critical difference

November 6, 2009

... in 140 characters, max. Garry Trudeau is a genius.

November 6, 2009 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At Politico, Pia Catton has a fun look at the social links between the members of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. As she writes, "these 26 private-sector appointees are intricately connected through years of leadership in the overlap of politics, arts and culture. Studying their resumes, some clear patterns and paths emerge." An accompanying chart by Sarah Lauren Bell maps the circles of influence.

Articles and charts being limited by nature -- they can't, after all, go on forever -- there's amusement for the reader, too, in finding connections the piece doesn't mention. Quick! How many additional social groups does George C. Wolfe belong to?

November 6, 2009 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 5, 2009

Lounging at Lincoln Center

A few elegant chairs. That's all it took to significantly ameliorate a design disaster in the Barclays Capital Grove at Lincoln Center.

The god-awful concrete benches marring the plaza just north of the Metropolitan Opera House are still there in all their multifaceted dreadfulness, but it's only fair to point out -- a bit belatedly -- that visitors seeking a place to sit under the trees now have a far better option.

In the new context, the benches serve as a frame for the activity inside them. An ugly, ill-advised frame, but one that can more easily be ignored.

November 5, 2009 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

November 4, 2009

Our Sense of Place, Dismantled

There was a startling melancholy to a street scene in Chelsea yesterday, just off Eighth Avenue. An old Boston Globe delivery truck, now with New York plates, idled at the curb, removed from its native habitat, disconnected from its original purpose. The painted lettering that betrays its past life is only partly scraped off, legible enough to lend the new owners -- a Brooklyn firewood delivery business -- a certain retro cool.

But melancholy is the mood where newspapers are concerned. A reporter friend, as weary as I am -- as we all are -- of the endless coverage of newspapers' demise, roused himself from his professional ennui the other day to recommend a stellar essay on the subject. I was skeptical; who wouldn't be? But Richard Rodriguez's "Final Edition," in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, is lovely, literary, smart: the kind of thing that reminds you why you fork over money to read good writing -- which you'll have to do for this, even online.

A taste:

We are a nation dismantling the structures of intellectual property and all critical apparatus. We are without professional book reviewers and art critics and essays about what it might mean that our local newspaper has died. We are a nation of Amazon reader responses (Moby Dick is "not really a good piece of fiction"--Feb. 14, 2009, by Donald J. Bingle, Saint Charles, Ill.--two stars out of five). We are without obituaries, but the famous will achieve immortality by a Wikipedia entry.

Like all the best obits, Rodriguez's essay tells us what's been lost, and why it matters, not least to our sense of place. But, as he points out, "An obituary does not propose a solution."

November 4, 2009 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

October 28, 2009

The Yankees' Cautionary Tale

Just in time for the World Series, WNYC has a seriously fascinating report on the effect the new Yankee Stadium is having on its Bronx neighborhood. With the team having built what one fan approvingly describes as a mall, brimming with pricey dining and shopping options, there's correspondingly less economic benefit to area restaurants and stores -- though local impact is always a significant part of the argument when a sports team, or any other organization, is seeking incentives and concessions from municipal or state officials. Nationwide, reporter Ailsa Chang says, that's the trend: New athletic facilities are designed to get and keep visitors inside, spending money on concessions there.

To a lesser extent, in-house dining and shopping have been the trend in arts facilities as well. But it would be a rare theater, concert hall or museum that could meet the needs of every visitor who wants to pair a cultural outing with lunch or dinner, coffee or a drink. The actual numbers can be squishy in the extreme, but arts patrons really do flock to neighboring establishments before and after they get their culture fix. Even die-hard Yankee fan (and opera buff) Rudy Giuliani acknowledged as much in the weeks and months after the September 11 attacks, when he begged tourists to come back to Broadway not just for the shows but for the sake of the surrounding businesses.

The self-sufficient new Yankee Stadium, then, is both ammunition, in that it appears to provide another argument against sports teams in the battle for government funding, and a cautionary tale -- albeit maybe not for the Yankees, who have an annoying habit of getting whatever they want the instant they want it, and throwing a tantrum otherwise. But arts organizations have to tread more lightly. For them, the lesson is this: If, with the help of public dollars, you engineer things so that the rising tide helps only your boat, people might get the idea that their aid, next time, might better be directed elsewhere.

October 28, 2009 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Comedy Writing with a Side of Sex

Former "Late Night with David Letterman" writer Nell Scovell's excellent Vanity Fair piece about the show's hostile work environment is juicy reading, and illuminating, too. But it's worth mentioning that the point Scovell makes from the inside -- that "there are more females serving on the United States Supreme Court than there are writing for Late Show with David Letterman, The Jay Leno Show, and The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien combined" -- is one Nancy Franklin made nearly a month ago in The New Yorker:

Did a bomb go off and kill all the women comedy writers and leave the men standing? The other night on the Emmy Awards broadcast, the names of the nominees for best writing on a comedy or variety series were read, and, out of eighty-one people, only seven were women. Leno has no women writers on his show. Neither does David Letterman, and neither does Conan O'Brien. Come on.

Score another one for Franklin, who worked that eloquent little cri de coeur into her takedown of Leno's prime-time show, just as the Letterman extortion attempt was grabbing headlines.

One of the great things about scandals is their function as catalysts for evolution that's long overdue. Is it too much to hope that, in the wake of Letterman's sexual-harassment debacle, the comedy-writing clubhouse will go co-ed for good, and the behavior of those who toil there will become professional at last?

Sexual attraction is natural; it happens in every workplace. But adults are expected to have some impulse control, and funny people are grown-ups just like the rest of us. Feeling attracted doesn't have to mean acting on it, especially when acting on it is illegal. No one should have to compete sexually at work -- and that's exactly the dynamic that's set up for the entire staff when superiors and subordinates sleep together.

Separate but related is the trouble female comedy writers have getting in the door in the first place (and, as this week's headlines remind us, the trouble persists even in fields perceived as relatively female-friendly, like dance and independent film).

"I just want Dave to hire some qualified female writers and then treat them with respect," Scovell writes. "And that goes for Jay and Conan, too."

Comedy writing jobs are just that: jobs. This whole discussion is, at bottom, about the right to work, and to work unmolested, literally and figuratively. For most men, that's the status quo; they take it for granted, and they ought to. It shouldn't be any different for women -- but at the moment, it still is.

October 28, 2009 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Critical Difference If I were following the template, this would be the place where you could read the Critical Difference manifesto. Trouble is, I don't have a manifesto, and I'm not terribly fond of following templates. What I do have is a point of view. more

Laura Collins-Hughes I've been an arts journalist since 1993. Until it folded last fall, I was deputy cultural editor of The New York Sun, where I wrote about the two areas of the arts closest to my heart: theater and books. more

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