Where True Liberty Resides

In Emdashes' obituary notice on Norman Mailer, Martin Schneider speculates as to why Mailer was such a relative no-show in the magazine.

Until Tina Brown's tenure, Mailer had published only two short poems in the magazine, both in 1961. There are just five bylines in all. As one of America?s most important postwar writers and a frequent object of public attention, he was far more often written about; a search on his name in The Complete New Yorker yields more than 100 hits.

Indeed, it would appear that Mailer had little interest in writing for the magazine. Perhaps he considered that a New Yorker byline would be incidental to his various projects--to remake American literature, to upend the battle of the sexes, to provide a channel whereby citizens could regain authenticity.

Methinks me detects a faint whiff of sarcasm in that last rollcall. In fact, Mailer made plain his reasons for giving the Shawn-era New Yorker a pass in the chapter of The Armies of the Night titled "The Liberal Party," where the genial pelican presence of critic Dwight Macdonald triggers a rumination:

Although Macdonald would not admit it, he was in secret carrying on a passionate love affair with The New Yorker--Disraeli on his knees before Victoria. But the Novelist [Mailer] did not share Macdonald's infatuation at all--The New Yorker had not printed a line in review of The Presidential Papers, An American Dream, or Cannibals and Christians, and that, Mailer had long ago decided, was an indication of some of the worst things to be said about the magazine. He had once had a correspondence with Lillian Ross who asked him why he did not do a piece for The New Yorker. "Because they would not let me use the word 'shit,'" he had written back. Miss Ross suggested that all liberty was his if only he understood where liberty resided. True liberty, Mailer had responded, consisted of his right to say shit in The New Yorker.

Now, of course, all manner of shit is said in The New Yorker, and nobody minds, not even the senior nuns.

Until recent editorships The New Yorker tended to resist writers who made their reputations outside the magazine and hence were less beholden to the magazine's mystique and culture, which perhaps explains why Gore Vidal's byline didn't appear there until the nineties either.

Dust Bunnies Meet the Dogs of War

I've never been a big believer in The Believer. The arch, twee tone, the precious, curlicued sensibility, the cliquish roster of contributors (cavorting like the troupe of a Renaissance Fair, bells a-jangle), the subheads and captions diddling away for our amusement--you know, the usual boring complaints. But I have to say the latest issue swung to me, and not just because it offers as a special treat an array of temporary press-on tattoos perfect for wearing home for Thanksgiving dinner and convincing your loved ones that you've finally flipped.

The black cat in the bowtie--I'd have to say that's my favorite.

But the chief motivation for me stretching my arm at the newsstand and bringing the new issue home was an interview with critic/curator Dave Hickey, whose collection Air Guitar should be in the paperback library of every bomb shelter and body shop in America. When oh when are we going to get a sequel to Air Guitar or an updated edition that will feature Hickey's cataclysmic tribute to The Carpenters' "Goodbye to Love"? You think I'm kidding but I'm not. I never kid where Karen Carpenter's concerned.

The interview with Hickey conducted by Sheila Heti is tonic not only because it's so smart and candid but because Hickey sounds like an actual human being talking, not a filtration device preening with little soundbites.

SH: Do you see anybody doing anything that--let's say radical--right now?

DH: First of all, let me say if I did, I probably wouldn't recognize it.

SH: You wouldn't recognize it?

DH: Let me put it this way. When I was a bright young thing, my relationship to my elders was, uh, problematic. It was like--[makes a gesture of waving from across a chasm]. And I thought they were wrong and I was right. And they were wrong, but I'm probably as wrong today. As I always say, the next great art movement may be dust bunnies, you know what I mean? And I wouldn't recognize it. It's like, whoa! What dust bunnies did you get from out of your bag!?

[snip]

DH: I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. Some good artists in their maturity?like me?will take a job at a university and continue to produce because they have trained themselves to produce. But the university environment is not a productive environment. It's oppressive.

SH: It?s what?

DH: It's not free. You cannot say what you want to. Let me explain. If I sell an article to Vanity Fair, they give me some money and we're quits. I can take that money and spend it on heroin and Arab boys if I want to. But if I get the money I make from the university every year, that comes with a requirement that I not be a pedophile, that I not be a drug addict, that I not tell the truth, that I not say what I think about the president of the university. That's what that money is. And if I take a job at a university and I'm a young person, I have six years in which I can't express my opinion until I get tenure. Now, are you going to remember your opinions for six years? No!

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you've got to make money elsewhere?

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That's my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don?t make literature, architecture, and art--the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don't think the culture needs government help.

What Hickey says about Vanity Fair's laissez faire policy--so true. If I were to spend my celery* on building elaborate model airplanes or spaceships and end up sprawled on the floor overcome by airplane glue as tiny mice considerately tiptoed around me, nobody at Vanity Fair would care, though Chris Garrett might mention something at contract time if my copy continued to come in three months late and so staccato with typos it looked like cryptography. Then steps might be taken, an intervention staged.

That's one of the many reasons I lay off the glue.

But otherwise.

Here's another portion I like.

DH: ...Everybody's a poll watcher. Nobody's a voter. We've got millions of people devoted to the whole idea that art's supposed to be fair and good for you. But art's not too fair, you know? Why should you be publishing books and not your friends? Because it's not fair, that's why.

SH: Yeah, whatever.

DH: Anyway, the art world is way too big right now. The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn?t sit around saying, "There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!" You know what I'm saying?

SH: Sure, it was for yourself. You were happy.

DH: Right, you were happy to be there, and if the art world today shrunk down to the size and scale of the jazz world, I would be happier now. Things would be freer and a lot less tedious.

Hickey, as every hipster in Barstow knows, lives in Las Vegas, and as a gorgeous supplement to the interview The Believer features a two-page panelled spread of luxurious carpet patterns from Vegas hotels. Based on the carpet patterns alone, my number one hotel pick for my next stay in Vegas would be the Luxor,** though the Plaza has a sort of mod martini-olive Mad Men thing going on that's diggable.

At the newsstand I also grabbed a copy of the first issue of former Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham's inspired new quarterly, but I haven't had a chance to do much more than gog at how lavishly detailed, handsomely produced, and conceptually brilliant it is. It recontextualizes history and makes it come alive to the sound of battle. Pick up the first issue if you can find it, and, online, experience its instructive inducements of deja vu.

*as a coworker at the PX used to say.

**on second thought, yikes!

Sunday Sermonette

"...[A] vast and violent fire broke out in Beverly Hills and frizzled up a great many houses both gracious and ungracious, including those of poor Zsa Zsa Gabor, Burt Lancaster, Walter Wanger, etc., all of which goes to prove that God's in his heaven and not just sitting there either. He's doing something."

--Noel Coward, from The Noel Coward Diaries, November 12, 1961

In Memoriam

For those of us who grew up in his literary thrall, losing him is like losing a planet, a fire sign of the Zodiac. But the initial sadness upon seeing the news of Norman Mailer's death--his headshot flashed on cable news, followed by a few stingy words of explanation segueing into an update about a homicide case; in such high regard is American literature held by our media--gave way to a renewed gratitude and admiration for all that Mailer accomplished and the forward-ho ferocity of his life-force that fed and fueled everything he did. He had a great life, a multi-storied career, a molecular-altering impact on postwar culture, and he never tamped down his iconoclasm and risk appetite for a cozy fade into the sunset as a senior statesman of letters. "The fact that Mailer continued writing up until the very end says more about him as a creative being than anything that any critic could offer," observes reviewer and blogger Laura Axelrod. Infirm as he was, "Mailer was clearly as curious and alive as he was in the 60s." As a writer and man, he went down fighting to the end, courting turbulence, willing to look foolish and willing to wage big, his body ravaged but his mind still keen and serrated. Mailer believed in karma, and may his transmigration be the voyage he was seeking.

Beauty and the Bob

The latest New Criterion is ripe with splendors, though for some reason they failed to include my tender, evocative personal reminiscence about the late Allan Bloom, "Kimono My House--and Make It Snappy," as part of their 20th anniversary Closing of the American Mind symposium. Perhaps there were space restrictions, or the editors considered my anecdotes not quite suitable to the augustness of the occasion. My turning in my copy after the issue went to press may have also contributed to the situation.

But I want to take advantage of the special personal privileges afforded by this blog and draw special attention to "Wall of Thorns," a halcyon essay-review of ABT's revival of Sleeping Beauty in the issue written by Laura Jacobs,* whose poetic apprehension of ballet's mortal depths oft makes me feel like a dum-dum. Perhaps the piece achieves its fullest wingspan in this passage, devoted to the dancer many of us have come to think of as Our Veronika:

...The big news of this Beauty was the announcement that soloist Veronika Part would dance the opening night Aurora. Part has become controversial. Her fans revere her for what she is (deep and vulnerable); her detractors insult her for what she isn't (fast and invulnerable). Her every performance is an event. At the same time, because she is so intensely watched and judged, her every performance is also an existential test, the bar set higher for Part than for any other dancer in New York. And still she takes the stage without camouflage or cheating or sell, bringing before us classical dancing in all its purity and poetry and risk.

When Part was cast as Aurora, some of her critics were actively hoping she'd fail?a level of partisan nastiness I've never seen in twenty-five years of reviewing. Even among those who love her dancing, some thought she was miscast. Aurora is an allegro role and Part is an adagio dancer. I myself was thrilled at the casting, not because I had hoped for it--I assumed Part would do Lilac Fairy--but when you adore a dancer you want to see them in everything: What will she do with it? I missed the preview of Beauty excerpts at the season?s opening gala, but heard that Part was rattled in the Rose Adagio and lost her balances. Knives sharpened.

Part has a tendency of fluffing first tries then coming back on high beam, and on opening night she came back and triumphed. Not with an imitation Aurora--bouncy and overbright--and not with theatrical finessing, flash thrown onto the end of ho-hum phrases. She triumphed with simplicity, with petite batterie of feathery loft, and with a clean, thoroughly achieved classical line (no decorative embellishment, no girlish mannerisms). In the intermission, Irina Kolpakova, one of the world?s great Auroras, described Part's performance as "like milk." Not cream--though Part's aplomb has often been called creamy--but lighter, modest, milk. I can't help thinking of Thomas Hardy's milkmaid princess, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, with "just that touch of rarity about her."

As always, Part's first appearance, her entrance in Act One, lifted the ballet to a higher and, because of her height, stranger place. She seemed born not of this king and queen but of vine-covered history. Her climactic port de bras in the Rose Adagio--dipping, reaching, rising over a turning spindle of bourrees (Petipa's brilliance: he's hinting at her fate just minutes away)--really was petaled, a long-stemmed rose ecstatically opening. And in the Vision Scene, no one performs that reaching pique arabesque which whorls 'round into an extension en avant with the centrifugal pull and plumb of Part, creating a wave, opening space. Notice how Petipa reverses this move in the Wedding Pas. Facing the Prince, holding his hand, Aurora unfurls a developpe en avant on pointe, arches her upper body backward from it, then flick, she pivots into an attitude that has them both facing the audience. It's a cantilevered strength move, very difficult, and where most dancers lay back stiffly, Part's arch sinks back into dream, revisiting the spell and giving us a glimpse of the curve, stress, and bevel that held her in that hundred-year sleep, and still holds in classical dancing. This is Part's power: radiant, radical imagining. In an era of allegro, she emerges--like something in a fairy tale--from the rhythms, the river, of adagio, with its rising inner life and ardor arrested, explored.

After Part has been in a ballet it can be difficult to see others come in. It isn't a question of interpretation, rather of dimension. Part has a way of opening the physical parameters of a role, not through conventional virtuosity, such as adding extra turns on a pirouette (her doubles are calla lilies; don't ask for triples), but by enlarging the measure of give within a phrase: deepening the plies; hitting the high note of a developpe with singingly perfect placement; bringing a blossom, a volumetric expansion, to a seemingly thin linearity. Part is a tautology: If you can't see what makes her great you're not really fit to judge her.

Among those most preeminently unfit to judge is the New York Observer's Robert "Ichabob" Gottlieb, who isn't really a critic as much as a self-appointed consigliere more interested in his agenda than in the art of dance. Although he's been attending ballet since the invention of the chandelier, his sophistication seems somewhat stunted; he expresses delight as if taking a hit from Rex Reed's strawberry shake. ("This is one of those ballets that just makes you happy, and the dancers were clearly happy dancing it." Golly.) His aesthetic is little more than pet likes and pet hates which he peddles as if campaigning to have his favorites crowned prom king and queen during intermission. His pet hates get the Carrie treatment, though Carrie may be too near-contemporary a film allusion for Gottlieb, who slags off Veronika Part in his latest column by comparing her to Pola Negri, a silent screen actress whose career was defunct long before most of the Observer's readers were born, assuming they were born and not simply hatched in a real-estate agency. "If I were allowed a favorite," writes Gottlieb, feeling a song coming on, "it would be Sasha Radetsky. He?s completely invested in every movement, every moment, without ever seeming self-conscious or showoffy. In fact, as I?ve written before, a little showing off wouldn?t hurt him; modesty can get you only so far." Modesty's never been your problem, Ichabobby!

*my wife, for those keeping score in the lower mezzanine

Claus Encounter of the Pod Kind

John Podhoretz, rising to the majesty and authority of his new position as editor-in-chief of Commentary, defies those doubters and naysayers who snipe that he's too intellectually shallow for the job by submitting for the ages his review of Fred Claus.

...Hollywood has sprung another Yule trap on me and millions of other unsuspecting Americans in the form of a new, colossally budgeted movie called Fred Claus, which wants both to be a gentle parody of Santa movies and traffick unironically in every North Pole movie cliche. The movie is based in a mildly funny notion that Santa Claus's older brother might be working as a repo man in Chicago with the ambition of opening an off-track betting parlor. This notion can, at best, support a three-minute sketch, however. The same can be said of its satirical extension of a childhood sibling rivalry into an agonized immortal eternity.

You'd have to be Elmer Fudd to fall for this Yule trap. Those millions of "unsuspecting Americans" deserve to get jobbed for being as dumb as Bush voters. Anybody remotely bright who saw the TV ads for Fred Claus knew that it had stinker stencilled all over it (snowball fights! sleigh rides!). The only holiday film that looks worse is the upcoming monstrosity with Dustin Hoffman in a frosted wig that looks like the sort of sparkled dementia that used to star Robin Williams before he bummed us out too many times. But even a bad movie can touch the child in all of us, if that child is as soppy as John Podhoretz:

Fred Claus is dreadful--and yet. At its climax, Santa's ne'er-do-well brother pulls up to a Chicago foundling home in the family sleigh, drops down a chimney, and delivers a Jack Russell puppy to a cute orphan. And, to my great dismay, I felt tears sting my eyes. It happened again, five minutes later, when a deeply emotional Santa Claus (Paul Giamatti) tells his ne'er-do-well older sibling (Vince Vaughan) that "you?re the best big brother in the whole world."

And this big baby crying into his Milk Duds is going to edit his father's former magazine! It's enough to shake one's faith in baldfaced nepotism.

In an Ideal World...

...Alan Dershowitz and Deroy Murdock could take turns torturing each other, forging a symbiotic bond of mutual pain and symbolic need not unlike that of Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint in Bernard Malamud's The Tenants and sparing the rest of us their sophistic sadism.

Murdock could waterboard Dershowitz while reprimanding him mightily ("Mofo, I said more iced tea!"), then switch roles, allowing himself to be hooded and bent over a hobby horse and forced to listen to Dershowitz brag about his accomplishments ad nauseum until time and space dissolve into a black whirlpool and the fine line between Dershowitz and Ron Silver is extinguished.

The scenario above, a work in progress, should not be construed as a covert endorsement of torture.

Anyone who advocates, supports, defends, rationalizes, or excuses torture has pus for brains and a case of scurvy for a conscience.

No exceptions.

Cal Thomas, a real scurve.

Update: Deroy Murdock is a sicker puppy than I thought.

Laughter Is the Best Medicine

Unless you're actually sick with something--like, say, ague; in that case, those old Red Skelton tapes probably should take a back seat to a skilled, licensed health professional with a clean stethoscope.

But if we concede that laughter is the second or third best medicine for what ails thee, then you'll want to hop, skip, and jump over to Newcritics, which is holding a comedy blogathon all this week, no entrance fee or drink minimum required.

Being the sort of recovering Anglophile who subscribes to the Archers podcast, hanging on every moo and telltale rustle in the hayloft, I was particularly interested in Steve Bowbrick's primer on British radio comedy. One of the radio comic legends mentioned is the saturnine Tony Hancock, whose name rang a gong for me because years ago I had a fascinating lunch with Hancock's widow. I just can't remember why. It was one of those mysterious one-offs. I seem to have restricted access to sizable sectors of my vague past, remembering certain incidents without recalling how I got there, or why. On his own blog, Bowbrick selects choice goodies from Radio 4's docs and coms that might be of interest or amusement, including a radio profile (news to me) of Katy Haber, Sam Peckinpah's longtime assistant with many a war story to tell. Here again my memory falters. I know I spoke to Katy Haber back when I assigned to profile Peckinpah but I can't recall whether or not we actually met on the set of Convoy, or if that was one of the interims when she and Sam were on the outs. It was certainly no fun for whoever was delegated to rap on the door of Sam's inviolate trailer and roust him from whatever reverie was detaining at the time as the sunbeaten crew stood around waiting and production money splugged down the drain. It's hard dialoguing with a director wearing mirrored sunglasses and talking in a cryptic mutter about Mexican whores. Perhaps if Sam had discovered Transcendental Meditation, like David Lynch, he could have spent those valuable private minutes in his trailer attending to his mantra instead of practicing his knife throws. But TM was out of fashion then and couldn't compete with tequila.

"Can Analysis Be Worthwhile? Is the Theater Really Dead?"

Couple Saturdays ago, I attended a panel at the Philoctetes Center featuring three of the hardiest intellects ever to toil in drama criticism: Stanley Kauffmann, Robert Brustein, and Eric Bentley, all of whom were or still are associated with The New Republic and have managed to maintain their marbles despite being exposed to acres of meretricious twaddle during their long, hoarfrost tenures (and I do mean long--whatever the secret to their sage longevity is, let's bottle it). The panel was moderated by our friend Roger Copeland, whose Merce Cunningham study is to that I Ching grasshopper what Steven Koch's Stargazer is to Andy Warhol, who kept things moving nicely without succumbing to the Charlie Rose temptation to jump from boxcar to boxcar with his questions before any of the answers were completed. It was Kauffmann who struck a rueful notes of irony when he observed that highbrow critics of the theater used to rail against middlebrow drama as represented by Maxwell Anderson and the Theater Guild and, now, oh, to have that middlebrow audience back!--because today the theater landscape is dispersed, unrecognizable. All three critics lamented the devaluation and dumbing down of all arts coverage in print today, also the subject of Terry Teachout's impassioned lament in Commentary. It was an enjoyable, educating, involving, often funny two hours that is available for viewing here. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time for me to ask any of the august guests if they had seen the musical that spoke so profoundly to me, but I didn't let that stop me from mingling at the reception afterwards, where I met the artist Jon Sarkin, whose work is part of a whorling, pulsating group show at Philoctetes that you really should pop in and see and prepare to be be-bopped by (pardon the preposition).

Pat Boone Is Just So Goshdarn Butch

Don't be fooled by his soda-shop image. He's Billy Jack in white buck shoes, a one-man morals squad in Freddie Mercury leather, defending the country from the enemy within, and as long as he's capable of recording a robocall message to all his fans out there still capable of answering the phone, Kentucky won't be renamed Willandgraceland or LizawithaZcountry anytime soon. Not on his watch. Not as long as there's a bathroom stall somewhere with two pairs of loafers visible just asking to be busted.