STILL ON TRACK

So what happened to the overnight reviews at The New York Times? Not having seen any since the first one ran on Nov. 1 in the Metro section of the print edition, I wondered whether my report had been wrong.

This morning I asked Jonathan Landman, the cultural editor of the Times, in a gmail message: "Can readers expect to see more overnights in the future? Are you phasing them in slowly or have you dropped the idea (and if so, why)?"

He replied: "You were right, though a tad premature. We hope to start these on a regular basis in a couple of months. until then, we'll do it when the occasion warrants -- probably a bit more often than we've done it in the past, but not on any fixed schedule."

Once the policy goes full bore, will overnights run in the arts section, where readers are accustomed to looking for reviews? Or will they continue to run in the Metro section of the print edition? We didn't get into that. My guess is Metro, due to its later production deadlines, unless the paper rejiggers its printing schedule.

Meantime, this morning's front page had a surprise for classical musicians who've been feeling as desperate about their base as Democrats about theirs. When was the last time the paper gave front-page treatment to a non-news feature profile about a fill-in opera singer? Not in recent memory. Maybe never?

November 8, 2004 12:57 PM |

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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