Archives for October 2003

I’m going to Sotheby’s Friday afternoon to bid on an etching by an artist whose name has turned up more than once on “About Last Night.” It’ll be the first time I’ve ever taken part in an auction of any kind, except when I once raffled off the opportunity to dunk me in a dunking booth as part of a college benefit. (I hope this is more fun.)

Watch this space for details–and in the meantime, cross your fingers. I soooooooo want that etching!

Michael over at 2 Blowhards has stories of disturbing, and possibly disturbed, moviegoers. They range from the merely annoying to the downright hilarious, and include one cautionary tale for New Yorkers.

It’s funny he should bring this up today, because there was a general disturbance when I was watching Mystic River in Oak Park the other night (more on the movie later). About halfway through, during a solemn scene involving Tim Robbins’ character and his young son, there came a great whooshing from the other side of a door at the front of the theater, as of someone washing a sidewalk with a fire hose. This went on for a while, all of us sitting dumbfounded, looking at the door and missing what may have been a pivotal scene, for all I know. Finally, a brave lady walked over, opened the door, and told the unseen party outside, “we’re trying to watch a movie in here!” From outside, we all heard the surprised response: “Uh…you guys can hear this?” Uh, yeah!

Just one more: about ten years ago, a friend went to see an obscure little Russian movie at the selfsame Film Forum that figures in one of Michael’s stories. The movie wasn’t very good. About half an hour into it, someone at the back stood up, loudly declared, “Janet Maslin sucks!” and walked out. Everyone applauded.

Maybe it’s just me, but when my next invitation to a Halloween party at a federal building comes rolling in, I’m thinking “gun-toting” anything doesn’t get out of the first round of costume ideas.

John Dobbins and Mary Ochs’s addictive “First Lines” quizzes enlivened and sabotaged my work week (thanks–I think–to Household Opera for the link). They are (yay) many. But (sigh) finite. Helplessly craving another fix, I’ve raided my own bookshelves for more. I beg forgiveness for the copycatting.

Here are the first lines of 10 works of fiction, arranged by length. The works they come from were published between 1749 and 1991. One is a translation.

1. In that pleasant district of merry England which is watered by the river Don, there extended in ancient times a large forest, covering the greater part of the beautiful hills and valleys which lie between Sheffield and the pleasant town of Doncaster.

2. An author ought to consider himself, not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary, at which all persons are welcome for their money.

3. At the time when this story begins, the Stanhope press and inking-rollers were not yet in use in small provincial printing-offices.

4. On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.

5. You are not going to believe me, nobody in their right minds could possibly believe me, but it’s true, really it is!

6. The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis.

7. The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry.

8. The book was thick and black and covered with dust.

9. One never knows when the blow may fall.

10. In Africa, you want more, I think.

Answers will appear Monday. In the meantime, if you would like to submit your answers for recognition, email them to the usual address (but please put “OGIC” in the subject line). Top scorers will get… recognition!

To snark or not to snark? The conversation continues on two fronts this week. Maud links to a piece bringing a Canadian perspective to bear on the great snark debate (which, if you’ve been living under a rock, started here). Kate Taylor puts her finger on the most absurd thing, in my eyes, about the anti-snark campaign: purveyors of snark are far, far outnumbered by “mealy-mouthed reviewers tiptoeing around the books they are reviewing, leaving readers to discern their real opinions between the lines.” The last thing we need is more reviews of this sort.

At The Morning News, meanwhile, the subject comes up about two-thirds of the way through a long, consistently interesting interview with Julie Orringer, who recently published her debut short story collection, How to Breathe Underwater, to early acclaim. There’s something off about Orringer and Robert Birnbaum’s discussion of negative reviewing. Their blind spot is most pronounced in remarks like these:

The dismissive review is the one that really disrespects the time and the effort of the writing itself and that’s a horrible thing to see done to someone.

…a bad review can be a plea on the part of the reviewer to make the writer see some truth about his work or the world. That’s extremely important.

What–or who–goes missing when you start thinking of reviews as “pleas” to authors, or as something “done to” them? Only the reader! In the author-centric universe promoted by the snarkophobes, readers’ needs are elbowed out of the way to make room for authors’ sensitivities. This is exactly backwards.

This blog probably belongs to Our Girl for the rest of the day (I’ve got a review to write and a bunch of appointments on top of that), but I did want to leave you with something to chew on before I vanished up the spout.

It is, incidentally, tough to type when you have a great big bandage on one of your fingers, not to mention a missing “U” key (which I won’t have time to get fixed definitively until I hit my last deadline tomorrow afternoon). I don’t recommend it. Nevertheless, I’m doing my best, all for you.

“Music has an enormous advantage: it can, without mentioning anything, say everything.”

Ilya Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn’ (quoted in Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich and Stalin, forthcoming in April from Knopf)

A reader writes:

Thanks for plugging John Marin
so aggressively…frankly, from inside the museum world it seems as if his marginalization is a function of his having done his major work on paper. Museum curators are typically departmentalized by media so that American paintings specialists will often deride works on paper (as opposed to larger works or those on canvas) as comparatively minor.

I was fascinated to hear from this correspondent, who is a curator at a well-known Eastern museum. I’d always wondered whether there was a bias in the museum biz against “small” artists, a label that could easily be attached to Marin, who left behind no large-format paintings and (as now seems clear in retrospective) did his major work in watercolor rather than oil. Sure sounds like it.

Another reader writes, apropos of Lileks’ recent posting on Fantasia and the rise of digital animation, a theme in which this blog has also taken an interest:

I’m of two minds regarding the changes in animation and animation tools: on one hand, I know the medium in which one works affects the work itself, often in nearly imperceivable ways — when I hand-write a first draft I produce a slightly different style of prose than when I type straight into the computer — and on the other hand, I have a gut sense that a tool is just a tool and after many revisions the initial effects of the medium become less important than the core of the content. In the case of animated movies, I believe the quality of the story and the skills of the animators have a greater impact than the means by which the movie was made.

Last Thursday’s “Wall Street Journal” included an article (“Disney Decides It Must Draw Artists Into the Computer Age,” by Bruce Orwall) about Disney’s conversion to computer-generated animation that addresses the issue from the traditional animators point of view. I will not be surprised if the conversion to CG tools is beneficial to Disney in unexpected ways: The studio’s problems may have more to do with stagnation, and forcing themselves to learn new tools and develop new processes may shake things up enough to allow creativity to happen. Glen Keane’s comment that he feels “like about 30 years ago, when I was first at Disney just learning” seems like as a good sign, don’t you think?

Yes, I do, and I’m encouraged by the optimism of this letter, though I’m not quite convinced by the comparison between writing on a computer and animating on one. There’s a difference between the former (in which the hand merely transfers pure symbols from the writer’s brain to the “support” of a computer screen) and the latter (in which the “symbols” are of interest in their own right rather than because of what they stand for). But I incline to agree that “a tool is just a tool,” and I think it’s perfectly possible that digital animation can aspire to the warmth and imagination of hand-drawn animation. Maybe. I hope.

Which reminds me to remind you that The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, the new four-DVD set of classic Warner Bros. cartoons–all of them created with nary a computer in sight–is now officially on sale. My copy arrived in the mail yesterday from amazon.com, and I had to pry myself away from it to get to the theater on time for the press preview of Wicked, which opens tomorrow and about which more Friday.

I’ll be writing about the Golden Collection in the Wall Street Journal, too, perhaps as early as next week, so I don’t want to jump my own gun, but I can tell you this: IT’S FANTASTIC. Go get one.