Archives for December 8, 2003

To jazz buffs outside New York City, Frank Kimbrough is probably best known as the pianist for Maria Schneider’s big band. If you live around here, you’ll have heard him in any number of other contexts, both on his own and as an indispensable sideman. Either way, he’s one of my favorite jazz pianists, but I’ve never heard him play a solo recital, so it’s great news that he’s planning to do just that.

The date is this Sunday, Dec. 14. The place is the Blah Blah Lounge in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I’ve never been there, but Frank, who has high standards when it comes to clubs and their pianos, describes it as “a rarity, an intimate space with a good piano, minimal listening distractions (the bar is in another room), and a friendly staff.

(1) Since I fell ill on Friday night, I haven’t listened to a note of music. All I feel like doing is reading, watching TV, and looking at the art on my walls. Would anyone care to speculate on why music hath temporarily lost its charms for this sick blogger?

(2) The incoming mail is going unanswered. Sorry. I’ll catch up when I feel a little better.

(3) I managed to rise from my sickbed over the weekend and post a bit, so please take a look.

(4) Have you tried the new search engine yet?

I’m still sneezing and wheezing. I cancelled all my weekend performances (I can’t believe I was too sick to go hear Chanticleer’s annual Christmas concert at the Metropolitan Museum!), and I haven’t set foot out of the apartment since Friday night other than to buy food and drugs. All I’ve done is sleep, watch TV, and read.

The last of these has proved to be an unexpected delight, though, for my six-month stint as a judge for the National Book Awards left me next to no time to read purely for my pleasure, and it’s been fun to chew through a stack of books simply because they looked good to me.

No pleasure should remain unshared, so here are three books I read this weekend that I strongly recommend:

Somebody asked me what movies I’d seen since I retreated to my couch to tough out the Great Cold of 2003. I’ve mentioned a few, but here’s a more or less complete list: Yellow Sky, The Cincinnati Kid, Johnny Guitar, The Lady Eve, The Shop Around the Corner, The Gunfighter, Bringing Up Baby, The Tin Star, Passion Fish, and Holiday Affair.

All, incidentally, were plucked from cable TV by my trusty digital video recorder, for which I give much thanks.

“There is a passage in the autobiography (more or less true) of Alonso de Contreras, who began life as a scullion and ended it as a Knight of Malta, that has always seemed to me a masterpiece of narrative and an example of perfect style. Having at one period of his picturesque career married the well-to-do widow of a judge his suspicions were aroused that she was deceiving him with his most intimate friend. One morning he discovered them in one another’s arms. ‘Murieron,’ he writes. ‘They died.’ With that one grim word he dismisses the matter and passes on to other things. That is proper writing.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

The Criterion Collection’s DVD of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, all scrubbed up and fitted out with gazillions of special features, is now available for pre-ordering at amazon.com by clicking here. Do so. Even if you don’t share my passionate belief that it’s the greatest movie ever made, surely you’ll agree that it comes damned close–and if you’ve never seen The Rules of the Game, now’s the time. The street date is Jan. 20.

For some reason, mention of The Rules of the Game put me in mind of the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, whose unfortunate winner, Aniruddha Bahal, was announced last week. Or maybe it was vice versa. The Rules of the Game, after all, is a film about sex (among other things) in which you don’t see anything but people talking and (occasionally) kissing. Yet there’s never any question in your mind about what’s going on behind all those closed doors.

I’m not prudish about on-screen sex: I just don’t think it tends to be especially memorable or persuasive. More often than not, as in the case of Kissing Jessica Stein, it’s far more effective–not to mention sexy–when the details of the act itself are left to the viewer’s imagination. But I readily make an exception for those rare sex scenes that are used to deepen our understanding of the characters. John Sayles is particularly good at this, especially in Baby It’s You and Lone Star, where the sex scenes tell us important things about the participants. Another film in which an on-screen portrayal of sexual intercourse is used to brilliant (and joltingly unsexy) effect is The Dreamlife of Angels. And I hasten to add that I can also think of a few fairly explicit on-screen sex scenes that are just plain arousing, foremost among them the ones in The Big Easy.

Any thoughts on this topic, OGIC?