« TT: Entries from an unkept diary | Main | TT: Up to the nanosecond »
April 26, 2005
TT: Elsewhere
Time once again to upend the bag and pour out a pile of v. cool and/or amusing links.- Michael Blowhard on the mysterious profession:
Actors generally don't know who they really are. They find a center only when they pour themselves into the container of a "character"; they become most fully who they are when they turn themselves into someone else. Actors are often charming and gifted creatures, but they'll drive you crazy too. An actress might say one thing at 8 a.m. and then say something completely contradictory at 4 p.m. She wouldn't be bothered by this because in both cases she's been true to her feelings of the moment--and because being "true to the moment," whatever it happens to be, is what being an actor is all about. Men in romantic relationships with actresses often find these women a terrific turn-on--the passion! The excitement! The responsiveness! Yet the men often spend a lot of time scratching their heads in bewilderment too, wondering if anyone's truly home....
This has not been my experience with actors, but I know plenty of people who beg to differ. Maybe I've just been lucky. (Or not.)
- Mr. Alicublog finally catches up with Sideways (what kept him?), and has some objections mixed with praise:
So what's good? Mostly stuff that (forgive me) ripens over the course of the film. The dramaturgy is wicked smart. For example, throughout most of Sideways I wondered, what do these two guys see in each other? They spend most of the movie savagely attacking each other's actions and motivations. Good friends may do that, of course, but underneath it all you expect to see traces at least of the ties that bind.
Payne was subtle about this--maybe over-subtle. The big clues came late: the attack at the golf course, and especially Miles' reclamation of Jack's wallet. After these the rest of their relationship, and the whole movie, made more sense. Jack may seem like a heedless horndog and Miles a volatile lush, but each has a strain of madness that the other can enjoy, if only because it's different and thereby more exciting to him than his own....
- Mr. Thinking About Art has had it up to here, or maybe there, with theory:
What in the world does it add to the art viewing experience of 99.9% of the general public? Not much, I think. Certainly there is a place for theory in our academic institutions and surely contextualizing art among all the various -ism's is valuable. But Jerry Saltz's piece blasting Damien Hirst is a perfect example of why theory in art criticism and reviews in mostly useless. Give me Saltz's 885 words without theory any day of the week. Saltz's article actually means something to me. I can feel his experience of Hirst's work. I can connect to his opinion. I can sense Saltz's emotional response to the work.
Anyone can learn art theory if they wish. I'd venture a guess that if you took 100 art historians and asked them to write a theory-based critique of Hirst's show, you'd get 100 very similar writing samples. It's not unique like economic theory isn't unique. We can all learn it. For me, econometrics is much more exciting and insightful. You can use some theory and techniques, but without some creativity and a personal approach, you'll get stale results. Art for me is the same way and it's why I write my reviews from a personal, opinionated viewpoint. Some may say, "We've all got opinions!" And my response would be, "That's the point!" We don't all have knowledge of theory....
- Guess who?
Confession time: We've never been able to finish, or even get half of the way through, a novel by Saul Bellow. Maybe it's the language, which seems a bit overdone to us. Maybe it's how discursive and repetitive the books are. Maybe the alleged revolution that he brought to the writing of the American novel has already been so thoroughly absorbed that we're unable to appreciate how groundbreaking it truly is. In any event, we're prepared to admit that the fault must lie with us: Enough of the people we admire and respect claim him as a genius; perhaps he's the sort of writer that demands more attention be paid than our usual reading style (naked on the couch, a flask of bourbon at our side, Motorhead's Orgasmatron blasting from the hi-fi) allows....
- Admirers (and non-admirers) of Truman Capote will have a field day with the Lawrence Journal-World's elaborate package of freshly reported stories commemorating the 40th anniversary of the publication of In Cold Blood. Here's the beauty part: they were all written by college students. Print-media journalism may not be dead after all....
- Supermaud stumbles across a copy of another of my beloved books, the Viking Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I wonder why it went out of print?)
- "Heather," the semi-anonymous California pianist who blogs at in the wings, one of my current faves, describes what it feels like to turn pages for another pianist:
The requirements for this duty are straightforward enough: make yourself invisible, make sure you never turn too early or too late, make sure you never turn two pages at once, make sure to turn back pages when repeats are taken, and make sure to turn ahead to codas. Considering how long I've been reading music, page turning ought to allow me the lucky opportunity to study the pianist's technique, from fingering to pedaling to words muttered under the breath, but really, my levels of attention and perception rise near to performance level when I take that seat. And damn but I forgot how fast the second and fourth movements of Fauré's C minor piano quartet move! Stand up. Reach across. Flip. Sit down. Stand up. Reach across. Whew!...
BTDT, Heather. Way.
- Speaking of pianists, Michael Kimmelman, an amateur pianist who has also been known to write about art, has an essay about William Kapell in The New York Review of Books that's a must:
Was there any greater American pianist born during the last century than Kapell? Perhaps not. Certainly he was the most famous American-born player until Van Cliburn. He was a jukebox star during the 1940s, thanks to his performance of Khachaturian's Piano Concerto, a noisy showpiece that Kapell came to resent, in the way that Rachmaninoff came to loathe his own Prelude in C-sharp Minor.
He was also a stereotype of a native New Yorker: bright, brash, tactless, competitive, funny, cocky, and thin-skinned. He could be exceptionally generous and also nasty. He was a nervous, obsessive person--and meticulous (he kept a diary to record, down to the minute, how long he practiced each piece, toting up the numbers month after month)....
- Oh, just in case you were wondering, the Mozart Effect is a fraud.
- Needless to say, quite a few people have sent me this (which doesn't make it any less funny).
- Greg Sandow, my fellow artsjournal.com blogger, talks sense:
You can't blame people as individuals for not liking the music you think they should like. Or at least you can't blame them without understanding why they feel the way they do. This becomes quite a conundrum, I think, because abstract expressionist painters (whose style might be more or less analogous to atonal modernist music) have a much easier time with the public. People like their work. As I've mentioned many times in many contexts, there were lines around the block when MoMA had a Jackson Pollock show. So why doesn't music work that way?...
- Tobi Tobias, another artsjournal.com colleague, offers a close reading of Rock of Ages, Mark Morris' new dance, that leaves me with nothing more to say (which puts me in a hell of a spot, since I have to say something about it later today!). Here's a snippet:
This year, the Mark Morris Dance Group brought no brand-new, grand-slam work to its annual season at BAM. The sole novelty was a piece that had its premiere last fall, way west, in Berkeley, California. But it's a honey. Rock of Ages, set to the adagio movement of Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat, is a small, quiet dance that, like meditative deep breathing, expands the consciousness until it seems to reach the deepest feelings and an ever-widening understanding of how the world works.
Its population of four, plainly dressed, enters one by one from the four corners of the stage, briefly converges at the center of the space, then moves on (though a pair pauses briefly, side by side), each person simply continuing along the diagonal path prescribed by his or her first step. The ending reiterates this action, which is clearly the simple message of the dance: We exist alone; we meet when we occupy a common space; we interact in passing, our identity left essentially unaltered; we part-because it is only natural that we should....
- In related news, Maccers makes a major dance-related discovery:
Anyway, someone please remind me next time I am plugging in credit card numbers into websites that I don't like the story form of dance. I like abstract. And short skirts. Let me see the legs.
Me, too, mostly, except when otherwise.
- Spam, spam, spam:
Sender: Alrick.M.Bwalugari
Recipient: benedictxvi@vatican.va
RE: I NEED YOUR URGENT ASSISTANCE PLEASEDear Mr. XVI,
I am Alrick Mohammed Bwalugari, the son of the late Nigerian Los Angeles Head of Sacristans who died on the 6th of June 1999 while in active services. Following the sudden death of my father, Usher Bullem Shitika, the present Diocean Government has thrown my family and I into a state of utter confusion, frustration, and hopelessness, much like the state your detractors are in. I have been subjected to inhuman physical and physiological torture, like being forced to listen to the Protestant hymns and hippy folk tunes and being forced to view liturgical dancing girls....
- Finally, here's a truly great time-waster. Warning: I soooo defy you to blow less than five minutes on it....
Posted April 26, 2005 12:02 PM
