Archives for April 2008

“In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed: Fascism does not want them, forbids them, and that’s why you’re not a Fascist; it wants everybody to be the same, and you are not. But immaculate virtue does not exist either, or if it exists it is detestable.”
Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

I travel from coast to coast seeing plays for The Wall Street Journal, which means that I eat out a lot. Two weeks ago, for instance, I dined at Dressing Room, a restaurant in suburban Connecticut that is attached to the Westport Country Playhouse, where I saw a production of Alan Ayckbourn’s Time of My Life that was very impressive. So was my dinner.

Dressing Room, which bills itself as “A Homegrown Restaurant,” is a joint venture of Paul Newman (yes, that Paul Newman–his wife runs the theater next door) and celebrity chef Michel Nischan. Newman is by all accounts a hands-on boss, but his partner dreams up the dishes, most of which are gussied-up big-ticket versions of “regional American heirloom recipes.” One of them, I noted with astonishment, was described on the dinner menu as “Niman Ranch baby back ribs, Scott County Missouri-style.”

Why was I astonished? Because Smalltown, U.S.A., the place where I grew up and where most of my family still lives, is located in Scott County, where smoked meat is a food group. I’ve eaten plenty of barbecue there, much of it at a place called Dexter Bar-B-Que whose ribs are admired throughout southeast Missouri. It went without saying that I had to see for myself what manner of barbecued rib a celebrity chef and a movie star would attempt to fob off on a bunch of unsuspecting New Englanders, so I ordered an appetizer-sized portion, took a suspicious nibble, and commenced (as they say back where I come from) to hollering. M. Nischan’s ribs are light-colored, delicately seasoned, meltingly tender, and ambrosially tasty. I’ve never tasted anything like them anywhere in the world–including Scott County.

I Googled “Scott County Missouri-style ribs” as soon as I got home and discovered that Nischan had published his rib recipe in Condé Nast Traveler a year ago. I immediately e-mailed a copy of it to my brother David, a lifelong resident of Smalltown who is also a local authority on barbecue (he serves as a judge at regional cookoffs). This was his reply:

Your ribs intrigue me. I’ve never heard of anyone in southeast Missouri or Western Kentucky cooking ribs this way. People around here dry-rub seasoning into the meat and then smoke the ribs indirectly with heat. Nischan seems to be getting the color of his meat from searing over the fire. Our meat gets its color from the seasonings and the smoke from the wood fire. I would be interested in where and from whom in Scott County he got the recipe.

So would I, though my guess is that he’s put it through a set of hoops so fancy that it bears little if any resemblance to the authentic Ur-recipe with which he presumably started. And while I liked his Scott County-style ribs a whole lot, I have to confess that I like the real thing even more.

I should add that I speak as one whose taste in barbecue is nothing if not inclusive. I’ve eaten it everywhere from Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City to Rub BBQ in Manhattan, my adopted home. I’m not a particularly fussy eater, and I like most of the better-known regional variations of barbecue that I’ve run across in my travels. When all is said and done, though, the kind I like best is the kind I grew up with, and I suspect that most people lucky enough to have grown up eating barbecue feel the same way about the kind they grew up with. I’ve never met anyone who underwent a full-tilt adult conversion to a different style of barbecue. Crushes, yes: I myself once experienced a brief but intense attraction to the vinegary-tasting pulled pork served in eastern North Carolina. But my underlying loyalty to the dry-rubbed rib remained, and remains, unshaken.

I further suspect that my own liking for honest-to-God Scott County-style ribs is less a matter of aesthetic preference than a manifestation of my enduring nostalgia for southeast Missouri. Hometown cooking gets in your blood: I moved away from Smalltown three decades ago, but I return home to visit my family two or three times a year, and whenever I do, I eat barbecue. My mother doesn’t cook as much as she used to, so our visits to Dexter Bar-B-Que have become a replacement (of sorts) for the fried potatoes, baked beans, waffles, and stewed chicken and noodles that she dished up in my calorie-unconscious youth.

Paradoxical as it may sound, one of the things I love most about barbecue is that it tastes different wherever you go. Once upon a time America seemed to be evolving into a giant super-nation where everyone did everything alike. A half-century ago John Steinbeck bought a camper, drove it all over the country, and wrote up his adventures in a book called Travels With Charley. One of the things he noticed, or thought he noticed, was that local accents were dying out:

Regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man’s place of origin by his speech. That is growing more difficult now and will in some foreseeable future become impossible….Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless.

Maybe so, but my experience suggests otherwise. You couldn’t spend thirty seconds listening to my brother without knowing that he grew up in southeast Missouri, and Mrs. T and I had occasion last week to spend a few hours with a very nice woman from Massachusetts whose accent is strong enough to cut sheet metal. And just as our regional speech has contrived to defy the flattening effects of radio and TV, so has our regional cooking retained its individuality in spite of the ubiquity of the Big Mac. Nor should that surprise anybody: a land big enough to contain multitudes has room enough for every imaginable kind of barbecue, up to and including the fancy kind.

So I don’t mind admitting that I really, really liked Dressing Room’s not-quite-Scott-County-style ribs–as well as the fact that Messrs. Newman and Nischan went out of their way to say where they came from, tenuous though the relationship between their ribs and ours may be. Note that I still say “ours,” even though time has inevitably turned me into a Missouri-style New Yorker. I’m proud to be from Scott County. It isn’t famous for much, but I love it anyway. I was happy there, and most of the time I knew it. Remembered happiness and dry-rubbed ribs: of such humble commodities is middle-aged bliss made.

Guess I’ll go back home this summer,

Leave this daily grind behind.

There’s nothing wrong, I’m sure,

That going home won’t cure,

I’ll find my peace of mind.

Guess I’ll go back home this summer,

“Home, Sweet Home”‘s my favorite song.

Those folks will always be

The heart and soul of me,

I’ve stayed away too long.

Ray Mayer, “Guess I’ll Go Back Home (This Summer)” (music by Willard Robison)

I have good news to report in this week’s Wall Street Journal drama column, in which I speak well of two shows, the Broadway transfer of Patrick Stewart’s Macbeth and Westport Country Playhouse’s revival of Alan Ayckbourn’s Time of My Life. Here’s an excerpt.
* * *
It’s been a long time since a Shakespeare play caused more talk among New York theatergoers than Rupert Goole’s blood-soaked Chichester Festival Theatre version of “Macbeth,” which has just transferred to Broadway from the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a commercial run. Patrick Stewart’s presence in the cast explains much of the buzz, but not all of it: This is a remarkable “Macbeth,” thrillingly acted and imaginatively directed, and it would be worth seeing even if Mr. Stewart weren’t playing the title role.
Mr. Goole’s staging is a prosy, purposefully unmagical updating of Shakespeare’s tragedy in which the action is transplanted from ancient Scotland to the Soviet Union in the darkest days of the Great Terror. The setting is an anonymous, grimy-tiled chamber that serves by turns as an emergency room, a dining hall, a morgue, an unconvincing-looking battlefield and an even less plausible passenger train. Mr. Stewart’s Macbeth is a Stalinesque soldier who seizes power by assassinating his leader, while the three Weird Sisters become renegade nurses who kill their patients on the operating table, a wonderfully alarming touch.
While I have no problem with Mr. Goole’s conceptual overlay on Shakespeare’s text–it makes sense to approach “Macbeth” as a tale of more or less contemporary tyranny–I can’t say that I was completely convinced by the way in which he draws his historical parallels….
What really works in this “Macbeth” is the acting. Mr. Stewart is too old and too bluff to be altogether believable, but the freshness with which he delivers his well-worn speeches will still make you feel as though they’d just been written. Kate Fleetwood is terrifyingly vulpine as Lady Macbeth…
I’ll go a long way to see an Alan Ayckbourn play, but Westport Country Playhouse, which is an hour-long train ride from Times Square, has saved me the trouble by mounting an outstanding revival of “Time of My Life,” Mr. Ayckbourn’s 1992 comedy about a family that thinks it’s a lot happier than it really is.
To call “Time of My Life” a comedy is, of course, to miss the point. It is, like most of Mr Ayckbourn’s plays, a deeply serious study of middle-class life whose jokes all cut to the quick. It is also, like many of his plays, a virtuoso piece of stagecraft. The curtain goes up on a birthday party whose six guests give every impression of having a perfectly marvelous time. “My intention,” Mr. Ayckbourn has said, “was to perceive a single moment in life–in this case where the characters are apparently very happy. I then proceed to look at that moment through the eyes of the three pairs of protagonists. One pair remaining for two hours in the present, one pair proceeding two years into the future and one pair receding two months into the past.” What sounds fearsomely knotty in the telling turns out to be brilliantly lucid in the playing…
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

A “new” portrait of Mozart painted from life in 1783 was recently authenticated by a British musicologist, and the media took respectful note. So did I. But then I asked myself: what difference does it make whether we know what the composer of The Marriage of Figaro looked like? Why do we care–and why does it matter? The result of my speculations was this week’s “Sightings” column, which appears in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal.
Part of my inspiration for the column was this posting by the ever-provocative Mr. Anecdotal Evidence, which reminded me of an exceedingly relevant Samuel Johnson quote recorded in Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides: “I esteem biography, as giving us what comes near to ourselves, what we can turn to use.” But how can we turn the presumed physiognomy of a classical composer to use? And what do we do in the case of a great artist like Shakespeare about whose personal life we know almost nothing?
For the answer, pick up a copy of tomorrow morning’s Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section.
* * *
Read the whole thing here.

“In our way, Johnson strongly expressed his love of driving fast in a post-chaise. ‘If (said he,) I had no duties, and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman, but she should be one who could understand me, and would add something to the conversation.'”
James Boswell, Life of Johnson

5 x 5 Books … is a recommendation of five books that appears regularly in this space. Today’s installment comes from critic Michael Gorra. Michael teaches at Smith College and is the editor of The Portable Conrad (Penguin). I’m about to embark on a bunch of Conrad reading and so prevailed on Michael to set out the perfect primer. As you may remember, he also recently obliged us with a 5 x 5 Books related to Henry James.
But is a scene an incident, or a setting? My list includes both, and while I don’t know if that ambiguity obtains in other languages it seems entirely suited to Conrad. He thought that English words lacked hard edges. There was a fundamental lack of clarity to the language itself in a way that allowed one meaning to penetrate or maybe infiltrate another. So the simplest word might mean several different things — and clearly that confusion suited him.
1. The Secret Agent. I could fill this list with my favorite moments from this novel — it’s sick, I know, but reading this book always cheers me up. Still, I’ve got to skip over the wonderful negatives in the prose of the opening page, or the police constable’s report of his actions with a shovel. Let’s go instead with that “Hyperborean swine,” Mr. Vladimir, who in Chapter 2 instructs the title character to have “a go at astronomy” by bombing the Greenwich Observatory. He is the provocateur’s provocateur, a comic — indeed camp — version of the great tempters of nineteenth-century fiction, like Balzac’s Vautrin or Dostoevsky’s Svidrigailov.
2. Lord Jim. A setting here — the dinner Marlow gives to Jim at the Malabar House in Singapore. I haven’t counted, but it seems to take a hundred pages, in which Jim unfolds his history, protests, doubts, talks entirely too much… And Marlow listens, and then talks to us, tells us of the impression the man has made, ruminates. I wrote that last word unthinkingly, but it’s true: He does chew it all over a few times. It’s the point at which Marlow takes over the narrative, and his voice is so powerful that almost everybody forgets that the book starts in a more-or-less (well, less) conventional third person.
3. Nostromo. Not the scene in the silver-laden boat at night, the one that all readers remember. I like the more grotesque moments. Nostromo — our man — has swum ashore from that boat into the middle of a revolution; everyone believes he is dead. He sleeps all day in the sun, and at night makes his way into the Custom House of the city, drawn by two lighted windows in what should be darkness. He makes his way upstairs, and then stops, arrested by the shadow of a man upon the wall. He is unarmed, and so waits for a moment before going forward. But the shadow is that of a corpse.
4. Victory. English fiction has lots of novels about white men falling to pieces in hot countries. That’s a part of Conrad’s legacy. But nobody ever did it better, not even Graham Greene, and this late novel has a wonderful sequence set in a shabby island hotel, where a ladies’ orchestra plays to a crowd of colonial flotsam. The whole world is cheap and sweaty and shabby; there’s a trio of fabulous villains; and the hotelkeeper is the most wonderfully mediocre of souls, the hollowest of the hollow men. There is a hero, who wants nobler things, but he’s almost an afterthought; the book is most alive in its cheapest moments. I’m surprised Puccini never set it.
5. Under Western Eyes. The student Razumov, having betrayed a man who had trusted him with his secrets and his life, tells a police examiner that he wants “simply to retire.” Which makes his confessor ask, softly, “Where to?” No reader of Conrad will be surprised to learn that what then happens both fulfills the literal terms of Razumov’s desire and proves no retirement at all.

“One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another–secret and passionate and intense–which is the real life. . . . One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters . . . there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives.”
Willa Cather, Not Under Forty (as quoted and elided in Nancy Mildford’s Savage Beauty)