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August 31, 2005

TT: All in

Hurricane Katrina bumped into my end-of-the-month deadline glut, meaning that I had to stay up all last night writing--a Commentary essay from midnight to seven, my Friday Wall Street Journal drama column from seven to ten. John Pancake, my editor at the Washington Post, was able to give me a one-day extension for this Sunday's "Second City" column, which I'll write in the morning.

For the moment, though, I'm cross-eyed and sleep-deprived, so I'm not even going to try to blog. Our Girl, bless her, has taken over our "Live from Katrina" page, which continues to draw heavy traffic. Me, I'm going to post some pre-written items, then crawl into my loft and seek a bit of oblivion.

See you later.

Posted August 31, 12:04 PM

TT: Down the road

Up and coming on my calendar:

- SEPTEMBER 20-25: The Bad Plus performs at the Village Vanguard

- SEPTEMBER 25: The Mint Theater presents the world premiere of Walking Down Broadway, an unproduced 1931 play by Dawn Powell

- OCTOBER 11: Street date of the DVD of Me and You and Everyone We Know (MGM)

Posted August 31, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Commissioning fee paid to William Walton by Jascha Heifetz in 1939 for Walton's B Minor Violin Concerto, including two years' worth of exclusive performance rights: $1,493.00

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $19,589.35

(Source: Michael Kennedy, Portrait of Walton)

Posted August 31, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Merely having an open mind is nothing. The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid. To open the mind so wide as to keep nothing in it or out of it is not a virtue; it is the vice of the feeble-minded."

G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

Posted August 31, 12:01 PM

TT: A European perspective on Katrina

A reader from Norway writes:

I just want you to know that I'm one of the many people who are deeply grateful for your list of Katrina blogs. CNN Europe was very good on the tsunami, but has been maddeningly lame on Katrina. The crucial test, which they failed ignominiously, was the unexpected levee breaches. After the hurricane had passed, they went into automatic day-after-the-hurricane mode, serving up the same brief, standard, "well, now it's time for the big clean-up" report every half-hour for hours. During the same hours, I was reading on Brendan Loy's weblog and other weblogs about the breach in the first levee and the rising waters in New Orleans. Literally hours went by before CNN Europe picked up on this story, and while Brendan Loy understood the significance of it immediately, CNN Europe reported on it in a perfunctory manner, apparently unable to switch gears quickly because this new development just didn't fit their script. Incredibly, long after Loy had begun reporting on the rising waters in New Orleans, CNN Europe was still broadcasting the same fatuous day-after-the-hurricane report (including an interview with a French Quarter merchant who was happy that his business had survived intact), the thrust of which was that N.O., thank goodness, had been spared the worst of the storm.

BBC World was even more hopeless. I've also read articles at the New York Times, Times-Picayune, and other MSM websites, some of them very good. But overall, the MSM coverage seems incredibly thin compared to the rich tapestry of information provided by the weblogs you've linked to (including readers' comments). It certainly is a new age in media, and nothing has proven this more surely than the Katrina story.

Another point. Weirdly, while the tsunami was a major topic of conversation here in Norway for days, nobody seems to be talking about the devastation in New Orleans. I brought it up yesterday while having drinks with a bunch of friends, and they seemed barely aware of the story and didn't seem to find it interesting or important. They were far more interested in discussing the upcoming Norwegian elections.

We'd be interested in hearing from other readers outside the United States on this topic....

Posted August 31, 10:36 AM

August 30, 2005

OGIC: The beat goes on

Two notable follow-ups to last week's overpuffed movie post have rolled in. One fills out the story of the time Carmela Soprano met Charles Foster Kane:

Belatedly read your over-praised movie post in which you cite the Citizen Kane scene from The Sopranos. Carmela hasn't chosen Kane randomly--the film club she has set up is going to go through the AFI 100 Greatest Movies list in order. Which, of course, sets up a great gag in a following episode, when the girls are back together and can't watch #2, Casablanca, because Tony has taken the AV equipment. Carmela says that she "didn't feel like watching Casablanca anyway" and someone asks what the next movie on the list is. Janice picks up the piece of paper to read, "The Godfather." The looks on their faces are priceless.

I'd forgotten the exact circumstances, which much improve the vignette. Thanks to Tosy and Cosh for the rest of the story.

Regarding The Natural, a reader conveys a terrific anecdote from a Michael Farber story in this week's Sports Illustrated:

Tim Hudson said of [Braves rookie outfielder Jeff] Francoeur, "He's like Roy Hobbs. I'm wainting for him to come out of the bullpen and start striking guys out, throwing 98 [mph]. Or to start hitting bombs lefthanded." Francoeur was born the year The Natural hit theaters, but he knows Hudson's reference is to the guy who goes light-tower at the end of the film. Told that in Bernard Malamud's novel the tragic Hobbs strikes out, the rookie laughs and booms, "That's why books suck!"

And that's why I'm no athlete!

Posted August 30, 12:56 PM

TT: A very bloggy story

In light of the continuing crisis in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast, we've decided to resume updating of "Live from Katrina," our list of stormblogs and other useful links. To see it, go here.

* * *

A funny thing happened on the way to my writing what was supposed to have been today's lead posting: I ended up spending half of Sunday and all of Monday creating and maintaining what appears to have been the Web's most comprehensive list of bloggers who were reporting from the scene on Hurricane Katrina.

Needless to say, that had less than nothing to do with the mission statement of "About Last Night," but I did it anyway, and thereby hangs a tale.

Like many, perhaps most Americans, I didn't realize until Sunday afternoon that a Category Five hurricane was headed for New Orleans. I'd spent the whole morning writing a long, involved posting about how I'd become disillusioned with the new Museum of Modern Art. I came up for air, turned on the TV, and discovered to my astonishment that the city about which I'd been writing for the past few months (I'm working on a biography of Louis Armstrong) was at high risk of being blown into the Gulf of Mexico.

Being a blogger, my snap reaction was to head for my iBook and find out what was what. I quickly discovered that lots and lots of people were posting on Hurricane Katrina. But while most of their postings included links to other blogs, no one had thought to assemble a one-stop list of stormblogs and other relevant sites. After bookmarking a few of the best ones, I got the idea to throw together an "About Last Night" posting called "Live from Katrina." The first version, as I recall, contained links to a half-dozen blogs, most of which made mention of one or two other bloggers. I checked out every link I ran across and, when appropriate, added it to my original posting. Within an hour or two, other bloggers, including Jeff Jarvis, were linking to my list, which by then included a number of other informational sites. At that point it occurred to me to send an e-mail to Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit suggesting that he take a look at what I'd done. He linked to it a minute or two later, and the hits started pouring in.

That was when the Web began to work its own mysterious, self-sustaining magic. Stormblogs I didn't yet know about started turning up in my referral log courtesy of the Instapundit link, and I in turn transferred them to my new blogroll, adding other useful links as I discovered them. By the time I went to bed at three-thirty that morning, I realized that my informal little list had turned into a potentially significant resource.

I awoke without benefit of alarm at seven and set to refining my list, indicating which blogs had been updated most recently and posting excerpts from the best ones. Within an hour or two I had created what was for all intents and purposes a manually operated aggregator page of Katrina-related sites. I was supposed to deliver a piece to Commentary at noon that day, but by mid-morning several other high-traffic pages, including MSNBC's Clicked, National Review's The Corner, and The Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web, had linked to "Live from Katrina." I felt I ought to keep on doing what I was doing, so I sent an e-mail to Neal Kozodoy, the editor of Commentary, asking him if he could extend my deadline for a day. He agreed on the spot, and I spent the rest of Monday updating "Live from Katrina" more or less continuously.

By midday Slate's Today's Blogs page had caught up with me:

"Katrina has been downgraded still further to a Category Two storm--that is, disastrous but not apocalyptic," reports converted arts and culture blogger Terry Teachout in a link-stuffed post at About Last Night. "The eye of the storm is now moving across Mississippi to Alabama. New Orleans has already been hit hard, and flood damage appears to be extensive. ... CNN is carrying eyewitness reports of looting. Large pieces of the roof of the Superdome roof, the 'shelter of last resort' for nine thousand stranded locals and tourists, were peeled away by high winds, but the damage was superficial, not structural."

The funny thing was that I hadn't really converted. In addition to "Live from Katrina," Monday's "About Last Night" also included its usual quota of art-related postings, including my MoMA rant and Our Girl's report on a gig by Erin McKeown, all of which were pulling in the usual quota of Monday-morning traffic. It was as if two different blogs--a stormblog and an artblog--were simultaneously inhabiting the same body, and doing so without any apparent conflict.

As Hurricane Katrina finally slowed down and Monday shuddered to a close, I stopped updating "Live from Katrina" and started thinking about the implications of what I'd been doing for the past two days. On the one hand, nothing could have been less typical of "About Last Night" than for me to have thrown myself head first into so unlikely an undertaking. Yet at the same time, nothing could be more characteristic of the new world of new media. One of the most distinctive properies of blogs, after all, is that they are instantly and infinitely malleable at the whim of the blogger. "About Last Night" is about art because Our Girl in Chicago and I want it to be about art. If we decided at noon tomorrow that it would henceforth be about hockey, or smoked salmon, there'd be nothing to stop us from changing course at 12:01. Instead, we decided to make a one-day detour into citizen journalism, and the blogosphere promptly sat up and took notice.

Don't get me wrong. I love newspapers. If I didn't, I wouldn't pour so much of my energy into them. I hope I spend the rest of my life writing for them. But what happened to this blog two days ago is a dramatic demonstration of the two most important properties of the new media: independence and immediacy. I doubt that any print-media editor, however savvy or enlightened, would have let me do what I did with "About Last Night" on Sunday afternoon. I would have had to talk a half-dozen suits into letting me tear up my job description for a day, and by the time I'd finally talked them around (assuming I succeeded in doing so, which probably wouldn't have happened), it would have been too late to bother. As a blogger, I didn't have to talk anyone into letting me do what I wanted--I just did it, with Our Girl's enthusiastic blessing.

Am I glad to get back to artblogging? You bet. I'm beat to the socks.

Am I glad I took a day off from artblogging to try and do some good? Absolutely.

Am I glad I'm a blogger? A hundred thousand times yes.

And now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a deadline to hit....

UPDATE: Here are a couple of messages I found in my e-mailbox when the smoke finally cleared:

- "You've really outdone yourself with your compendium of Hurricane Katrina links. What a fantastic effort--I can't believe every news site hasn't done something similar (but they haven't). And then to read that you're doing this even though you've never been to New Orleans--well, my jaw dropped."

- "I appreciate your posting the list. My family all lives in New Orleans (they're in Alabama at the moment) and no one can even get near their neighborhoods to see how things are going. I can't look at any more photos--New Orleans looks like postwar Berlin in A Foreign Affair--but I like reading the blogs to see how people are doing. Thanks again."

Letters like that make it all worthwhile.

Posted August 30, 12:05 PM

TT: Try it (the first in an occasional series)

Most people know Aaron Copland's Rodeo and Billy the Kid (as well they should--they're perfectly wonderful pieces, popular in the best possible way). Surprisingly few concertgoers, though, are familiar with the abstract instrumental pieces of Copland's middle years, which are "abstract" only in the sense that they weren't written to accompany ballets. In fact, you'll find in them the same sweetly austere harmonies and long, leaping arches of melody that make Copland's music so immediately distinctive and quintessentially American in sound and style.

I recommend the Violin Sonata of 1943, which Isaac Stern recorded in 1968 with Copland himself at the piano (he was a fine pianist, crisp and unmannered). It doesn't get played much in concert, and I don't know why, because it's extraordinarily beautiful, from the gentle open-prairie lyricism of the first movement to the stomping vigor of the finale. Maybe it isn't flashy enough for your typical hot-shot virtuoso. All I know is that the Copland Violin Sonata never fails to bring tears to my eyes.

Posted August 30, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Jerome Robbins' royalty in 1944 for each performance by Ballet Theatre of Fancy Free, his first ballet: $10

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $106.83

(Source: Deborah Jowitt, Jerome Robbins)

Posted August 30, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

I'll go my way by myself, this is the end of romance.
I'll go my way by myself, love is only a dance.
I'll try to apply myself and teach my heart to sing.
I'll go my way by myself like a bird on the wing,
I'll face the unknown, I'll build a world of my own;
No one knows better than I, myself, I'm by myself alone.

Howard Dietz, "By Myself" (music by Arthur Schwartz)

Posted August 30, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Welcome to the mise en scene

Don't know if anyone else caught the highly ridiculous yet entertaining premiere of Prison Break tonight--don't look at me, I was diligently working on my review that's due later this week!--but if nothing else it was notable for what I believe must be the first prominent use of Chicago's Millennium Park as a dramatic backdrop. And a good use it was, too--I'm told--capitalizing on the Crown Fountain's big, spitting images for their creepy panoptical quality. Perhaps the next episode will treat us to some Bean action; there's a star in the making if I ever saw one. (If you want to catch up, tonight's premiere airs again Thursday at 7:00 pm Bean Daylight Time, 8:00 Eastern.)

Posted August 30, 1:15 AM

August 29, 2005

TT: Footnote

Shepard Smith of Fox News was on Bourbon Street late Sunday afternoon, carrying a cell phone and watching the diehards party. He ran into one man who was walking his dogs.

"What are you still doing here?" he asked the man incredulously.

"None of your ------- business," the man answered.

I wonder where that guy is now?

Posted August 29, 12:06 PM

OGIC: Rapid fire

A few brief notes from a harried blogger:

- Last night's Erin McKeown show at Schuba's was a blast whose double aftereffect I'm still feeling: I'm still all charged up from it and at the same time rather crestfallen that it's over. This show was quite different from her appearance last year on the same stage--as one of my companions put it, the brainy chanteuse of Distillation and Grand gave way to the brainy rocker of We Will Become Like Birds for this one--but no less exhilarating. McKeown played almost everything from the new album, recast some old favorites in new tempos, and generally poured her heart out all over the stage. This was not surprising, but the opening act was: Chicago-based folk singer and guitarist Rachel Ries was just captivating with her melodious waterfall of a voice and a very disarming stage presence. Her brand-new album is available here.

- Hooray--as promised, the Chicago Reader recently beefed up its on-line presence, adding features, reviews, and in fact all content to its website, here. The current issue of the free Chicago weekly notably contains a short story by local writer Kevin Guilfoile, of Coudal Partners and Cast of Shadows fame, that comes from a new anthology of Chicago Noir fiction. It's available as a PDF.

- Memo to Random House production: If you must divide "Mussoliniesque"--especially at a page break--the only acceptable division is "Mussolini-esque." Truly.

Posted August 29, 12:05 PM

TT: One big blockbuster

"So, what did you do all afternoon?" my friend Allie asked as we settled into our seats to see Junebug.

"I went to MoMA," I told her.

"And did you enjoy yourself?"

I hesitated, still reluctant to commit myself definitively to the unwelcome truth.

"No," I finally said. "I didn't enjoy myself at all. I don't think the new MoMA is a very good place to look at art. It's like a mall, not a museum. A great big supermall."

She nodded. "That's just how I feel," she replied.

It wasn't until last Friday afternoon that I was willing at last to admit what I'd suspected all along: I simply don't like the much-ballyhooed new Museum of Modern Art, which I saw for the first time just before it opened to the public last November. My first impressions had been sharply mixed, but I did my best to side with the strengths of the new building, knowing that such impressions are almost always deceptive. I went back a month later, and since then I'd stayed away, wanting to give the curators a chance to find their footing before I rendered anything like a final judgment.

Sure enough, some things have changed since the new MoMA opened its doors, and one of them is genuinely encouraging. The museum's great Monet "Water Lilies" triptych, which had been hanging in a multi-story atrium across from Barnett Newman's monstrous Broken Obelisk, has now been moved to a small side gallery which it shares with two other late Monets and a pair of large paintings by Bonnard and Vuillard, a modest but nonetheless welcome gesture to civility.

Otherwise, the MoMA I saw on Friday is basically the same MoMA I saw last November, with the same ineradicable problems that were immediately apparent to me (and many others) on first viewing. The exaggerated scale of the building swamps the art it contains, and the austere décor is so rigidly uniform in its self-conscious simplicity as to make the museum seem even bigger than it is. As if to compensate--which it doesn't--most of the galleries are as overstuffed with paintings as they are overcrowded with people, making it impossible to concentrate on any one work with anything remotely approaching ease. And while I'm hardly the first person to remark on the mall-like character of the new MoMA, I found it even more oppressive this time around. I came away feeling that visitors were intended not to commune with the art on the walls but to pass by it briskly on the way from the food court to the museum store, sped on their hasty way by the endless banks of escalators that in retrospect strike me as the building's most memorable feature.

Size alone does not make a museum oppressive. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is big, too, but the varied character of its public spaces makes it feel far more compact than it is, like an ensemble of smaller museums that happen to share the same building. You can spend an hour or two in the American wing, for instance, and go home satisfied, knowing that you can always return another day to look at the Vermeers. Not so MoMA, whose architecture and décor are all, all of a piece throughout, making it look less like One Big Museum than One Big Blockbuster, "Modernism: A History," a fist-sized pill that must be swallowed in a single desperate gulp or not at all.

Needless to say, it doesn't help that the curators of MoMA long ago imposed on their collection an ideological unanimity that is precisely mirrored in the building's unanimity of style. The Gospel According to MoMA is so well known by now that one thinks of it as a single portmanteau word: Cézannepicassosurrealismabexminimalismpop. That which fits neatly into the museum's official "narrative" is exhibited in depth, sometimes counterproductively so. (The Mondrian gallery is a case in point.) That which fails to fit is either ignored or condescendingly shunted off to one side, as in the now-notorious case of the stairwell to which Milton Avery's Sea Grasses and Blue Sea and a gorgeous pair of abstractions by Richard Diebenkorn have been relegated.

MoMA's idiosyncratic version of the complex story of modernism has been criticized innumerable times, by me among others:

In the old MoMA, prewar American modernists were all but ignored, except for the ones whose work either related to European surrealism (Joseph Cornell) or prefigured abstract expressionism (Milton Avery). Nor were such postwar representationalists as Fairfield Porter given the time of day. Alas, nothing has changed....

The fact that the old MoMA was too small to exhibit more than a fraction of its vast holdings made me wonder whether the new MoMA might possibly be planning to rethink its cramped view of American art before 1945. No such luck. At least for now, Elderfield & Co. haven't even tried.

They still haven't. On Friday I looked into the photography galleries, and saw on one wall a deft juxtaposition: Irving Penn's 1947 dual portrait of H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan hangs side by side with his 1948 study of John Marin, one of America's greatest prewar modern painters. Might this have been a donnish stroke of curatorial wit? Mencken, after all, was violently hostile to modernism in most of its manifestations, as I explained in The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken:

Mencken may not have been the most qualified of observers of the American scene, but he had certainly spent more than enough time in New York City to have some awareness of what was going on there in 1924. The problem was his own lack of curiosity. It is impossible to imagine him dropping by Carnegie Hall for the premiere of Aaron Copland's Organ Symphony, strolling into Alfred Stieglitz's exhibition of the latest watercolors by John Marin, or even paying a visit to the Casino Theatre to see the Marx Brothers in I'll Say She Is. While it is too easy simply to say that he was as much of a philistine as the philistines whose ignorance he loved to denounce, it is not altogether untrue.

Alas, the effect of this clever juxtaposition was greatly diminished by the fact that there was not a single painting, watercolor, or etching by Marin hanging anywhere in the Museum of Modern Art last Friday. There is more than one way to be a philistine.

The vastly increased size of the new MoMA makes its curatorial philosophy seem even more confining in retrospect. The larger MoMA's vision of modernism is writ, the less convincing it looks, especially in light of the contextual separation imposed by the fact that MoMA is a museum of modern art. To visit a medium-sized encyclopedic collection like that of, say, the old Cleveland Museum of Art, where modernism was presented not as an isolated phenomenon but as part of the larger story of Western art--and where, no less importantly, the works of modern art on display were chosen in a brilliantly discriminating way--is a very different experience, as I was reminded when I visited Cleveland last September:

Instead of collecting in depth, Cleveland's curators, like their counterparts at Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum, opted for quality over quantity, and time and again they hit the bull's-eye. When I visited the abstract expressionist gallery last Tuesday, for instance, it contained paintings by William Baziotes, Arshile Gorky, Philip Guston, Hans Hofmann, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko, sculptures by David Smith and Isamu Noguchi, an Alexander Calder mobile, and a Joseph Cornell box--the whole history of abstract expressionism summed up in fourteen objects, all on display in a single room. Except for the Krasner, each one was of the highest possible quality. The whole museum is like that, more or less.

Next to so civilized a place, or the similarly civilized Phillips Collection, the new MoMA starts to look less like a truly great museum and more like the monomaniacally excessive Barnes Foundation. As I wrote back in June after my first visit to the Barnes:

Not coincidentally, seeing the Barnes for the first time redoubled my appreciation of the Phillips. While Albert Barnes and Duncan Phillips were both great art collectors whose underlying sensibilities were very similar, Barnes was both obsessive and provincial in a way that Phillips was not. Phillips spent a lifetime cultivating his eye and mind by engaging with the ideas of others; Barnes seems to have listened only to himself, eventually going so far as to create a closed system of aesthetics whose sole purpose was to justify his own prejudices...

There can be, of course, no doing without the Museum of Modern Art, if only because it is the home of so many beloved and essential works of art, and because it not infrequently contrives to present them, and others of similar quality, in memorable ways. I can't count the hours I've spent looking at its exhibitions, nor can I even begin to estimate the pleasure and profit I've derived from them. That's why I used to love MoMA, disagree though I always did with its inflexible point of view. No more. I know I haven't paid my last visit there--but I also know that we shall never be again as we were.

UPDATE: Says Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes:

It is fair to ask if museums can be lovable once they hit the 120,000-square foot mark.

It sure is.

Posted August 29, 12:05 PM

TT: Half a list

For reasons I can't yet reveal, I just had occasion to draw up a list of my fifteen favorite American movies of the past seven years. I'll share it with you when the time comes, but for the moment I've decided to post a teaser--the twenty runners-up.

In alphabetical order, they were:

About Schmidt
Being John Malkovich
The Cooler
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Garden State
Guinevere
The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou
Lilo & Stitch
The Limey
Lovely and Amazing
Magnolia
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
Me and You and Everyone We Know
Pi
The Secret Lives of Dentists
Sideways
Sunshine State
The Tao of Steve
The Whole Nine Yards
Three Kings

Watch this space for the winners....

Posted August 29, 12:04 PM

TT: Rerun

February 2004:

Without exception, my friends are puzzled by my more than occasional practice of reading biographies from back to front. It puzzles me, too, even though I've been doing it for years, and I can't offer any explanation, however theoretical, for a habit that at first, second, and third glances makes no sense. All I can tell you is that for some reason not yet accessible to introspection, I often prefer to read about a person's life in reverse chronological order, starting with his death and working backwards to his birth....

(If it's new to you, read the whole thing here.)

Posted August 29, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Price of the first oil painting ever sold by Milton Avery, purchased by the violinist Louis Kaufman in 1926: $25

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $264.16

(Source: Louis Kaufman, A Fiddler's Tale )

Posted August 29, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Robert Frost, "Design" (courtesy of Rick Brookhiser)

Posted August 29, 12:01 PM

August 26, 2005

TT: Snapshots from the Fringe

I reported on this year's New York International Fringe Festival (which runs through Sunday) in today's Wall Street Journal drama column. The most talked-about show I saw was Bridezilla Strikes Back!:

For those who don't keep up with reality TV, "Bridezillas" is the series that follows a group of increasingly demented brides-to-be as they plan their Must...Be...Perfect Weddings. Cynthia Silver, now a faculty member at New York's Atlantic Theater Company, was approached to take part in the first season and jumped at the chance for network TV exposure, taking for granted that it was a straight documentary and not realizing that the producers would edit the cinema-verité footage to make their subjects look as bitchy and neurotic as possible. Co-written with Kenny Finkle, "Bridezilla Strikes Back!" is the story of how she descended into the double-barreled maelstrom of a wedding and a hit TV show and emerged sadder but wiser.

I assumed Ms. Silver would tell her tale with the wised-up detachment of a media-savvy Manhattanite, but the tone of "Bridezilla Strikes Back!"--frankly confessional, rough around the emotional edges, unexpectedly poignant--is nothing like what I'd expected...

No link, so to read more about this and the four other Fringe Festival I reviewed, buy a copy of today's Journal. (Alternatively, go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, where you can read me every week and lots of other good stuff every day.)

Posted August 26, 12:05 PM

TT: Maintenance man

I spent an idle hour (yes, I do have them from time to time, every month or two) trolling through "Sites to See," our blogroll. I added several new blogs and sites that caught my eye in recent weeks, as well as dropping a few old ones that had become inactive or tedious. Our Girl, who writes the blogreviews that appear from time to time in the Top Five module, is doing the same. Our goal, as always, is to make "Sites to See" as useful to you as possible, so if you run across a new or little-known blog that you think we might like, drop us an e-mail.

New blogs and sites are marked with an asterisk. Give them a look--along with any of the old blogs and sites you've yet to visit. In the twenty-first century, the 'sphere is the place to be.

Posted August 26, 12:04 PM

TT: My all-time favorite verse from a rock song

I'm Lester the Nightfly
Hello Baton Rouge
Won't you turn your radio down
Respect the seven second delay we use

So you say there's a race
Of men in the trees
You're for tough legislation
Thanks for calling
I wait all night for calls like these

Donald Fagen, "The Nightfly"

Posted August 26, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- H.L. Mencken's weekly salary in 1899 for his first job as a Baltimore newspaper reporter: $8

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $177.24

(Source: Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken)

Posted August 26, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

To avoid the clichés
Of the obituary writers,
Die in obscurity.
A fine bed in a light-filled room
Someone who adores you is at your side
And vowed to silence.

Kenneth Koch, "Aesthetics of Obituary"

Posted August 26, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Cameo kitty

The most charming guest blogger perhaps ever is currently starring at Alex Ross's. I love how the mere thought of blogging gives her that deer-in-the-headlights stare. I know how you feel sometimes, Maulina, I know how you feel.

Posted August 26, 12:00 PM

OGIC: Wrapping up rants

Let me share a few last cinematic heresies, with some annotations this time because it's 8:00 and I'm fresh as a daisy compared with my recent blogging sessions:

American Beauty. I know, you picked it, too, but I couldn't resist. From Kevin Spacey, playing the single role he always plays, to Annette Bening, as a gay screenwriter's idea of a castrating hag; from the ridiculously worshipful depiction of a teenage pothead to the implication that a Marine World War II vet is a repressed homosexual Nazi (it was people like Spacey, Alan Ball and Sam Mendes, of course, who actually stopped the Nazis from conquering the world), this breathtakingly mendacious picture of American suburbia takes the cake.

Thank you. I've been really gratified to see how many people actively dislike this movie. I saw it in less than ideal conditions: in a promotional preview on a college campus with Spacey, Mena Suvari, Thora Birch, and Wes Bentley in attendance. The starstruck college kids in the audience hooted and clapped through the whole thing, egging on Spacey's character. My alienation from my surroundings was complete. I've avoided the movie ever since. But judging from what many of you had to say, I wasn't simply swayed the unfavorable circumstances--there was a kernel of discernment at work, too.

Leaving Las Vegas. It seemed like an exercise in piling on the gratuitous misery and despair, and I've realized of late that I think gratuitous despair is much worse than gratuitous sex and violence. (I'm of the Jane Austen "let other pens dwell on guilt and misery" school of thought.) Watching it, I got the feeling that all the critics who praised it were congratulating themselves for being brave and tough-minded enough to watch something that depressing. Blech.

Not having seen this one, I'm not qualified to comment. But what the hell: Blech!

The Natural. Here's the movie I hate that most people like and it usually ends near the top of best sports movies. Honestly, I can never forgive Redford for what he did to this story. Roy Hobbs doesn't hit that home run, he doesn't win the game; no, he fails and everyone thinks he was paid off by gamblers.I don't expect a movie to be 100 percent faithful to its source material, but there has to a point where someone says "You know that story we're making into a movie? This is no longer that story." Yeah, I know Malamud himself seemed OK with it, mainly because he said the movie would cause him to be thought of as something other than a Jewish writer. Sorry, can't find the exact quote. Robert Redford is one of those people I thought would have more respect for the story. For me, his reputation is forever sullied and I'd just like to ask, "WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING? JUST GO MAKE SOME OTHER FREAKIN' BASEBALL STORY YOU HACK!"

Reading this struck an deep chord in me. I read Malamud's novel as a teenager, right around the time the Detroit Tigers had their Cinderella season. Being caught up in baseball made me especially attuned to Roy Hobbs's plight, and I was devastated; it was one of my first truly intense encounters with a truly bleak literary vision. Close on the heels of that, the movie felt like the worst kind of betrayal, and continues to stand as an all-time low in my movie-viewing history.

This next one also loudly rang a bell.

About Schmidt. Look, I grew up in Palo Alto, California, and go through a tin of flavored hummus a day, but the sneering condescension that pervades every shot in this film had me yelling to my friends about the elitist values of Hollywood on the way out of the theater. Oh, look at those poor people in Omaha with their bleak, meaningless lives. I've heard people talk about how sympathetic this movie was, but is there one character who isn't presented as either an asshole or a desperate loser? And does anyone actually still think that Jack Nicholson is a serious actor?

Well, I'm not sure it's Jack Nicholson's fault that for a while now he hasn't been able to play anyone but Jack Nicholson. It probably is. But more to the point, this movie vexed me no end because I was such a fan of Election and Citizen Ruth (and, more lately, Sideways, though--don't write--I'm fully aware of the case against; I'm not convinced, however, that this case, or the one against Lost in Translation, would have gathered so much steam absent the movies' success). I was fully prepared to like Schmidt. I loathed it. Coming from a director who is usually such a precise ironist, the false note of the final scene, especially, left me shocked and disgusted. And yet I suspect that the tonal difference between this film and Election was a matter of millimeters--millimeters that just happened to fall across some crucial line separating lampoon from contempt. (Speaking of Election, Quiet Bubble mentions in passing that it's one of his cows. I'm curious why, but in a way I don't want to know since QB has great taste and I wouldn't want to be talked out of my love for it.)

Next, two brave souls dissent from the common wisdom on a film that I personally have never heard a heartfelt negative word about, Waking Life:

- Earlier this week the Onion A.V. Club blog tossed out the question of what movies have inspired people to walk out of the theater, which got me thinking about this kind of stuff. So I thought I'd mention Richard Linklater's atrocious Waking Life. When it came out, I was in the middle of an extremely rigorous self-imposed academic hell at the University of Chicago, so the sight of Ethan Hawke or Julie Delpy standing on a pseudointellectual soap box spewing out "chicken soup for the soul"-brand political and social philosophy made me physically ill. I think this is a controversial choice, not because I've gotten into arguments about it with my friends (in fact, I haven't allowed any loved ones to see it if I could help it), but because of the rapt expressions of those around me when I was stumbling over them to get myself out of the theater as quickly as possible. I am sure they wouldn't agree with my assessment.

- When I read your post about attacking movies that everyone else loves, I immediately thought of Waking Life. I am alone among my friends who have seen this movie in thinking that it is 90 minutes of repetitive, self-impressed, pseudo-intellectual tripe. For some reason, the pretty pictures and elementary analyses blind the rest of my friends to its shallowness.

Conveeeeeniently, I haven't actually seen the movie and can't take a side. I'm a fan of Linklater, though that principally means I'm a fan of Dazed and Confused (as is the friend who wrote the first of these comments). So this should have been a natural choice for me, but something kept me from seeing it. Now--perhaps--I know what.

Next is another movie I've never seen. In this case, however, I've been congratulating myself on my judgment from the get-go.

Forrest Gump. The idea of the novel (I'm told) is that the generation of American history from, say, 1960 to 1980 is best rendered as a tale told by an idiot. The book was ironic, get it? Like most of the movies on this list, FG shows no awareness of the possibility of irony. A movie so bad as to constitute a small ethical catastrophe.

There are moments when I feel a shred of curiosity to check in on old Forrest. My idea of this movie's badness is so extreme as to make me think sometimes that it must have been misunderstood somehow. Then the moment passes.

Finally, I wanted to share this ultimate exercise in counter-intuition:

I haven't seen Citizen Kane for many years, perhaps an older me would like it more, but I found it uninvolving when I saw it many years ago. Some of the critical praise seems to emphasize technical accomplishments (camera movement, focus things) which is pretty much not of interest to the average movie goer.

I first saw Citizen Kane in my late twenties. I was a teaching assistant in a course where it was on the syllabus. I had to be ready to field questions and grade papers about it, so I was watching it in large part out of duty, and looking at it in large part as a work of art whose greatness was beyond doubt. (Which didn't really distinguish me from anyone watching it for the first time with an awareness of this reputation.) So it was decided ahead of time that I would find it a masterpiece. Under these circumstances, it can feel very much as though your own discernment, rather than the object of your scrutiny, is what's actually under scrutiny. And yet I think this effect is more pronounced for some acknowledged masterpieces than others. Watching, say, Grand Illusion or All About Eve for the first time, any self-consciousness I might have felt about my responses was soon extinguished by absorption. Not so for Kane.

As I told the reader who sent it, the Kane comment also reminded me of a memorable scene in The Sopranos, when Carmela gets her lady friends together for a movie club in the Sopranos' cushy home theater. For the kickoff, they watch Citizen Kane. It's Carmela's pick; she opens the evening with some critics' comments about the greatness of the movie, and the lights go down. When they come up again, everyone looks at each other rather blankly, halfheartedly attempts to discuss the movie's merits and flaws ("So it was the sled? He shoulda told somebody"; "That guy was so conceited"), and moves on eagerly to neighborhood gossip. Apart from any parallels between Kane and Tony Soprano, the scene appeared to mock the mob wives crowd for emerging from a masterpiece so pristinely unmoved. Hell, I laughed at them. But since my experience of the movie was so heavily weighed upon by its elephantine reputation, I'm not certain, in retrospect, I should have felt quite so superior. At the very least, I'm envious of their opportunity to view the movie relatively baggage-free.

Posted August 26, 12:00 PM

August 25, 2005

TT: So you want to see a show?

Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex)
- Chicago (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly)
- The Light in the Piazza (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene)
- Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language)
- Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes Sept. 25)
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some implicit sexual content)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

CLOSING SOON:
- Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, R, adult subject matter, copious quantities of spectacularly strong language, closes Sunday)

Posted August 25, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Fee paid by Cosmopolitan in 1932 for U.S. serial rights to Thank You, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse's first full-length Jeeves novel: $50,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $607,551.90

(Source: Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life)

Posted August 25, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"We grow tired of everything but turning others into ridicule, and congratulating ourselves on their defects."

William Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating"

Posted August 25, 12:01 PM

TT: When size doesn't matter

My friend and colleague John Rockwell, the chief dance critic of the New York Times, has published a column called "Has Mark Morris Made Only One Masterpiece?" which is so wrong-headed that I felt I had to say something about it at once.

Here's part of what John wrote:

Mark Morris is rightly regarded as the finest modern-dance choreographer of his generation, and his "L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato," a richly varied, deeply moving evening-length setting of Handel's oratorio to Milton's text, is widely believed to be his masterpiece.

But if "L'Allegro," which was created in Brussels in 1988 and concluded its fifth New York run since 1990 at the New York State Theater on Saturday, is Mr. Morris's masterpiece, what's he done since? Should we, as dance lovers and Morris admirers, be concerned that a choreographer still in his prime--he's just shy of 49--and celebrating the 25th anniversary of his company has not produced a comparable triumph in the last 18 years? And if not, why not?...

Size and success are not synonymous. Scattered through the shorter dances that make up the typical mixed-repertory programs of the Mark Morris Dance Group are innumerable gems. But grandeur of scale does make an impact; it stretches out the canvas to allow more room for the rich emotional range and teeming variety of detail that enliven "L'Allegro."

(Read the whole thing here.)

Fudge the point though he does, John is not so implicitly arguing that size and success are synonymous, or something close to it. He remarks in passing, for instance, that "Mr. Morris has delivered eminently serious work in recent years. Like 'V,' set in 2001 to Schumann's E-flat Piano Quintet." Yet that unforgettably compelling one-act dance, together with many other post-L'Allegro works of comparable weight and significance that John neglected to mention, is apparently as nothing when placed next to the full-evening L'Allegro, which to John's way of thinking is Morris' sole and only "masterpiece."

How shall I start dismantling this argument-by-assertion? With the most appropriate possible comparison. Mark Morris is about to turn forty-nine. How many full-evening dances had the greatest of all choreographers, George Balanchine, made by the time he was forty-nine? Er, one. He made The Nutcracker in 1954, shortly before his fiftieth birthday, and while it is an indisputably great and miraculous ballet, I don't know anybody over the age of ten who'd be likely to call it his masterpiece. Too bad poor Mr. B piddled away the remainder of his first five decades on such comparatively minor jobs of work as Apollo, Prodigal Son, Serenade, Concerto Barocco, Ballet Imperial, Symphony in C, Orpheus, The Four Temperaments....

You see my point, of course. Yes, L'Allegro is a masterpiece, probably Morris' greatest achievement to date, and its scope is part and parcel of its greatness. To quote what I myself have written about it, L'Allegro is "a whole world of dance in a single evening, everything from childlike pantomime to knockabout comedy to complex groupings reminiscent of George Balanchine in their control and clarity." This all-encompassing generosity of inspiration is one of the reasons why we respond to it so powerfully. But it's not great because it's long, nor are long works of art necessarily greater than short ones. In my opinion, the greatest ballet of the twentieth century--perhaps the greatest ever made--is Balanchine's half-hour-long Four Temperaments, which contains whole universes of thought and emotion. Jerome Robbins never made a single full-evening dance. Merce Cunningham has made only one, Ocean, and it's no masterpiece. To date Paul Taylor has made two, neither of which has remained in his company's repertory. And as for Morris, I can think of any number of his post-1988 dances which I and many other critics and dance lovers believe to be as good as L'Allegro, even if they're not as long. Dido and Aeneas, Love Song Waltzes, Grand Duo, Rhymes With Silver, The Office, The Argument, V: that's what Mark Morris has "done since," just for starters. So unless you define "masterpiece" as "a person's single greatest achievement," which John is obviously not doing in this context, then what he's written makes no sense at all.

Could it be that John has confused greatness with ambition? Or was he simply spinning out a big idea in haste and without sufficient forethought, as journalists, myself included, have been known to do on occasion when a deadline beckons? Beats me. But I wish he'd left this particular idea in the oven to bake a little longer before he served it forth in the New York Times.

Posted August 25, 10:09 AM

TT: Down the road

Up and coming on my calendar:

- SEPTEMBER 14: "Jules Olitski--Matter Embraced: Paintings 1950s and Now" opens at Knoedler & Company

- SEPTEMBER 20: Street date of Trio da Paz's Somewhere (Blue Toucan)

- OCTOBER 11: Street date of Hilary Hahn's first violin-piano CD, a set of four Mozart violin sonatas accompanied by Natalie Zhu (DG)

- OCTOBER 20: "Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of American Watercolors and Drawings from the Hood Museum of Art" opens at the National Academy Museum

- OCTOBER 25: Street date of Looney Tunes Golden Collection, Volume Three (Warner Home Video)

Posted August 25, 1:00 AM

August 24, 2005

TT: Strict observance

Sorry, folks, but that crackling noise you hear in the middle distance is the sound of me burning out. I'm driving up to Connecticut this morning to see a show, which I consider more than sufficient reason not to blog again today. Though I do finally seem to be on the verge of licking this damn cold--I actually took a two-hour nap yesterday afternoon that was blessedly rich in Rapid Eye Movement, something on which I've been severely short since last Thursday....

Anyway, see you tomorrow. Or maybe Friday. (And don't ask me which Friday.)

Posted August 24, 12:04 PM

TT: She's baaaaack

Ms. Cup of Chicha has returned to the blogosphere after an extended absence. She's as wicked as ever. Go say hello!

Posted August 24, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Total cost in 1937 of the 1,340-square-foot Herbert and Katherine Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, including Frank Lloyd Wright's architect's fee of $450: $5,500

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $73,341.81

(Source: Doreen Ehrlich, Usonian Houses)

Posted August 24, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorlèd ear,
Pipe me to pastures still and be
The music that I care to hear.  

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.  

Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Habit of Perfection"

Posted August 24, 12:01 PM

OGIC: This won't hurt a bit

So I'm hatching this crazy scheme over here that just might work: to get six whole hours of sleep tonight. I've been working fifteen-hour days and am in a pretty pitiable state, so I'm going to make this quick. Here are a handful of my favorite skewerings from the recent Ebert-inspired open call--which doesn't mean I agree with them...necessarily. But there's an art to doing this swiftly and fatally, and these readers have it down.

- Collateral. Oh God. Can we please just agree that it's time for the existential hit-man character to get two in the back of the head in a quiet Italian restaurant? Wised-up, amoral people don't decide to become hit-men because they don't see anything better to do, they become lawyers or lobbyists and make twice as much money without having to run from the police. Being a hit-man is necessarily an unpleasant and short life, and people who go into contract killing generally don't have a lot of other options, so let's just stop it with these Mephisto characters. And if you are going to use one, please don't have him be Tom Cruise talking about jazz.

- Eisenstein's October has been known to induce epileptic seizures in small children. They're the lucky ones.

- State and Main. OK, it's Vermont--get a couple old actors who've never been east of the Valley, put them in flannel shirts and rocking chairs and give them some really. stupid. lines. The part of this which was a send up of Hollywood types was funny, but the "real down home America" part was worse than painful and insulting. And I hate that ingenue with the squinty eyes, Julia Stiles.

- Rear Window. A man fears he may be a witness to a murder. Everyone else tells him he's nuts. They're wrong. That's a plot? Everything Jimmy Stewart's character thinks is happening IS happening. Not a single twist, surprise, or discovery. Dreadful. And the moment where he blinds the beefy murderous assailant with...a camera flash? Woeful. The only reason to watch: The glorious women. Thelma Ritter gives a perfect performance. And was anyone ever more beautiful than Grace Kelly is here? So gorgeous, it hurts.

- My sacred cow is "Reds," Warren Beatty's 1981 ode to John Reed. I saw it then and remember it like it was yesterday. Clocking in at 200 minutes, the movie just dragged, on and on and on. Around the 60 minute mark, people started stirring, heads bobbing and turning, the realization dawning that we're not even a third of the way through. After the intermission, fewer than half of my fellow theater-goers returned. I sat in an aisle seat, one foot wandering left to the aisle, the other uncertainly planted in front, as the seats around me continued to empty out, frustrated theater-goers muttering to themselves as they all but ran up the aisle. As the movie slowly ground its way into its third hour, I stopped debating whether to leave, the whole thing having become a weird sort of endurance contest, one of those things you do just to say you did it, no matter how excruciating the pain.

And then, of course, Beatty won an Oscar for best director.

Googling "Reds" just now I was heartened to note that no less an authority than Paul Schrader, the writer of "Taxi Driver," among many others, had a similar experience:

"Paul Schrader likes to talk. Fortunately for his listeners, he is a very good storyteller. 'I remember I was over at Paramount, and Warren Beatty and I had been fooling around, doing this Howard Hughes thing. He had made the film "Reds" and he was showing it on the lot, and he wanted me to come. I was so tired. I thought, "Well, I'll sit way in the corner, way in the back. If I fall asleep, I'll fall asleep, and nobody will know." Nobody told me there was an intermission. So the lights come up, everybody from Barry Diller on down is in the room, all of Warren's friends, and I am sound asleep. Afterward, one of Warren's minions came over to me and said that Warren had expressed his displeasure. And I said, "Look, I know it took Warren 10 years to make this movie, but it took me three hours to see it, and I can guarantee you that three hours of my life mean more to me than 10 years of Warren's.'"

Hee. More where these came from tomorrowish. Sleep well!

Posted August 24, 1:56 AM

August 23, 2005

TT: Price was right

I'm in The Wall Street Journal today with a piece about...well, you've kind of got to read it:

As of yesterday, "Atelier de Cannes," a 1958 crayon drawing by Pablo Picasso, was still on sale at www.costco.com. Price: $129,999.99. You'll find it listed under "Gadgets, Gifts & Art," along with art prints by the likes of Chagall, Dufy, Miró, Modigliani and, er, Peter Max. The quality of these latter works is fairly modest (the Picasso isn't very good, either), but the fact that you can buy them on the Web has brought the warehouse chain reams of free publicity. Yet no one seems to remember that what Costco is doing is nothing new. Forty years ago, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was selling Picassos and Chagalls, not to mention Rembrandts, Dürers, Goyas, Whistlers, Mondrians and Wyeths, all of them bearing the imprimatur of a celebrated connoisseur who was better known for making such grisly movies as "The Fly" and "House of Wax."

Vincent Price is now best remembered for his supporting role in the classic 1944 film noir "Laura," but in the '60s he was a full-fledged movie star, albeit one who never got the girl--at least not while she was still alive. An elegantly campy gent who in his later years specialized in playing pardon-me-sir-while-I-cut-off-your-head psychopaths, Price was also one of Hollywood's most passionate art collectors, a former student at the Courtauld Institute of Art who had been well on his way to becoming an art historian when he abruptly changed course, went on the London and Broadway stages and became an overnight success.

In 1962 Price was approached by George Struthers, Sears's vice president of merchandising, who believed his company could sell fine art to the American public the same way it sold lawn mowers and ladies' underwear. Price agreed to pick the pieces and serve as spokesman, and the Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art was off and running, first in Sears's Denver store, then in other stores across the country, with a mail-order line added the following year....

OpinionJournal.com, the Journal editorial page's Web site, has posted a free link to this piece, so you can read the whole thing by going here. Not that I'd dream of discouraging you from buying a copy of today's paper and turning to the Leisure & Arts page (or, better yet, subscribing to the Online Journal by going here).

Posted August 23, 12:07 PM

OGIC: "Good" Movies You Hate

Here's the raw list of sacred cattle proffered by our readers, presented in clever subdivisions. Starting tomorrow I'll share some of the actual reviews, which were delightfully bitter and bilious. Ebert who?

THE EVER POPULAR

American Beauty (5 mentions)
Lost in Translation (3)
Breaking the Waves (2)
Platoon (2)
Waking Life (2)
Dances with Wolves (2)
Pulp Fiction (2)

CAPITAL-S SACRED

Citizen Kane
The Third Man
Rear Window
Nashville

I RESPECTFULLY PROTEST!

Rushmore
Barcelona
Last Picture Show
Goodfellas

I HEARTILY CONCUR

About Schmidt
Immortal Beloved
Good Will Hunting
As Good as It Gets
The Natural

A FEW PAIRINGS

Schindler's List and Life Is Beautiful
Fahrenheit 9/11 and Passion of the Christ
2001: A Space Odyssey and Close Encounters of the Third Kind

THE CRUISE FACTOR

Vanilla Sky
Magnolia
Collateral

WHO EXACTLY IS GENUFLECTING?

Cheaper by the Dozen
Independence Day
Cabin Boy
Troy

...AND THE REST

Ordinary People, Primary Colors, The Vanishing, The English Patient, The Crying Game, Talented Mr. Ripley, Million Dollar Baby, A Letter to Three Wives, Reds, Short Cuts, Forrest Gump, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happy Endings, Love's Labour's Lost, The Goodbye Girl, Talk to Her, State and Main, Andrei Rublev, Gandhi, Z, Dersu Uzala, October, Mississippi Burning, Dead Man, Everything Quentin Tarantino Has Ever Done, A Clockwork Orange, The Piano, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Posted August 23, 12:04 PM

TT: Elsewhere

Don't think I'm not still sick! I'm mostly better, but not entirely. I had to cover the Fringe Festival last night, and my Wall Street Journal drama column is due this morning. So in lieu of original content, I offer you this snapshot of my recent reading:

- Robert Birnbaum interviews Camille Paglia:

CP: I'm on a crusade--it's to say to the poets and the artists, "Stop talking to each other. Stop talking to coteries. I despise coteries in any form. You are speaking to a coterie, OK. Stop the snide references to the rest of the world who didn't vote with you in the last election." This is big. Because we have all separated again. After 9/11, everyone was united. We are separated again thanks to what has happened in politics. People in the art world are full of [a] sanctimonious sense of superiority to most of America. But they must address America, learn to address America. Yes, have your friends, have the people who support what you are doing in the art world, but you have to recover a sense of the general audience and the same thing I am saying to the far right, get over the sneering at art, the stereotyping--

RB: They started it.

CP: Wait a minute. The far right wouldn't have any opinions about art if it weren't for those big incidents in the late '80s to the '90s when some stupid work was committing sacrilege.

RB: You're referring to Andrés Serrano?

CP: Yeah, some 10th-rate thing. It's always Catholic iconography, I might point out. I am atheist, by the way. It's never Jewish. It's never Muslim. So I am saying this is a scandal. The art world has actually prided itself on getting a rise out of the people on the far right. Thinking, "We're avant-garde." The avant-garde is dead. It has been dead since Andy Warhol appropriated Campbell's Soup labels and Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe into his art. The avant-garde is dead. Thirty years later, 40 years later, people will think they are avant-garde every time some nudnik has a thing about Madonna with elephant dung, "Oh yeah, we are getting a rise out of the Catholic League."...

Read the whole thing here.

- Speaking of countertakes, Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post offers this unexpected slant on The Aristocrats:

For the comics, life is lived onstage, in the limelight, to the love and applause of anonymous crowds. It involves a great deal of travel, friendships with other gifted, crazed people but just as frequently, bitter rivalries, endless feuds, treachery and betrayal. If you win, you win the power of fame, which after the second day gets you nothing but good tables in restaurants where rubes bother you for autographs as you suck down your linguini, the right to fail with a better class of woman and, of course, the emptiness of being unconnected to anything larger than the self.

Boy, that's some act. Whadaya call that act?

The losers....

- And speaking of critics, Mr. Something Old, Nothing New proposes a high-camp grudge match:

Who would win in a fight between the two meanest, cruellest, wisecrackiest critics in the history of movies: Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in Laura or Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) in All About Eve?

I'm going with DeWitt. Lydecker may be more dangerous in certain respects, but DeWitt has the size advantage, and a cooler head, and more strategic ability. His decision to blackmail and form a weird alliance with Eve (making them, according to some interpretations, 1950's original Ambiguously Gay Duo), is a far sounder strategic decision than Waldo's Pygmalion act with Laura. Addison in three rounds unless Waldo has something stashed in his old clock.

However, if it's a question of who's better at wisecracks, then Lydecker obviously wins....

The title of this posting, by the way, is "Battle of the Evil Critics." I myself would have pleaded not guilty were it not for my most recent Wall Street Journal review, which I fear may have been a touch on the evil side. (Not that there's anything wrong with it!)

- The Little Professor, one of the 'sphere's more obsessive bibliomanes, offers an alarming list of "signs that the books have taken over." Item No. 1:

Your parents send you an article from the L.A. Times that describes the lengths to which people will go to house their personal libraries--converting a garage, for example. It's not clear if this article is meant to be prophetic or admonitory.

Yikes!

- Mr. Jubilation Rising, a blogger new to me, bids a lovely farewell to Vassar Clements, one of the all-time great country fiddlers:

Vassar was a fiddler, plain but not so simple. To borrow part of a line, the violin is a harsh mistress. In symphony halls, it is revered and somewhat feared. In shade-tree string bands, it is just feared. Playing a violin is like spending time with a beauty. Even a virtuoso performance gains only passing admiration, the object of affection usually in a hurry to return to the mirror. But every so often a suitor comes along with the ability to tame. That was Vassar.

It sure was. I spent part of the summer of 1974 kicking around Nashville, playing in broken-bottle joints and looking for Vassar Clements--but that's another story....

- Ms. DevraDoWrite goes to a way scary gig:

It was a sad night. Sad to see an old friend who no longer has what it takes, surrounded by second or third rate musicians. He wears a suit jacket that looks slept in and no one on the bandstand smiles. He wanders on stage alone, and starts to play. I wonder if he begins his program solo, then works up to duo and builds on--then I realize he's just warming up almost as if unaware he's on stage. The pianist arrives, as does the sax. The drummer gets seated. He counts off and they begin just as the bassist walks on stage. They've begun anyway....

(No, I don't know who it was, and I'm glad I don't. I've been to gigs that were just like that.)

- Ms. Searchblog, who blogs about her struggles with chronic depression when not reflecting on other aspects of life, love, and art, waxes especially eloquent in this posting:

If anyone told me nearly two years ago that I would still be fighting to regain my mental health in August 2005, I would have dismissed such projections as delusional, or at least laughable.

Yet here I am--still struggling, still trying so hard to get better, still fighting the good fight.

Each morning when I open my eyes, my first thought is, "OK--I can make it through today. I can do it." Although I've repeated this mantra every morning for almost two years, I don't feel sorry for myself--not at all. It's simply the way my life is lived now: a highly internalized struggle that yields inconsistent results. My major depressive episode led to a terrifying mental breakdown, which resulted in chronic depression. That's the way it is....

Read this one, whether you've been there or not. And be sure to take the test at the end--it's very good for a laugh.

- Mr. CultureSpace does the job on Sin City:

Corruption contrasts with the men's hearts of gold. But this sort of yin-yang balance, this universal dualism, is the type of clichéd, glib sensibility of a twelve-year old, or someone who thinks life is really this simple. I loved Miller's comics when I was young, to be sure. But I grew up....Sin City is devoid of color, but not the kind you see. Rather, it's devoid of the kind you feel, and this is the worst sin of all.

Haven't been. Won't now.

- Lastly and conversely, the adorable Cinetrix posted about Me and You and Everyone We Know back in June, but for some reason it slid past me. Catching up with her thoughts now, I'm struck by her astute and subtle comparison to another of my favorite films:

At the end of Me and You, I felt the way I did after seeing Trust for the first time, or The Dreamlife of Angels: I had been somewhere new and strange and was reluctant to come back to the "real" world; I had fallen in love.

I also can't remember the last time I saw a film so gentle. The narrative ebbs and flows, exerting a tidal pull on the characters, exposing their glistening idiosyncrasies to our gaze for a moment before sweeping them away. I can't wait to see it again....

I wish I'd said that. (I will, I will.)

Posted August 23, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Amount Scott Bradley was paid in 1954 to compose the musical score to a Tom and Jerry cartoon for MGM: $1,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $6,904.77

(Source: Daniel Goldmark, Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon)

Posted August 23, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Even a great performance can't spoil a fine composition."

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (quoted in Louis Kaufman, A Fiddler's Tale)

Posted August 23, 12:01 PM

August 22, 2005

TT: Eleven things I've learned while sick

(1) The computer is the worst enemy of a workaholic with a chest cold.

(2) The iPod is his best friend (especially if he sleeps in a loft).

(3) Don't watch Red Rock West when you have a fever.

(4) Good movies for invalids: Barbershop, Clueless, Defending Your Life, Speed. (Did you realize that Clueless is now ten years old? Wow.) Also good: Nero Wolfe, Patrick O'Brian, twice- and thrice-read theatrical biographies.

(5) Soup gets tiresome.

(6) Insofar as possible, don't let unwashed dishes pile up in the sink. The resulting spectacle is depressing and inhibits recovery.

(7) If you have to choose between staying dirty and taking a cold shower, take the shower.

(8) There is no truer friend than the one who offers to run errands for you.

(9) When buying groceries under the influence of antihistamines, don't just look at the pictures--read the labels.

(10) All cabbies are sadistic psychopaths. Show no weakness!

(11) Yours is not the only blog in the 'sphere.

Posted August 22, 12:04 PM

TT: Inside tracks

- Gene Bertoncini, who plays for happy eaters on Sundays and Mondays at Le Madeleine, is appearing this Thursday at the Jazz Standard in a "celebration" of the release of Quiet Now, his second CD of unaccompanied solos for acoustic guitar. As I wrote in the liner notes for its predecessor, Body and Soul, Gene is

one of those musicians whom I seek out, no matter where they're working. That's the nice thing about living in New York--you can really keep up with great artists like Gene--and that's why I can say with certainty that his playing has gotten better with every passing year. The emotions grow steadily deeper, the harmonies richer and more oblique, the textures more eloquently spare. He was never one to throw around his technique, but now he doesn't waste any notes at all: every one rings true....

For more information, go here.

- Last Dance, Mirra Bank's 2002 cinema-verité documentary about Pilobolus, is playing on the Sundance Channel tonight at 9:30 p.m. EDT. It's a startlingly frank backstage look at how Pilobolus collaborated with Maurice Sendak to create A Selection, a dance about the Holocaust. I can personally testify to its candor, for I happened to be visiting Pilobolus' rehearsal studio when it was filmed (I was reporting on the making of A Selection for a New York Times story) and ended up becoming one of the film's on-camera talking heads. It is, if I do say so myself, a damned fine piece of work, and since it has yet to be released on DVD, I commend it to your atttention.

For more information, go here.

- Check out all the new Top Fives, O.K.? I may be sick, but I'm still consuming art....

Posted August 22, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Weekly salary paid to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1937 for screenwriting duties in Hollywood: $1,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $13,334.87

(Source: Steve Chagollan, "F. Scott Fitzgerald Gets a Second Act After All," New York Times, Aug. 21, 2005)

Posted August 22, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"To have no pride as an actor is fatal. To have the right amount is almost impossible. It gets in the way of good work; the lack of it prevents your taking chances, daring to go further than you have before, risking whatever reputation you have--not with the public, but with your director or playwright. You need to know they will allow you to rehearse awkwardly, embarrassingly, in your search for certain elements in the play. Not carelessly, but with the kind of abandon that only comes with real love.

"Our happiest theatre memories are those when that love exists in equal measures for the actors and the audience. When the play is received as love is received, with trust, unquestioningly. Because it is being given with confidence and truth and, yes, pride. Beautiful pride."

Marian Seldes, The Bright Lights: A Theatre Life

Posted August 22, 12:01 PM

OGIC: White rabbit

I'm late, I'm late, for a very important post...I promised you reader movie rants, and they are forthcoming--just not this weekend, which is now last weekend, alas. And I still have a long night ahead of me before I can rest up for next week, which has insidiously but surely turned into this week, right under my insufficiently efficient nose. Wow: I am really, really bad at Sundays. I'll be back during the week with the goods. Have a nicer Monday than my Sunday, please.

Posted August 22, 2:02 AM

August 19, 2005

OGIC: No cow, it turns out, is sacred

Thank you to everyone who has emailed me with their unfavorite movies. Seems there's a little Evil Ebert inside all of us, and it is perfectly delighted to be asked out to play. Time has been short, so regretfully I haven't been able to write most of you back yet. I promise to do so this weekend, and I'll also share your bêtes noires with the rest of the class--watch this space. Moreover, next week I'll turn the question on its head and give you a chance to defend those films that you believe to be insufficiently appreciated. It will be interesting to see whether the invitation to praise results in quite as much mail as the invitation to bury.

Posted August 19, 12:59 PM

TT: Utterly out of it

I've been invaded by a virus. It must have been sneaking up on me for the past couple of days, but I didn't realize what it was until early yesterday evening, when I started coughing and feeling increasingly crappy at dinner. I then strolled over to Lincoln Center to see Mark Morris' L'Allegro, and by the end of the first act I was clammy and exhausted. I stuck it out, but my weak chest and I passed a thoroughly awful night together. I just cancelled out of the show I was going to see tonight, and I'm planning to spend the rest of the day in bed or near it.

More as it happens, but don't be too terribly surprised if you don't see much of me here on Monday.

Later.

Posted August 19, 12:06 PM

TT: Imagine there's no Lennon

Friday again, and time for the weekly postmortem...er, Wall Street Journal drama-column teaser. This time around I slit the throat of Lennon and report on Terrence McNally's Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams:

I give the cast full credit for trying to make something out of nothing, but halfway through the first act I was muttering, "Bring on the deranged assassin!" Alas, "Lennon" needed no Mark David Chapman to supply the coup de grâce: It was dead on arrival....

Terrence McNally has a way of writing plays that start well, then go off the tracks. "Dedication or The Stuff of Dreams" is a good example of this bad tendency. For the first half-hour or so, it's a witty, agreeably sentimental backstage play about a middle-aged theatrical couple (Nathan Lane and Alison Fraser) who gave up their dreams of stardom to run a small-town children's theater. Then it hits a pothole and turns into a problem play about a cranky, cancerous grande dame (Marian Seldes) who wants Mr. Lane to euthanize her. Then it hits another pothole and turns into an overripe melodrama about sexual frustration. By the end, Mr. Lane is wearing a dress--but I'll stop there....

There's plenty more where that came from--and this week the Journal has posted a free link to my review on its "Today's Free Features" Web page. To read the whole thing, go here, with the compliments of The Wall Street Journal. Stagebloggers, take note!

(As always, I encourage you to subscribe to the Online Journal by going here. It's soooo worth it.)

Posted August 19, 12:04 PM

TT: Mailbag

To begin with, I want to thank the sharp-eared reader who read this posting about Joseph Taylor's 1908 recording of "Unto Brigg Fair" and wrote to tell me that it has indeed been transferred to CD. It's part of English Rhapsody, a really lovely collection of music by Frederick Delius, George Butterworth, and Percy Grainger, performed by Mark Elder and the Hallé Orchestra. I have since bought the disc, ripped all 39 seconds' worth of "Unto Brigg Fair," and dumped it into my iPod. I bet I'm the only person in the world whose iPod contains a 1908 recording by Joseph Taylor....

I also want to thank the sharp-eyed reader who read this almanac entry and wrote:

Love your blog, particularly the poetry. But if you google the great "perhaps everything terrible..." line you'll see that although Richard Rhodes incorrectly attributes it to Auden, the line actually comes from Rilke. (Auden's great. Eliot's great. Stevens is great. Merrill can be great. Rilke is the best.)

Arrgh! I don't even have a halfway decent excuse for getting this wrong, because while I usually make a point of tracing all the quotations I use in my daily almanac entries to their original sources, I lifted this one directly from Sherill Tippins' February House: The Story of W.H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof in Wartime America without noticing that Auden was quoting from Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. Pardon me while I pull up my pants. (Richard Rhodes can pull up his own damn pants.)

Now, some letters:

- "How unobservant of you and Maud. Stars are indeed visible in the New York City sky--not very many, not very often--but they are the sign of an especially clear night. You see more of them if you live in an apartment building and have access to the roof. I once saw the wisp of a comet from the top of mine. My desk looks over Third Avenue, St. George's Church, and Stuyvesant Park, and I see moons of many different colors and brightness."

Yeah, well, serves us right for not living in high-rise buildings....

- "I loved your post about the problems of recommending a play like '25th Annual....' When I saw it, the first thing I thought was 'this is perfect for the new hot HS musical' (something has to replace 'Fiddler' and 'Oklahoma' and 'Grease'!) but then I heard the 'problem song' and the Jesus-on-the-cross and the gay parents and had to rethink that. At my old school, where most of the children are relatively sophisticated, we decided that the parents of the 4-6 grade students could choose to allow those kids to come to the evening performances of 'Laramie Project' and 'A Chorus Line,' but that we would schedule other activities during the afternoon performance so as to not offend anyone that thought those were too heavy/inappropriate for their child. And several parents did not allow their children to attend (much to the kid's disappointment). Jesus and gay parents aside, any child 11-15 will be laughing at 'M.U.E.' but not for the right reasons--they'll be laughing because it's happened to them, because it's an embarrassing topic, because they're trying to be 'cool,' etc., just as they laugh at the lyrics to 'The Flintstones' ('we'll have a gay old time').Your solution is probably the best, even though it sort of looks like the ratings addenda to the NYTimes movie reviews (which, I think, are getting progressively snarkier)."

- "I was catching up with About Last Night (you write faster than I can read) last night and came across this about several pieces you listed from Bill Evans: 'No one has ever made more beautiful music.' I might have been able to swallow that without gagging had I not been listening to Angela Hewitt's new recording of the Bach keyboard concerti. Come now. Shirley U. Jest."

Well, O.K., maybe I exaggerated in the heat of aesthetic frenzy, but surely Evans' recording of "My Foolish Heart," at the very least, is not unworthy of comparison to Bach, no matter who's at the piano. (And stop calling me Shirley.)

- "I loved the map. I could see the green dot in the heart of Europe and knew that was in fact me reading your blog, as I do every day. (At least, if I was reading the map and the rest of the page correctly.) Very cool. I'm an American living in Prague for 13 years and got turned onto your web page a couple of years ago, which I read religiously. It's a great way for this English major/music major/lawyer/investment banker to keep up with what's really important back home. Your reviews and recommendations are spot on, and I make it a point to chase up (whenever possible) your suggestions. Many thanks for producing such a consistently interesting, honest, enriching and deeply enjoyable body of work."

Right back at all of you. Need I say how much Our Girl and I love hearing from the readers of "About Last Night"? Keep it coming.

Posted August 19, 12:03 PM

TT: Number, please

- Amount Benny Goodman charged in 1938 for a one-nighter by his big band: $2,000

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $25,743

(Source: Swing, Swing, Swing: The Life and Times of Benny Goodman, by Ross Firestone)

Posted August 19, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"'Is there mental illness in your family?'

"'No, not really.' Her reply was automatic, and she immediately doubted its veracity. Really, insanity was the only explanation for some of them. But there was no diagnosed mental illness in her family, so she was telling the truth."

Laura Lippman, The Last Place

Posted August 19, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Fortune cookie

"'I have writers the way other people have mice,' a disturbed hostess has written me. 'What can I do to keep them from arguing, fighting, and throwing highball glasses after dinner? One doesn't dare mention names, such as Herman Melville and Harold Loeb, or the fight is on. What would you suggest?'

"Well, now, it isn't easy to entertain writers and have any fun. You might begin by saying, over the first cocktail, 'I don't want any writers to be mentioned this evening.' Do not make the mistake of adding, 'From Washington Irving to Jack Kerouac,' because that would instantly precipitate an argument about Washington Irving and Jack Kerouac. You might begin by saying, 'The porcupines are getting our artichokes.' This could, of course, lead to literary wrangling and jangling, but everything is a calculated risk when writers are present, even 'My grandfather almost married a Pawnee woman,' or 'I wonder if you gentlemen would help me put the handle back on my icebox.' A writer, of course, can turn anything at all into a literary discussion, and it might be better not to say anything about anything.

"I myself have found, or rather my wife has found, that you can sometimes keep writers from fighting by getting them into some kind of pencil-and-paper game. You could say, for example, 'There are thirty-seven given names and nicknames, male and female, in the word "miracle." I want you all to see how many you can find.' This almost always takes up a good hour, during which the writers are mercifully silent."

James Thurber, "The Porcupines in the Artichokes"

Posted August 19, 1:20 AM

OGIC: Bonus Thurber

"Let us glance at a few brief examples of creative literature in the very young, for which they should have been encouraged, not admonished.

"The small girl critic who wrote, 'This book tells me more about penguins than I wanted to know,' has a technique of clarity and directness that might well be studied by the so-called mature critics of England and the United States, whose tendency, in dealing with books about penguins or anything else, is to write long autobiographical rambles.

"Then there was a little American girl who was asked by her teacher to write a short story about her family. She managed it in a single true and provocative sentence: 'Last night my daddy didn't come home at all.' I told this to a five-year-old moppet I know and asked her if she could do as well, and she said, 'Yes,' and she did. Her short story, in its entirety, went like this: 'My daddy doesn't take anything with him when he goes away except a nightie and whiskey.'...

"Finally, there was Lisa, aged five, whose mother asked her to thank my wife for the peas we had sent them the day before from our garden. 'I thought the peas were awful, I wish you and Mrs. Thurber was dead, and I hate trees,' said Lisa, thus conjoining in one creative splurge the nursery rhyme about pease porridge cold, the basic plot sense of James M. Cain, and Birnam wood moving upon Dunsinane. Lisa and I were the only unhorrified persons in the room when she brought this out. We knew that her desire to get rid of her mother and my wife at one fell swoop was a pure device of creative literature. As I explained to the two doomed ladies later, it is important to let your little daughters and sons kill you off figuratively, because this is a natural infantile urge that cannot safely be channeled into amenity or what Henry James called 'the twaddle of graciousness.' The child that is scolded or punished for its natural human desire to destroy is likely to turn later to the blackjack, the golf club, or the .32-caliber automatic."

James Thurber, "The Darlings at the Top of the Stairs"

Posted August 19, 1:00 AM

August 18, 2005

OGIC: The odd couple

That I don't understand all of the fuss about Target usurping the New Yorker's ad pages this week must mean that I'm part of the problem. And it would, in fact, be less than honest to deny that I'm a passionate fan of the place. Terry can personally attest to this: before I owned a car, he used to rent one when visiting Chicago and always, but always, cheerfully acceded to my pleas to be driven to Target in said rental during his stay. That, dear readers, is a true blue friend.

But, personal shopping preferences aside, exactly what is it about the infernal New Yorker-Target alliance that is raising so many eyebrows? Is it simply the purchased exclusivity, or is it something about Target being the purchaser? Again, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the notion that anyone would regard Target as less than sublime. But even if I didn't harbor this deep bias, I think I'd still be a lot more disturbed/bemused by, say, those frequently turgid theme issues of the NYer that have seemed so to proliferate over the past few years, and so many of which seem designed to lure ad dollars as much as to lure readers. In these cases the line separating editorial integrity from the bottom line begins to look perilously thin. As far as I can tell, the Target discomfort doesn't have anything to do with fears about the contamination of the editorial side of the magazine--or if it does, they haven't been aired out. So what's the hubbub, bub? What am I missing?

P.S. This isn't an isolated incident of Target-targeting animus, either. Earlier this summer I attended a Chicago architecture event where it was mentioned that a Target may open in the historic Carson, Pirie, Scott Building. I was startled when a large contingent of the audience hissed at the news as though they'd heard that a Wal-Mart was opening in Robie House. Sure, it would be grand if Carson Pirie Scott could live on forever in the great building named for it, but at least we're talking apples and apples; one retailer replacing another hardly seems grounds for a hissy fit. Is the Dayton Company, which owns Target, worse than Saks, which owns Carson (but is trying to sell it)? Related: a few years back, Bloomingdale's moved its Chicago home store into the abandoned Medinah Temple, thereby saving the building from being condemned. So the place where Terry and I once attended an earth-shattering performance of Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand is relegated to retail now--but at least it's still standing, and has even received some loving restoration. Is that all bad?

Posted August 18, 12:40 PM

TT: So you want to see a show?

Not surprisingly, people in and out of town are always asking me what plays they should see, so here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated each Thursday. In all cases, I either gave these shows strongly favorable reviews in The Wall Street Journal when they opened or saw and liked them some time in the past year (or both). For more information, click on the title.

Warning: Broadway shows marked with an asterisk were sold out, or nearly so, last week.

BROADWAY:
- Avenue Q* (musical, R, adult subject matter, strong language, one show-stopping scene of puppet-on-puppet sex)
- Chicago* (musical, R, adult subject matter, sexual content, fairly strong language)
- Doubt (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, implicit sexual content)
- Fiddler on the Roof (musical, G, one scene of mild violence but otherwise family-friendly)
- The Light in the Piazza* (musical, PG-13, adult subject matter and a brief bedroom scene)
- Sweet Charity (musical, PG-13, lots of cutesy-pie sexual content)
- The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee* (musical, PG-13, mostly family-friendly but contains a smattering of strong language and a production number about an unwanted erection)

OFF BROADWAY:
- Orson's Shadow (drama, PG-13, adult subject matter, very strong language)
- Philadelphia, Here I Come! (drama, PG, closes 9/25)
- Sides: The Fear Is Real... (sketch comedy, PG, some implicit sexual content)
- Slava's Snowshow (performance art, G, child-friendly)

CLOSING SOON:
- Glengarry Glen Ross (drama, R, adult subject matter, copious quantities of spectacularly strong language, closes 8/28)

Posted August 18, 12:04 PM

TT: Number, please

- Alexander Woollcott's fee in 1929 for "Shouts and Murmurs," his single-page New Yorker column: $200

- The same amount in today's dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $2,160.94

(Source: A. Woollcott: His Life and His World, by Samuel Hopkins Adams)

Posted August 18, 12:03 PM

TT: Small world

Courtesy of our Site Meter world map, here are some places where "About Last Night" has been read in the past twenty-four hours:

Apple Valley, California
Arvada, Colorado
Beaverton, Oregon
Beijing, China
Benton, Missouri
Burnaby, British Columbia
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Choudrant, Louisiana
Delhi, India
Dublin, Ireland
Halletts Cove, Australia
Hamilton, Bermuda
Irancheh, Iran
Kiev, Ukraine
Knoxville, Iowa
Kochi, Japan
Lisbon, Portugal
Lund, Sweden
Mountlake Terrace, Washington
Oneonta, New York
Oslo, Norway
Parsons, Kansas
Plano, Texas
Prague, Czech Republic
Pukalani, Hawaii
Santiago, Chile
Slough, England
Smyrna, Tennessee
Vienna, Austria

(We were also viewed in unnamed cities in China, Egypt, and Israel.)

Hi, y'all! Come back soon--and tell your friends, wherever they are.

Posted August 18, 12:02 PM

TT: Almanac

"Everybody who collects art has some adventure. There's no question about it--whether it's paying a lot of money for a picture and hanging it in exactly the right spot, or whatever it is. There's never a day goes by in my life that I haven't looked at the things I have. And that's all my life because I started when I was twelve. I don't look at everything, of course. I don't go around and count them. But there are certain things that I have that bring back the whole minute when I first saw them, the impression I had, the things that made me want them."

Vincent Price (quoted in Victoria Price, Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography)

Posted August 18, 12:01 PM

OGIC: Mea maxima culpa

I owe a massive apology to Maud and Dan Kennedy for what I wrote two posts down ("The Odd Couple"). I read their posts about the New Yorker Target ads uncarefully to begin with, and then thoughtlessly lumped them in with the sort of commentary I'd read in Slate and Fishbowl NY, which were of an entirely different stripe. And I hadn't seen the actual magazine. Ergo, the actual force of their objection went over my head completely and I posted something deeply stupid. I apologize.

Posted August 18, 10:37 AM

OGIC: Rather dullish and decidedly formal

Confronted with the workmanlike diaries of Nathaniel Hawthorne, of whom he is writing a critical biography, Henry James is positively confounded. And, truth be told, a little annoyed!

I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way--this seems as good a place as any other to say it--are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding with them in the whole body of literature. They were published--in six volumes, issued at intervals--some years after Hawthorne's death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books; but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written--what was Hawthorne's purpose in carrying on for so many years this minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the large part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence, or commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity; whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have said, our glimpse of Hawthorne's mind (I do not say that they elevate our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as much as by what we find in them.

I haven't read the notebooks in question, but this reminds me for all the world of the sort of observations that Andy Warhol's diaries elicited. But nobody really brought to those the sky-high expectations that James seems to have brought to his predecessor's notebooks. What I love about the above passage is the heated contest of James's impulses to protect Hawthorne and to excoriate him for being so dull, a contest that ends in a stalemate. First, James thinks he's going to be tactful about this and tell you what he really thinks only between the lines: he's thankful for notebooks--"as a biographer." As a reader, one gets the sense, he's about an inch away from tossing them into the fire. Then he gives up the charade: "I am obliged to confess"...that I haven't the foggiest what Hawthorne thought he was up to! Then he's tactful again: the chronicle is valuable...if you want information about Hawthorne "at any cost." And so on.

The reigning note, however, is confusion verging on a sense of having been betrayed by the notebooks' emptiness. You don't often catch James not knowing what to say, but here the discovery of his literary father figure's personal banality has him practically sputtering. Rather affecting, if you ask me.

Posted August 18, 3:04 AM

August 17, 2005

TT: Elsewhere

Here's some of what I've run across on the Web in the past couple of weeks:

- Jay Rosen, journalism professor and mediablogger extraordinaire, holds forth on the subject of things he used to teach that he no longer believes. Among them:

I used to teach it implicitly: journalism is a profession. Now I think it's a practice, in which pros and amateurs both participate. There were good things about the professional model, and we should retain them. But it's the strength of the social practice that counts, not the health of any so-called profession. That is what J-schools should teach and stand for, I believe. I don't care if they're called professional schools. They should equip the American people to practice journalism by teaching the students who show up, and others out there who may want help....

Yes. Totally. And if you're a blogger, you soooo know what he's talking about.

- Online theater columnist Peter Filichia points out that the list of the ten longest-running plays on Broadway "is the same today as it was on June 13, 1982, the day Deathtrap finally called it quits":

1. Life with Father (3,224 performances)
2. Tobacco Road (3,182)
3. Abie's Irish Rose (2,327)
4. Gemini (1,819)
5. Deathtrap (1,793)
6. Harvey (1,775)
7. Born Yesterday (1,642)
8. Mary, Mary (1,572)
9. The Voice of the Turtle (1,557)
10. Barefoot in the Park (1,530)

He also explains why.

(Incidentally, how many of you recognize all ten of these plays? The only one of which I'd never heard was Gemini.)

- Found object: I saw a new one-woman play about Edna St. Vincent Millay the other night, and came away wondering what her actual speaking voice sounded like. The answer is here.

- Department of Posthumous Praise: The divine Ms. Althouse, who guested on Instapundit last week, used that space to pay a nice little tribute to the late Barbara Bel Geddes, and got a funny and revealing piece of e-mail in return.

I, too, thought Bel Geddes was a babe, especially in Blood on the Moon, one of my all-time favorite Westerns (not yet out on DVD, and why the hell not?).

- We don't do politics here, but Mr. Alicublog was so funny the other day on the subject of conservatives who hate Hollywood that I just had to steer you his way:

I actually think rightwing cinephile Jason Apuzzo has a great idea--that conservatives who are forever bitching about ee-vil Hollywood should cease "verbally 'rebutting' these movies like dour lawyers in a courtroom" and start making movies themselves. I should certainly like to see Halliburton Films' epic production, The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew, starring John Goodman as a hard-drinking Wisconsin Senator up against International Communism and the Democrat Party, played by James Woods. I would also enjoy a new version of The Grapes of Wrath in which the Joads toss flowers to the men who have come to bulldoze their home, and cheerfully take jobs at roadside hamburger stands built by a dreamy-eyed young Ray Kroc (played by Stephen Baldwin)....

While Mr. A and I rarely see eye to eye on matters of state, nobody, and I mean nobody, does the funky reductio ad absurdum the way he does.

- Ms. Bookish Gardener explores her "presumptuous familiarity" with Oscar Levant, one of my all-time favorite minor celebrities.

- Here's why litbloggers should post more often about out-of-print books...

- ...and here's why t