FAKE LANGUAGE

One thing about the upcoming Biennale de Paris seems certain. It's not going to score points with English speakers. Here's what the latest biennale bulletin has to say, in so-called English translation, about the theme and context of the 2004 exhibition:

The BDP is an event favorising an art dynamic with the goal to reveal the actuality of the art in his new advanced forms. Threw new advanced art forms and by the valorisation of the immaterial production, this event reach to reconsider Paris as a major place on the international art scene. The imaterial productions and the new advance art forms means works of mind which is in keeping in the reality and which generate elements of reflexion, of awareness, or revealing in order of the personal experience, colectively and socialy. free from the influence of the aesthetic domination, the imaterial productions and the new advanced art foms definite itself in terms of free mind which assert itself.

Got that? Talking about the avant-garde (new advance art forms) is no excuse for drivel. If this is what the French think English is, no wonder they're afraid it will pollute their language. English like this would pollute any language.

November 21, 2003 11:13 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on November 21, 2003 11:13 AM.

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