Archives for November 2011

Truman Capote appears on The Dean Martin Comedy Hour in 1974:

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

“It is not true that suffering ennobles the character; happiness does that sometimes, but suffering, for the most part, makes men petty and vindictive.”
W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

“I was suffering from that mysterious self-consciousness which often attacks the adolescent, a malady as agonising and overwhelming as seasickness or stage fright.”
Francis Wyndham, “Obsessions”

National Review asked me (among others) to make some Christmas gift recommendations. To find out what I suggested, go here and scroll down.

To go to a basement nightclub in Manhattan and sit ten feet away from a big band in full cry is one of the most exhilarating experiences known to man. Once upon a time I did so fairly often, but nowadays I rarely manage to do it more than once a year, when Mrs. T and I head down to the Jazz Standard on the Sunday after Thanksgiving to hear Maria Schneider‘s band.
Each year we do our best not to miss the last night of Maria’s annual week-long residency at the Jazz Standard, but this time around I felt more strongly than ever before the absolute need to flee from life and immerse myself in the world of art. Too much work, too much stress, too much everything…so we walked away from our worries, lined up at the door, and within minutes found ourselves sitting two tables away from the musicians, the very place where we most wanted to be.
The sound of a big band in a small room hits you like a benign tornado, filling the air with glowing clouds of harmony. It is, I suppose, possible to think of other things in the midst of such a maelstrom, but I didn’t: I let the outside world go and was content.
Eventually the music stopped, as it always does, and we said our farewells to Maria and caught a cab outside the club.
“Why don’t we do that more often?” asked Mrs. T as we pulled away.
“Beats me,” I replied.
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The Maria Schneider Orchestra plays “Journey Home”:

Zora Neale Hurston talks about zombies on Mary Margaret McBride‘s radio show in 1943:

“Late love has this in common with first love, it is again involuntary.”
Sybille Bedford, A Legacy

In today’s Wall Street Journal drama column I report on the premiere of Seminar, Theresa Rebeck’s new play. Here’s an excerpt.
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Nobody does nasty like Alan Rickman, and in “Seminar,” Theresa Rebeck’s new play, he goes the whole hog, playing a monstrously brutal teacher who hates his students almost as much as he hates himself. It’s no surprise that the man who brought Severus Snape to the screen should be so good at spewing verbal cyanide onstage. To hear him dismiss a short story written by one of his hapless charges as “a soul-sucking waste of words” is to know what a mouse feels like as it peers down the mouth of an ill-fed snake. What’s surprising and gratifying about “Seminar” is that Ms. Rebeck, a prolific playwright with a hit-or-miss average, should have connected so firmly with the dramatic ball this time at bat. Like “The Understudy,” her last play, “Seminar” is an intermission-free comedy that gets serious at the halfway point, and for all the shiny slickness of its surface, Ms. Rebeck has once again contrived to conjure up a stageful of too-clever-for-their-own-good characters who’ll sneak right under your skin.
The premise of “Seminar” requires explaining, since it will undoubtedly be alien to anyone who hasn’t dipped a toe into the creative-writing racket. Mr. Rickman plays Leonard, a burned-out novelist turned high-octane book editor who makes extra cash on the side by leading private seminars in The Fine Art of Getting Published. Pony up $5,000 and you get to participate in 10 kick-me sessions at which he tells a small group of up-and-coming young writers what dim-witted boobs they are…
It goes without saying that Mr. Rickman is the star of the show. Ms. Rebeck has given him a lengthy speech about unsuccessful writers (“You’ll feel like you’re in the ninth circle of hell, where the betrayers of Christ are frozen in eternal cannibalistic silence”) that he delivers as if it were an operatic aria, using his hissing, sinister drawl to color each phrase so tellingly that you’ll catch your breath from start to finish. But “Seminar” is in no way a one-man show, and Mr. Rickman’s “supporting” cast backs him brilliantly and effortlessly….
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Read the whole thing here.