Terry Teachout's Blog, page 154

TT: A little bit of courage

My brother and his wife will soon be moving into my mother's house in Smalltown, U.S.A. David and I grew up there, and though I left Smalltown in 1974, I faithfully returned to 713 Hickory Drive two or three times each year until my mother died in May. The house, which was built in 1962, became increasingly dilapidated after my father died, so my brother, a self-taught carpenter of near-professional skill, has decided to remodel it himself. He started with my old bedroom back in March, and now he's working on the living room.

One thing that he's long wanted to do is strip away the now-threadbare wall-to-wall carpeting that my father installed back in the Sixties, in the process covering up the gorgeous hardwood floors that came with the house. It was on the living-room floor that we tore into the mountain of presents that my parents piled under the Christmas tree each December. Needless to say, the presents kept on coming after the floor disappeared beneath the brand-new carpet, but little boys believe passionately in the beauty and significance of that which is, just as middle-aged men long no less passionately to recapture that which was, especially when it reminds them of a happy childhood.

A few days ago I got a cellphone message from my brother. It consisted of the picture on the right, accompanied by a single line of text: "The living-room floor has just seen daylight for the first time in thirty-plus years!"

As I looked at the picture on the screen, I suddenly recalled a song by Gerry Goffin and Carole King called "Goin' Back" that I first heard around the time that my father put in the carpet: Now there are no games to only pass the time/No more electric trains, no more trees to climb.

I thought at once of the jumbo electric-train set that my father set up in the basement, a long-decayed treasure that went unused for decades after David and I left home. I thought, too, of the tall maple tree in the front yard that was destroyed by the great ice storm of 2009 . My brother subsequently replaced it with a new tree, one that is coming along nicely but still has a long, long way to go before it reaches its full growth.

My eyes filled with tears as I reflected on what time had stolen from us. Then I remembered the last two lines of "Goin' Back": A little bit of courage is all we lack/So catch me if you can, I'm goin' back.

"You know what that picture makes me think of?" I texted my brother. "Christmas, when we were kids--and now I'm getting choked up..."

"Yup," he texted back. David is a man of few words, but he knows how to pick them.

The two of us needed more than a little bit of courage to cope with the trials of the year just past, and I expect it'll take almost as much to get through the next one. But when I go back to Smalltown for a visit, I'll be able once more to see the amber glory of the living-room floor, and I have no doubt that the sight will fill me with comfort and joy.

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The Byrds sing "Goin' Back" on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968:

GALLERY

Martin Puryear: New Sculpture (McKee, 745 Fifth Ave. at 57th St., up through June 29). New work, by turns witty, lyrical, and provocatively enigmatic, from America's foremost living sculptor, a virtuoso woodworker whose subtle inclination toward the surreal grows increasingly evident (TT).

CD

Pat Metheny, Unity Band (Nonesuch). Nine new compositions by the master guitarist, all performed by his latest working band, a quartet that features Chris Potter on tenor saxophone. This is the first time that Metheny has recorded as a leader with a saxophonist since 1980, and Potter's presence is galvanizing. All hands--including Ben Williams on bass and Antonio Sanchez on drums--play with colossal vitality. This one's a keeper (TT).

THE SEDUCTIVE LURE OF ABSTRACTION

" Despite what seems to be an innate preference for more or less literal representation of the visible world, the abstract idea remains to this day both seductive and perennially relevant. Why? Because the best abstract art has the power to cut through the rigid conventions of direct representation and externalize interior essences--to show us things not as they look, but as they are..."

BOOK

Elijah Wald, The Dozens: A History of Rap's Mama (Oxford, $24.95). This impeccably researched study of the classic black insult game may be the funniest work of serious scholarship ever published--and the one that will give newspaper reviewers the most trouble, since virtually every paragraph of is studded with obscenities of the highest possible voltage. That said, The Dozens is a superlative piece of work, which won't surprise anyone who's read any of Elijah Wald's earlier books . If I ran the world, I'd give him a MacArthur (TT).

DVD

Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen (Song Without Borders). This is the documentary by Michael Stillwater that I wrote about with the utmost enthusiasm earlier this year in The Wall Street Journal. I can't recommend it strongly enough now that it's available on home video, both as an introduction to one of this country's best composers and as a model of how to tell an artist's story on film (TT).

BOOK

James Garner and Jon Winokur, The Garner Files: A Memoir (Simon & Schuster, $25.99). Most ghostwritten celebrity autobiographies are a waste of time. Not so The Garner Files, which is unselfconscious, unpretentious, and ungossipy--but frank. If, like David Thomson and me , you esteem the star of Maverick, The Rockford Files, and Support Your Local Sheriff! as one of Hollywood's outstanding on-camera craftsmen, you'll gallop through it with delight. I only wish it were twice as long (TT).

TT: 1378 and all that

In today's Wall Street Journal I review the off-Broadway premiere of Kenneth Lonergan's Medieval Play and a San Diego-area revival, North Coast Rep's double bill of Harold Pinter's The Lover and The Dumb Waiter. Here's an excerpt.

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Kenneth Lonergan is a master of subtle, intimate theatrical naturalism who decisively established himself in "This Is Our Youth," "You Can Count on Me" and "The Starry Messenger" as one of America's foremost playwrights and screenwriters. But he is also, lest we forget, a co-author of the screenplay for "Analyze This," and his broadly comic side comes to the fore in "Medieval Play," a mile-wide farce about the Great Schism of 1378 which has about as much in common with "The Starry Messenger" as "Airplane!" has with "The Seventh Seal." "Medieval Play" is billed as "a new and meandering comedy with no contemporary parallels worth noting." I suspect that this blurb was penned by Mr. Lonergan himself, because it nicely conveys the feel of "Medieval Play," which is by turns silly and sophomoric, surprisingly smart, very funny and--sure enough--meandering.

If you aren't familiar with the Great Schism, it's enough to say that the Roman Catholic Church had two popes between 1378 and 1417, one based in Italy and the other in France, and that the rival claimants to the papal throne, not to mention their respective supporters, didn't get along even slightly. Enter Sir Ralph (Josh Hamilton) and Sir Alfred (Tate Donovan), a pair of moronic knights who stumble into the middle of this messy conflict and, inspired by Catherine of Siena (Heather Burns), forswear raping and pillaging oand endeavor with limited success to hew to the path of righteousness.

Mr. Lonergan has turned this conflict into a one-joke play, the joke being that all of the characters in "Medieval Play" speak not in the language of Europe circa 1378 but of America circa 2012....

The problem is that in addition to writing the script, he's also staged it. It's not that he isn't a good director, but anyone else would have ordered him to cut at least a half hour, if not more, out of "Medieval Play." Instead we get a one-joke show that runs for 155 minutes. If, like me, you have a furtive fondness for brainy juvenile humor, you'll enjoy yourself anyway, but the fact remains that "Medieval Play" is far too long for its own good....

The enigmatic plays of Harold Pinter are still a hard sell at most regional theaters, so I thought it would be interesting to see how they went over when mounted by a San Diego-area company headquartered in a shopping center. Judging by the unselfconsciously enthusiastic response of the crowd that turned out for the opening night of North Coast Repertory Theatre's double bill of "The Lover" and "The Dumb Waiter," it appears that Mr. Pinter has a big future in the suburbs....

David Ellenstein, the company's artistic director, has put together a dynamite cast led by Elaine Rivkin, a Chicago-based actor who is icebox-cool in "The Lover" as a dissatisfied housewife who dallies each afternoon with...but I mustn't give it away. Mr. Ellenstein's cracker-crisp staging points up the laughter in both plays without stinting on their underlying menace...

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Read the whole thing here .

The set change for North Coast Rep's double bill of The Lover and The Dumb Waiter, accompanied by Schumann's A Minor Piano Concerto:

TT: The seductive lure of abstraction

My recent visit to the Orange County Museum of Art's Richard Diebenkorn retrospective has yielded up a "Sightings" column for today's Wall Street Journal. Here's an excerpt.

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One of the most satisfying museum retrospectives ever devoted to an American artist is now traveling from coast to coast. "Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series," which closed at California's Orange County Museum of Art two weeks ago and will reopen on June 30 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., consists of 75-odd abstract paintings and works on paper made by Diebenkorn between 1967 and 1987, the years when he worked out of a studio in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica....

Part of what makes the Ocean Park series so fascinating is that Diebenkorn, who died in 1993, waged a lifelong "battle" with abstraction. He started out as a gifted abstract-expressionist painter. In 1955 he suddenly embraced representation, turning out dozens of figurative paintings that translate the language of Matisse into a wholly personal, semi-abstract style. Then, in the Ocean Park series, he made a decisive return to abstraction, in the process creating the most original works of his career.

To chart Diebenkorn's stylistic development is to be reminded of the near-overwhelming power of the idea of abstraction in the 20th century. It was even felt by artists who, like Pierre Bonnard and Fairfield Porter, never produced an abstract painting in their lives, but were nonetheless influenced by the way in which practitioners of abstraction created what Diebenkorn called "invented landscapes," non-objective images that evoked the world of tangible reality while steering clear of literal representation.

The idea of abstraction is so central to the history of modern art that it left its mark on the work of non-visual artists as well. George Balanchine, for example, is best remembered for the many "plotless" ballets that he made to the music of Igor Stravinsky. The Russian-born choreographer never used the word "abstract" to describe them. "Dancer is not a color," he said. "Dancer is a person." But to look at a dance like "Stravinsky Violin Concerto," in which still-recognizable human relationships are stripped of all literal meaning, is to suspect that Balanchine saw in his youth at least some of the innovative canvases in which Vasily Kandinsky, his fellow countryman, dispensed with the pictorial restrictions of figurative art to become the first abstract painter....

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Read the whole thing here .

An excerpt from Balanchine, a 1984 PBS documentary narrated by Frank Langella, in which George Balanchine and Igor Stravinsky are seen in conversation. The clip includes excerpts from three Balanchine-Stravinsky ballets, Agon, Balustrade, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto:

TT: Almanac

"It is after creation, in the elation of success, or the gloom of failure, that love becomes essential."

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise