomax, the white musicologist who spent a half-century touring the Deep South making field recordings of black blues singers. Lomax truly loved the blues, but there was more to it than that, as he acknowledged in his book:

I strolled along, wrapped in my envelope of Anglo-Saxon shyness and superiority. We had grabbed off everything, I thought, we owned it all–money, land, factories, shiny cars, nice houses–yet these people, confined to their shacks and their slums, really possessed America; they alone, of the pioneers who cleared the land, had learned how to enjoy themselves in this big, lonesome continent; they were the only full-blown Americans.

Somehow I doubt it ever occurred to Lomax–who was, as it happens, a Communist fellow traveler–that his self-flagellating praise of the joys of working-class black life was at bottom every bit as condescending as the happy-darkies stereotypes he held in such deserved contempt.

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