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January 25, 2004

TT: Emptying the mailbag

Here are some of the many interesting pieces of e-mail I've received in recent weeks:

  • Did you ever stop to think about the line you wrote regarding a lack of modernist impact on the little heartland town? Maybe there is something purposeful in the lack of appreciation for most of the high art of the twentieth century. Modernism has little to say to the folks who, like me, choose to live in the great dead heart of America. We are not politically or artistically correct. You came (apparently) from small-town roots and were always drawn to high culture. Nothing wrong with that but it is not the only world. You went to NY and are our representative to that town I refer to as "east of the Hudson." Your sensibilities are more complex than most of the folks whose voices are important on that $24-dollar hunk of rock. But there are only a few of us out here who care much at all about what is current in NYC. Manhattan is very, very inbred, by our standards and while we read the NYT and the WSJ, both of which are now delivered every morning to our mailboxes. But our daily lives are not very much impacted.

  • I saw Casablanca for the first time in the big auditorium at college, on one of those ratty screens that aren't quite large enough to be a real screen but are still bigger than a filmstrip screen in a classroom. It was part of the Student Union's film series (which was shown in University Hall -- logic? at my university? riiiiight). Most of the time they showed current or near-current films (Wayne's World, The Freshman) but one quarter they did old movies. I loved Casablanca deeply. After years of oppressive jokes by the Baby Boomers about films I'd never seen but was still supposed to worship, I honestly was sure it must suck. Instead it felt so fresh and nasty and cynical and romantic that it might have been written just yesterday, for me. I bought my mom the DVD for Christmas, but really, I wanted it for myself. (But I gave myself Firefly and a great deal of anime, so don't feel too sorry....) I do plan to convert my cousins. Soon.

  • I'm 28, and I first saw "Casablanca" on the big screen; my college showed it as a part of its campus film series. (It screened on Valentine's Day, appropriately enough, and caused great distress among my group of girlfriends, as we had neither Ricks nor Victors in our lives that year.) The film program typically showed more recent films, but periodically it would screen classics, and those screenings were a wonderful opportunity to see these films the way they were meant to be seen.

  • You wrote: "Not for the first time, I wondered why no painter has ever taken for his subject what one sees from the window of an airplane." And I refer you to this.

  • I think your New York location is skewing your thoughts a bit on regional orchestras. I live in Portland, OR, home of the Oregon Symphony, one of the orchestras mentioned in your piece. Portland is also home to the Portland Art Museum, a passable regional museum with a decent permanent collection and plenty of traveling shows. I think that the experience of seeing classical music performed live is quite different than that of listening to a CD. I can buy books with many great paintings from Amazon.com as well, but is that the same as seeing the original? I can watch ballet on TV-- same thing. Experiencing even a mediocre performance of an old standard is something that still captures me, but maybe that's my small town roots. The symphony also gives us rubes the opportunity to see a variety of soloists we would not otherwise see, many world-class. In New York, you have an abundance of culture. Portland is really not bad given it's size, but losing the symphony would be a blow. Furthermore, there is considerable synergy between various arts organizations. For instance, the principal percussionist for the Oregon Symphony is also the music director for the Portland Opera (or is it the ballet? I forget, but you get the point).

  • I also thought TWILIGHT was wonderful, for the same reason that I love the Lew Archer novels; it puzzles me why you don't share that enthusiasm (as I recall from your review of a Ross MacDonald biography a couple of years back). Like the Archer stories, TWILIGHT transmutes the smartass patter of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade into a more realistic look at an aging outsider. And also like them, TWILIGHT's murderer, when uncovered, seems sadly inevitable, a convincing portrait of tragic choices made - rather than the Sidney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre monsters of more black-and-white private eye adventures (not that I don't also love THE MALTESE FALCON, understand, but this is more interestingly complex in some ways).

  • You say that the Boetticher/Scott Ranown Westerns "never even turn up on TV" but they actually have aired on Turner Classic Movies and fairly frequently over the past couple of years. I'm a freelance writer/researcher for TCM (in fact I wrote the Boetticher obit on the website, along with a bunch of other stuff such as DVD reviews) and have done work on these. I think TCM may have even shown the entire cycle but could be wrong about that because I don't remember Decision at Sundown, a particular favorite because it's so disillusioned (even ending with a cowboy riding off into the sunset though in probably the least heroic manner imaginable).

  • You know, I think you'd make your life a lot easier with respect to reviews if you lowered your standards a bit. Take a look at this.

  • I was reading your new post about Zankel Hall, and I figured I'd toss in a data point about the issue of subway noise. I just saw a classical concert there (Pierre-Laurent Aimard playing Messaien's Vingt Regards; fantastic performance, incidentally). I found the subway to be audible, but not particularly obtrusive, especially because as the concert went on and I got used to it going by. I should mention that this was only during relatively quiet sections; during louder passages (of which there were quite a few), the subway noise was pretty much masked by the music.

  • We have coffee together each morning -- like it or not. I may be a bit quieter than you and a bit farther from civilization, but I have that odd sense that we've struck up a friendship. You don't seem to listen to me when I pound the desk and say that you've lost your mind about something, but that's a rare occasion, anyway, and I'm willing to forgive. I'm out here, just beyond where god parks his bicycle in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and I enjoy your blog tremendously. My wife (who never reads blogs) thinks I've become something of an authority on all sorts of things because I steal liberally and give credit rather stingily.

    Steal at will! And thanks to you all for writing.

    Posted January 25, 2004 2:38 AM

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