{"id":13286,"date":"2011-03-23T15:06:11","date_gmt":"2011-03-23T19:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=13286"},"modified":"2011-03-24T12:29:32","modified_gmt":"2011-03-24T16:29:32","slug":"a-week-in-culture-elizabeth-samet-professor-and-writer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/23\/a-week-in-culture-elizabeth-samet-professor-and-writer\/","title":{"rendered":"A Week in Culture: Elizabeth Samet, Professor and Writer"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"DAY ONE<\/h3>\n

What better way to launch this diary than with a little detour, en route to meet some friends, along the street of pianos? I love the Sunday morning silence of this short stretch of West 58th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue: all those Steinways, Bechsteins, and Bosendorfers asleep inside their showrooms. Outside there\u2019s only the light jingle of the collar on a small but imperious terrier, its owner dragging sleepily behind. The terrier\u2014preferably Fox or Welsh\u2014is my ideal virtual dog. I can admire one in passing; then someone else can take it home. The canine\u2019s playful condescension always calls to mind my favorite couplet, Alexander Pope\u2019s epigram<\/a>, which the poet had engraved on the collar of a puppy he once gave the Prince of Wales: \u201cI am his Highness\u2019 dog at Kew<\/em>\/ Pray tell me Sir, whose Dog are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

My Piano Street Strut concludes a musical weekend. Let\u2019s start in reverse order: Lucinda Williams<\/a>, Webster Hall, Saturday night. Webster Hall has its own time zone: doors open at 6; show starts at 7; or maybe 7:45, as they inform you at the door; or, in fact, a little after 8, when Lucinda Williams steps onto the stage saying, \u201cSorry.\u201d The hall is packed, and the crowd can\u2019t get enough. Many are obvious veterans of her shows; they keep screaming, \u201cLu!\u201d and lifting their beers in tribute. My favorite Williams recordings are bundles of bitterness, but I\u2019m just not hearing it this night<\/span>.<\/p>\n

\"\"But what chance did anyone really have after Ann Hampton Callaway<\/a> at Dizzy\u2019s Club Coca-Cola on Friday? I raced home from a late night at work to meet friends in from D.C. for the show, which was delayed a bit because of some water problems at the club. Never underestimate the cosmic force of a diva: Callaway can conjure the elements. Water flowed again. And then Tony Bennett appeared. Yes, he did. Callaway improvised a song of tribute to him. It\u2019s that capacity for improvisation, that singing on the precipice, I so admire about Callaway\u2019s artistry. She often speaks of the importance of \u201clive music,\u201d and then she lives it right there in front of you.<\/p>\n

\"\"The first time I saw her she improvised a song using whatever unlovely, unmusical words the audience happened to suggest. I attended that show in the company of Callaway\u2019s father, the great Chicago journalist John Callaway<\/a>, who died in 2009. He interviewed me once<\/a> and quickly became a friend. John was the most delightful correspondent: we wrote to each other about politics, sports, and books. (He was a fan of Henning Mankell mysteries.) And when he came to New York, I looked forward to dinner and stories of the old City News Bureau in Chicago. How is it that we can feel so deeply the loss of people we\u2019ve known but a short while? Maybe it\u2019s because there are so many stories left to tell.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

DAY TWO<\/h3>\n

\"\"I refuse to subscribe to \u201cpremium\u201d cable. While everyone around me obsesses over the latest groundbreaking \u201coriginal series,\u201d I bide my time. My mother, who has both HBO and DVR capabilities, stockpiles episodes for me like missiles in a cold-war silo. I return home for the holidays each year to ignore my family and catch up on a season\u2019s worth of In Treatment<\/em>, Curb Your Enthusiasm<\/em>, or The Sopranos<\/em>. But now I\u2019ve got a three-month free trial of HBO, and I\u2019ve become a little dangerous. Deadwood<\/em> on demand has been the highlight: I do love life on the filthy (in so many different ways) frontier. I realize that in HBO time this puts me about eleven years behind, but sometimes belated is better.<\/p>\n

\"\"Having finished the entire first season of Deadwood<\/em>, I start to wander through the premium wilderness of HBO A<\/em> to Z<\/em>. Then somewhere between Catch Me if You Can<\/em> and that roller-derby flick with Ellen Page, or maybe it\u2019s between The Fantastic Mr. Fox<\/em> and the movie in which Tony Shalhoub talks to a parrot\u2014it\u2019s late and the plots are running together\u2014I light on an extended preview for Mildred Pierce<\/a><\/em>, the five-part miniseries directed by Todd Haynes and starring Kate Winslet in the title role originally inhabited by Joan Crawford. HBO has plastered ads for Pierce<\/em> on the side of every New York City bus, but to watch the preview is to be stunned by the hubris of it all. Can even the formidable duo of Haynes and Winslet pull this off? Is it wise to mess with the Crawford mojo? This is the woman who supposedly responded to a director\u2019s question about whether she could cry on demand, \u201cYou want tears? Which eye?\u201d A woman who dragged her mink across the floor of 21. My indignation builds: Crawford brazen in the lurid lunacy of Johnny Guitar<\/em>; rolling her car over on a snowy New England road at the end of Daisy Kenyon<\/em>, then emerging from the wreck looking only slightly dazed and stumbling gamely out of the frame in fur and heels to find her way home to a waiting Dana Andrews and<\/em> Henry Fonda; running up and down the streets of San Francisco in Sudden Fear<\/em>\u2014again with the fur coat\u2014to escape her murderous husband Jack Palance:<\/p>\n

\n

Jack: \u201cWhy do you look at me like that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Joan: \u201cI was just wondering what I\u2019d done to deserve you.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And of all films, Mildred Pierce<\/a><\/em>? The Warner Brothers picture that resurrected Crawford\u2019s career, with Eve Arden and Jack Carson\u2014those meticulous Warner Brothers contract players\u2014wisecracking their way through all 111 minutes, that oozing Max Steiner score, and Joan\u2019s Mildred baking four-dozen pies a night just to buy that bitch of a daughter singing lessons. What can they be thinking?<\/p>\n

DAY THREE<\/h3>\n

\"\"For reasons still obscure to me, I recently decided that I needed to learn how to play the guitar. One Sunday my friend Steve\u2014a first-rate Virgil for a trip down to the Union Square Guitar Center\u2014helped me pick out an instrument. Think Will Ferrell finding that sea-foam Fender in Stranger than Fiction<\/em>. Okay, not quite. Sunday mornings are quiet at the Guitar Center, especially in the climate-controlled room where they keep the acoustic instruments. Nevertheless, as I discovered on a return visit, the vibe is altogether different on a weekday afternoon, when every teenage boy in New York is there grappling with an ax to create a cacophony impossible to describe.<\/p>\n

\"\"Thus newly indoctrinated into the world of guitars, I decide to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art\u2019s \u201cGuitar Heroes\u201d exhibition<\/a>. Fantastic. There are some beautiful stringed instruments from the museum\u2019s permanent collection. The materials from which they\u2019re made are found poems: spruce, ebony, fruitwood, snakewood, parchment, bone, ivory, mother-of-pearl. But at the heart of the exhibition are the gorgeous mandolins and archtop guitars of three twentieth-century New York luthiers: John D\u2019Angelico, James D\u2019Aquisto, and John Monteleone. Several of the most beautiful models were inspired by city architecture: D\u2019Aquisto\u2019s New Yorker Deluxe and Monteleone\u2019s Radio City and Deco Vox models, the latter capturing the look of the Chrysler Building at sunset. Monteleone\u2019s Black Mambo, Radio Flyer, and Sun King are also on display. You can listen online to musicians playing several of the instruments and discussing the sound and craftsmanship. Check out Barry Mitterhoff http:\/\/blog.metmuseum.org\/guitarheroes\/john-monteleone\/”>playing<\/a> \u201cSoldier\u2019s Joy\u201d on a Monteleone Baby Grand model mandolin.<\/p>\n

I went home to practice my C chord.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Samet is the author of<\/em> Soldier’s Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point<\/a>. Check back tomorrow for her second installment.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DAY ONE What better way to launch this diary than with a little detour, en route to meet some friends, along the street of pianos? I love the Sunday morning silence of this short stretch of West 58th Street between Broadway and Seventh Avenue: all those Steinways, Bechsteins, and Bosendorfers asleep inside their showrooms. Outside […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":143,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[1617,2027,2029,2030,46,125,2028],"class_list":["post-13286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-culture-diaries","tag-culture-diary","tag-elizabeth-d-samet","tag-hbo","tag-joan-crawford","tag-music","tag-new-york-city","tag-piano"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Week in Culture: Elizabeth Samet, Professor and Writer by Elizabeth Samet<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 23, 2011 \u2013 DAY ONE What better way to launch this diary than with a little detour, en route to meet some friends, along the street of pianos? 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