Archives for 2008

“Forgetfulness. A gift of God bestowed upon debtors in compensation for their destitution of conscience.”
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

The Gerry Mulligan Quartet plays “Open Country,” with Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“The dullard’s envy of brilliant men is always assuaged by the suspicion that they will come to a bad end.”
Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson

I sent the following e-mail to the Santa Fe Opera yesterday afternoon:

Attached is the complete revised libretto of The Letter, incorporating various changes to the text (all of them small) that I have made in consultation with Paul Moravec since the first version of the piano-vocal score was printed by Subito Music earlier this year….

This version of the libretto supersedes all previous versions. Paul will be using it to prepare the revised piano-vocal score and the orchestral score. I am not planning to make any further changes until the opera goes into rehearsal.

Writing that last sentence felt almost as fateful as writing the last paragraph of Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong. Needless to say, it doesn’t mean that I’m done with The Letter–not by the longest of long shots–but it does mean that my libretto is now officially in its final form. For the next few months, the ball will be in my colleague’s court. Paul started orchestrating The Letter last week, and I went over to his apartment yesterday to listen to the first part of the first scene (he played a synthesized version for me on his computer). Up to now I’ve only heard The Letter accompanied by a piano, and the difference is staggering. To hear the opening pages of our not-so-little opera reconceived in orchestral terms is like seeing a black-and-white movie reshot in Technicolor and CinemaScope. I can’t even begin to imagine what it will feel like to hear a live orchestra playing Paul’s score next summer.

I celebrated by going to the Jewish Museum to see Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, which closes on September 21, then travels to the St. Louis Art Museum, where it will be on view from October 19 to January 11. It’s a remarkable show, not least because of the clarity with which it shows how Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, the two most important American art critics of the Forties and Fifties, influenced the reception of abstract expressionism in postwar America. Anyone who believes, as I do, in the power of criticism to do good cannot help but be stirred by Action/Abstraction.

Still, I confess to having been more stirred by the words of an actress I know whom I encountered in a theater lobby a couple of months ago. She introduced me to her boyfriend as follows: “Terry isn’t just a writer and a critic–he’s an artist, too. He’s writing an opera!”

This is a distinction whose significance I unhesitatingly admit. As far as I’m concerned, critics aren’t artists. In my capacity as a critic and biographer, I think of myself as an artisan–a craftsman. One of the reasons why I believe this to be so is because I used to be an artist back in the days when I was a professional musician. That fact has conditioned my approach to criticism.

As I wrote early in the life of this blog:

It’s not a popular view among my colleagues, but I think most of the best critics–not all, but most–have had at least some professional experience in at least one of the arts about which they write. I know I try to write not as a lofty figure from on high, smashing stone tablets over the heads of ballerinas and prima donnas, but as someone who has spent his entire adult life immersed in the world of art, both as a critic and as a practitioner. I was also fortunate to have served my apprenticeship as a critic in a middle-sized city, because it taught me that criticism is not written in a vacuum. It touches real people, people of flesh and blood, and sometimes it hurts them. If you don’t know that–and I mean really know it–you shouldn’t be a critic….

That’s another reason why critics should ideally have hands-on experience in the areas about which they write: It teaches them proper respect for what Wilfrid Sheed calls “the simple miracle of getting the curtain up every night.” It’s hard to sing Tatyana in Yevgeny Onegin, or to dance in Concerto Barocco. It’s scary to go out in front of a thousand people in a dumb-looking costume and put your heart and soul on the line. Unless you have some personal experience of what that feels like–of the problems, both psychological and practical, that stand in the way of getting the curtain up–then you may err on the side of an unrealistic perfectionism, and your reviews will be sterile and uncomprehending as a result.

What is true in the case of the interpretative artist is even more so when it comes to creative artists. Those who paint paintings or write poems are doing something essentially different–different in kind–from those who merely write about other people’s paintings and poems. I know this all too well, for I lack the gift of creativity, and it was the greatest disappointment of an otherwise charmed life when I realized that this was so. Unable to make something out of nothing, I decided instead to become a professional appreciator. I think I’m pretty good at it, but I’d much rather have been a pretty good novelist.

That’s why it means so much to me to be working on a project like The Letter. For the first time since my college days, I’m becoming an artist again, and the sensation is both terrifying and wonderful. I’ve never been to a casino, but I can’t help but think that this is what it feels like to place a very large bet.

“Would that I were a poet or a philosopher, but I’m only a critic!” I wrote in my last posting about The Letter. A few days later, a reader wrote to remind me of the following lines from one of my favorite movies, High Fidelity: “You’re making something. You–the critic, the professional appreciator–put something new into the world. And the second one of those things gets sold to someone, you’re officially a part of it.”

So I am–and I’m proud to be a part of it, prouder than I’ve ever been of anything in my professional life, though Rhythm Man comes pretty damn close.

Somehow I have a feeling that 2009 is going to be a good year.

“In criticising the work of a creative artist whom he admires, a man may devote himself to reverent interpretation. Indeed, that is always the highest kind of criticism–to translate, through one’s own temperament and intellect, the fine work of another man, to cast new lights on its beauties, to reveal things hidden in it, to illustrate and to extend its meanings.”
Max Beerbohm, Around Theatres

Forgive my testiness in the earlier version of this posting that I decided to scrap–I got a little bit too much mail today, and it made me a little bit crazy. Allow me to replace it with this kinder, gentler pair of suggestions:
• Please don’t send me unsolicited review copies of books or CDs. I don’t have time to examine them, or room in my small Upper West Side apartment to store them. I keep a close eye on publishers’ catalogues and listings of new releases, and if I want something, I’ll let you know.
• Please don’t send mass-mailed press releases to my public e-mailboxes. I get so much spam that I have no choice but to delete all such mail without reading it.

FRIDAY I drove out to Queens College with Ariel Davis, my research assistant, and spent the day at the Louis Armstrong Archives. We’re putting together the photo insert for Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, so we looked through box after box of prints, publicity stills, contact sheets, and one-of-a-kind snapshots. I’d already tracked down a wonderful photograph by Weegee of Armstrong on stage in 1940 that I’m thinking of using on the dust jacket.

At day’s end Ariel guessed that we’d gone through some two thousand photos, which seemed a bit high but not implausible. It certainly felt as though we had. Fortunately, Satchmo was as photogenic as it’s possible for a human being to be, and we brought home copies of thirty-five choice images, many of them previously unpublished.

SATURDAY I was supposed to meet Mrs. T in Fairfield, Connecticut, at a surprise birthday party for a friend, but Tropical Storm Hanna got in the way, so I stayed home and spent the afternoon and evening putting one last coat of polish on the final draft of Rhythm Man. It was three in the morning by the time I was finished.

This is the last paragraph of the afterword:

I thank my mother, who called me into the living room of our Missouri home one Sunday night and sat me down in front of the TV, on which Louis Armstrong was singing “Hello, Dolly!” on The Ed Sullivan Show. “This man won’t be around forever,” she said. “Someday you’ll be glad you saw him.” That was back when the public schools in my home town were still segregated, two decades after a black man had been dragged from our city jail, hauled through the streets at the end of a rope, and set afire. Yet even in a place where such a monstrous evil had been wrought, my mother came to love Armstrong–and, just as important, to respect him–not merely for the beauty of the music he made but also for the goodness of the man who made it. I wrote this book so that she, and others like her, might know more about the man they loved.

SUNDAY Don’t ever try to finish a primary-source biography and an opera libretto at the same time! I got up at eight and put in four uninterrupted hours of work on The Letter. I had a few tiny kinks to straighten out before we send the revised piano-vocal score off to Subito Music, Paul Moravec‘s publisher. Most were passages written in haste with which I’d never been fully satisfied, and it was a relief to get them fixed at last.

As soon as I was done, I threw on my clothes, caught a cab, and headed downtown to Film Forum to look at a new print of François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player, which I last saw a couple of decades ago. Since then I’ve read David Goodis’ Down There, the pulp novel on which Truffaut’s 1960 film was based. I like Down There, but it’s one of the most humorless books ever written, a exercise in nihilistic despair. Not so Shoot the Piano Player, which infuses Goodis’ grim plot with fey touches of romance and frivolity that make the final disaster all the more terrible by contrast.

David Thomson, my favorite film critic, included Shoot the Piano Player in “Have You Seen…?”: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. As always, his comments are very much to the point:

The speed with which asides and inserts could come and go, and the electric shift in mood from romantic to absurd, from lyrical to tragic–those things are still models for any filmmaker and a sign of how quickly film can work (this is a complicated movie of only 80 minutes). Marie Dubois is warm, Nicole Berger haunting, and the gangsters are so funny and yet so alarming. I find an extraordinary nostalgia in the mere sound of [Georges] Delerue’s music–and something just as compelling in the young man’s amazed rapture at finding he could do anything with film.

Me, too, and I also reveled in seeing a classic film in a theater for the first time in…well, I don’t know how long. I remember when I used to go to Film Forum once or twice a month to see old movies, but now I stay home, send out for pizza, curl up on my couch, and watch them on TV, sometimes with Mrs. T or a friend and sometimes by myself.

Thomson has this to say about home moviegoing in “Have You Seen…?”:

I see fewer films in real dark, in great prints, on enormous screens. I watch the videos on television, and try to adjust to the diminution….I lament the loss, but know that everything in the business and in the treatment of movies is shifting toward small-screen study. Otherwise sensible people write Ph.D. theses on particular movies without ever seeing them on a large screen. And if their writing is a little dry, or a little short of what I recall as magical effects, well, the Ph.D. is a professional achievement. Is it possible that the movies are going to end up as museum pieces–like the way we now study old newspapers? We should remember that the “meaning” of newspaper content had to do not just with the “news” preserved but with the dailiness of the paper, its feel in the hands, its smell, and its illusion of opening up the grubby world.

As for me, I loved seeing Shoot the Piano Player surrounded by silent, enthralled people huddled together in a darkened room. The experience was a miniature vacation, a present that I gave myself as a reward for the successful completion of two pieces of hard labor and a month and a half of theater-related travel. Now I wish I could take a whole week off and do nothing but go to the movies.

No such luck, of course–duty calls–but at least I was able to remind myself of what I’ve been missing.

“Remember that the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, probably superstitious, and possibly mad.”
Samuel Johnson (quoted in Hester Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson)