Archives for November 2003

“About Last Night” received approximately 4,000 page views on Tuesday, a thousand more than our previous all-time record, set last Friday.

What’s more, Our Girl and I expect to rack up our 100,000th hit at some point in the next day or two (that’s since we first went live on July 14).

Those numbers are pretty amazing for a new arts blog. Really amazing, in fact. So much so that I don’t quite know what to say other than thanks to you all, from the bottom of my heart.

Having said that, I must now add that you probably won’t see many new postings here, if any, on Wednesday. OGIC has pet problems, and I’m beset by two very bad deadlines. Still, I’ll try to get something up, if only out of gratitude.

And now to bed. Look what time it is! I have pieces to write, and I need to get some sleep. See you later.

“Everybody likes the idea of Cary Grant. Everyone thinks of him affectionately, because he embodies what seems a happier time–a time when we had a simpler relationship to a performer. We could admire him for his timing and nonchalance; we didn’t expect emotional revelations from Cary Grant. We were used to his keeping his distance–which, if we cared to, we could close in idle fantasy. He appeared before us in his radiantly shallow perfection, and that was all we wanted of him. He was the Dufy of acting–shallow but in a good way, shallow without trying to be deep. We didn’t want depth from him; we asked only that he be handsome and silky and make us laugh.”

Pauline Kael, When the Lights Go Down

A reader writes, apropos of a posting about reviews in which I suggested that “reviews should be read after the performance, not before, mine included”:

I don’t agree completely with your point about reading a critic only after the performance. If you’ve followed a critic for any substantial length of time, you know with some precision where your tastes and his intersect and where they diverge. You know his enthusiasms, his antipathies, his idiosyncrasies. In short, you can often tell from what he thinks of a work whether or not you’re going to like it. In this way, he can be quite useful to you as a consumer guide. And reliable guidance about what is worth seeing or reading is essential, for how is the ordinary guy (who doesn’t have the time or resources to make many mistakes) to know which new novelist to pick up or which new cabaret performer to seek out without the help of his favorite critics?…

But of course you should always return to a good critic after experiencing the work. He can illuminate it, enlarge the experience, or put his finger on why you found it unsatisfying. For me, comparing insights and thoughts with my favorite critics is half the fun.

My correspondent has a very good point. I sometimes forget that I don’t pay to see Broadway shows (or anything else, except movies). In a perfect world, everybody would experience art without first having it explained: no program notes, no wall labels, no interviews with the author, and–above all–no reviews. You’d go simply because you were interested, because you made a habit of going to see new things. Then, after the immediate experience, you’d seek out further information to help you put that experience in perspective (or, as my correspondent remarks, simply for fun). I think it’s hugely important to make a serious and sustained effort to come to new works of art this way. But in order to do so, especially when you’re talking about Broadway shows, you’ve got to have (A) a lot of spare time and (B) a lot of spare money. Otherwise, it’s essential to call your shots, if only to avoid bankruptcy, and good reviewers can help.

Can, I said. How often do they help? How often do consumers routinely use reviews in that way–as a “consumer guide”? For me, the problem is less one of money than time. It’s my job to attend all Broadway openings, so I don’t need a guide to theater, nor do I typically look to reviews to point me in the direction of a new symphony or jazz album or museum exhibit. Movies, yes, in certain circumstances: there are one or two critics whose word is enough to send me to a new film. (I saw Next Stop Wonderland solely because of Stephen Holden’s review in the New York Times.) More often, though, it’s a profile of an artist that stimulates me to see or hear something I would otherwise have passed up. (That’s why I went to see Ghost World–because of a New Yorker profile of Daniel Clowes that appeared prior to the film’s release.) Sometimes I go because a description of the plot made me curious (as in the case of Chasing Amy), or because the buzz has become too loud to ignore (as in the case of Lost in Translation). Most often, I go to new things at the urging of friends whose taste I know and trust, Our Girl foremost among them.

So I suppose I was offering a counsel of perfection when I suggested that reviews should be saved for after the fact. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to at least approximate the ideally receptive state that comes from experiencing art objects stripped of the intervening scrim of words. Above all, try to trust yourself, to feel what you feel, not what you think you ought to feel. Granted, if you don’t like Bonnard or The Four Temperaments or Falstaff or The Great Gatsby (the book, not the opera) or Charlie Parker’s “Embraceable You,” you’re the problem, not the art–but that’s no reason to pretend you feel otherwise, merely to keep trying to see what others see.

I’ll close with another almanac encore, this one from Kingsley Amis: “All amateurs must be philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt.” Yes.

We just registered our 100,000th hit. I wonder who it was? Anyway, yay!

Everybody in the theater business is going to be talking about this New York Times interview with Ned Beatty, who is co-starring (brilliantly) with Ashley Judd and Jason Patric in the current Broadway revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof:

Ned Beatty is a movie star himself, though not the big box-office kind. And he says Broadway has come to rely too heavily on celebrities, thrusting them into challenging roles they do not have the acting chops to handle.

Tucking into a plate of shrimp scampi after a recent matinee — hold the angel-hair pasta, per the Atkins diet, please — Mr. Beatty engaged in a candid assessment of his co-stars. He said he very much liked his glamorous colleagues personally: Mr. Patric, best known for the film “After Dark, My Sweet,” and Ms. Judd, who starred in “Ruby in Paradise.” He simply thinks, he said, that they are ill equipped for their parts: Brick, a brooding, boozing former athlete mourning his friend’s death, and Maggie, his long-suffering wife who craves his attention.

Mr. Beatty said of Ms. Judd: “She is a sweetie, and yet she doesn’t have a whole lot of tools. But she works very hard.”

And of Mr. Patric: “He’s gotten better all the time, but his is a different journey.”

Read the whole thing here, instantly.

My Wall Street Journal piece about Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes Golden Collection is in print, as of this morning. Here’s a snippet:

“What an ultramaroon.” “You’re…dethpicable.” “Hmm. Pronoun trouble.” “Of course you know this means war.”

Ring any bells? No? Well, try this one on for size: “Ehh, what’s up, doc?”

If that phrase doesn’t make you feel like gnawing a carrot, you’re probably not a likely buyer of “Looney Tunes Golden Collection,” a four-DVD set containing 56 of the finest Warner Bros. cartoons from the golden age of big-studio animation. Otherwise, get ready to laugh yourself silly.

The Warner animated shorts of the ’40s and ’50s have long been a gaping hole in the fast-growing DVD catalogue. No more. Now you can revel in crisp, clear prints of such classic cartoons as “Rabbit of Seville” and “Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century,” plus a full set of the bells and whistles without which no self-respecting DVD set is complete….

The future of animation belongs to the wizards of Pixar, and the day will surely come when they triumph over their computer-enhanced technique instead of being swamped by it. But when the last ink bottle is empty and the last paint brush has been put away for good, Bugs and Daffy will still be with us, one sly, the other spluttering, just as Wile E. Coyote will never stop chasing the Road Runner. They are as obsolete as a silent movie by Buster Keaton–and as imperishable.

There’s lots more where that came from. Read the whole thing here.

If for some inexplicable and unacceptable reason you haven’t yet purchased Looney Tunes Golden Collection, purge yourself by clicking here.

Don’t be an ultramaroon–do it now.

P.S. If that’s not enough to hold you for one day, 2 Blowhards has a really smart post on Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

A witty, well-read reader with a macabre streak who noted my dislike of Dickens e-mailed me the following excerpt from Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, a favorite book I haven’t revisited for a number of years:

One day, running his thumb through the pages of Bleak House that remained to be read, Tony said, “We still have a lot to get through. I hope I shall be able to finish it before I go.”

“Oh yes,” said Mr. Todd. “Do not disturb yourself about that. You will have time to finish it, my friend.”

For the first time Tony noticed something slightly menacing in his host’s manner. That evening at supper, a brief meal of farine and dried beef, eaten just before sundown, Tony renewed the subject.

“You know, Mr. Todd, the time has come when I must be thinking about getting back to civilization. I have already imposed myself on your hospitality for too long.”

Mr. Todd bent over his plate, crunching mouthfuls of farine, but made no reply.

“How soon do you think I shall be able to get a boat?…I said how soon do you think I shall be able to get a boat? I appreciate all your kindness to me more than I can say but…”

“My friend, any kindness I may have shown is amply repaid by your reading of Dickens. Do not let us mention the subject again.”

“Well I’m very glad you have enjoyed it. I have, too. But I really must be thinking of getting back…”

“Yes,” said Mr. Todd. “The black man was like that. He thought of it all the time. But he died here…”

If you know the book, you know the moral of the story. Terrible things can happen to those who read Dickens! Don’t let them happen to you….

Apropos of all our recent postings on Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a reader sent me this wonderful story from the San Francisco Chronicle about Patrick O’Brian, on whose Aubrey-Maturin novels the film was based:

The vivid, seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian have been getting lots of attention since the release of the big-budget movie “Master and Commander.” And they were doing all right without the movie: According to O’Brian’s editor at Norton, Starling Lawrence, even before the movie came
out O’Brian’s books sold 4 million copies. “We’re not exactly under a rock,” he says.

But as popular as the tales of Lucky Jack Aubrey and his notoriously unseaworthy friend and shipboard physician Stephen Maturin are among readers, they are especially revered by real wind-and-mast sailors. To them, O’Brian speaks the secret code of the sheeted main, the furled jib and the main topgallant staysail.

“I’ve sailed all my life,” says Bay Area venture capitalist Tom Perkins, speaking by phone from his vacation home in England, “and O’Brian never
made a mistake about the wind or the sails.”

Which is why it was such a surprise that when Perkins took O’Brian on an extended sailing trip, he had a startling revelation. O’Brian didn’t have a clue about how a sailboat worked.

“That was the amazing thing,” Perkins says today, still a little incredulous. “He didn’t know anything about sailing.”…

Read the whole thing here.