Archives for 2003

Courtesy of Bookslut, an article by a black writer from Cleveland who wondered whether Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor portrayed blacks in a racist way. Then he met Pekar on the street one day:

I confronted him about his use of language, the way the black workmates he wrote about read as ghetto-style and under-educated. White people had goofy accents in his comic, but didn’t seem to get that treatment in his book. He took the criticism real well, listening attentively. Finally he interjected.

“Y’got a few minutes?” he asked. “Cuz if ya do, I wanna take ya to my job and introduce ya t’ some a’ those people. You’ll meet ’em and see for yerself — I ain’t givin’ them a hard way t’go. I just write ’em as I hear ’em.”

Off to his gig we went, and as it turns out, the people he wrote about were exactly as he wrote them, and the writer in me tuned my ears to the music in their voices. I began to hear people in a whole other way — Pekar was taking risk with the written language I hadn’t seen or heard before….

Go here to read the whole thing–which you absolutely must do.

You might be surprised to learn who wrote this (scroll down to find it). Or maybe not:

Several readers have complained about my dissing of 2001. I stand my ground. There’s one point a couple readers have made though I will concede. They say if I’d seen it when it first came out I would think differently. That is undoubtedly true. But some movies — and books and bands and art — are significant because they break new ground and some are significant because they are timeless….it seems to me that 2001 was pathbreaking but it wasn’t timeless. I feel the same way about Citizen Kane, by the way. I watched it in film class in college so I know all about the groundbreaking techniques used in the film. But those techniques have now been absorbed by the trade. What’s left is a pioneering movie which is more interesting as a historical document in the history cinema than as a movie. Just as the Model T was a great advance in the history of automotive innovation, but there are plenty of other cars I’d rather drive, there are plenty of “great” movies I wouldn’t choose seeing again over the chance to watch Road House one more time. There are plenty of music videos I’d rather watch than Un Chien Andalou, even though Un Chien Andalou is their artistic father.

What I want to know is, which Road House does he have in mind? I have a sinking feeling it’s not this one.

Speaking of letters, Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, sent me one about yesterday’s posting describing my experience with digital video recording–then decided to post it on his blog, along with some further reflections:

The remote control caused a populist revolution, I’ve long said, because once we had choice, we proved that we had taste. (I mark the golden age of TV, the real golden age, not the nostalgic vaudeville age, from the mid-80s, when viewers had choice, watched the good stuff, and let the bad stuff die; the age of the Beverly Hillbillies died; the age of Hill St. Blues emerged thanks to our control.) Seeing that is what made me such a populist; it gave me faith in the taste, judgment, and intelligence of the people….

Go here to read the whole thing.

OGIC and I weren’t able to post for most of Thursday afternoon. According to artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, the server that handles all the artsjournal blogs, including “About Last Night,” experienced “catastrophic disk failure.” Everything finally got fixed, but not before Our Girl and I went to our respective evening appointments (she to 21 Grams, I to the press preview of the Roundabout Theatre’s revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker). I just now got home, posted the backed-up items, and wrote some new stuff. We trust all will be normal from now on, or at least for a few more minutes.

The amazing thing is that even though we couldn’t update the site for much of the day, we still pulled in an impressive amount of traffic: just over 2,100 page views, twice our previously normal figure. It begins to look as if at least some of the folks who visited “About Last Night” for the first time as the result of this week’s link orgy might just be sticking around. That’s very good news indeed.

Fridays can be hectic in both New York and Chicago, but we’ll do our damnedest to give you as many piping-hot entries as possible. In the meantime, please tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com, the 24/5-to-7 arts blog. It’s been a great week for us. Let’s have another.

I reviewed Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Here’s how it starts:

Ashley Judd. Jason Patric. Ned Beatty. Tennessee Williams. What’s wrong with this picture? Plenty, as you’ll learn if you visit the new Broadway revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” which opened Sunday at the Music Box. But there’s nothing even slightly wrong with Mr. Beatty, who breathes fire as Big Daddy. He is as exciting as Ms. Judd and Mr. Patric are dull–and as fresh as Williams’ play is stale….

Unlike most camera-pampered Hollywood types, Mr. Beatty knows what to do in front of a live audience. His beautifully placed bass-baritone voice, complete with bottled-in-bond Kentucky accent, bounces effortlessly off the back wall of the Music Box. Though he’s the shortest man in the cast, he turns his modest stature into a towering advantage, playing Williams’ wealthy plantation owner as a shrewd, scrappy underdog who chewed his way to the top of the heap and now revels in making taller people look small. You’ll gasp when he first totters on stage, seemingly wan and yellow from the cancer that is eating Big Daddy alive–and you’ll gasp again when he breaks into a maniacal jig to celebrate the news that he isn’t dying after all. But his hope is false, and as he faces the inescapable fact of his imminent demise, Mr. Beatty seems to grow a foot or two before your astonished eyes. Such are the mysterious ways of great actors, and this is great acting.

There’s much more, including brief but pungent notices of Richard Greenberg’s The Violet Hour and Paula Vogel’s The Long Christmas Ride Home…but there’s no link, for reasons explained at length here.

What to do? Easy:

(1) Extract one dollar from your wallet.

(2) Take it to the nearest newsstand and purchase a copy of this morning’s Journal.

(3) Turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, over whose first page I’m plastered.

(4) Read the whole section, not just my review.

(5) Report back at once.

Dear artblog.net: Not only are you one of my favorite arts bloggers, but you turn out to be a damn fine painter to boot. Who knew?

Dear Jolly Days: You are very smart on Pauline Kael (whom I admire greatly, albeit with strong reservations):

She was the safe outlaw – attracted to and provoking the naturally restrained. She liked tweaking the power structure, but was securely part of it and identified with it.

Dear Laura Lippman: RSI or no RSI, God meant for you to be a blogger. Get with the program.

Dear Felix Salmon: You are the first person ever to make me think I might possibly have slightly underrated Marc Chagall.

And, finally:

Dear Old Hag: You rock. Totally.

Here are four recent letters to “About Last Night” that caught my eye:

Sorry for the slow day around here! We have been stymied by technical problems, and as for your GIC, she is in the foulest of moods today, quite apart from server snits. I wish I had it in me to channel my ill humor into something as hilariously misanthropic as this (when did the Chronicle of Higher Education get a sense of humor, anyway?), but I have vast expanses of other peoples’ prose to edit, and no time to waste venting. Come to think of it, though, editing and venting don’t have to preclude one another, do they…oh, pity the poor manuscripts.

I’m counting on the healing, or at least distracting, powers of art to snap me out of this funk: in a few hours I’ll be attending a preview of 21 Grams, for which I have the highest hopes. I’ll let you know how they pan out.

New Yorkers who subscribe to Time Warner digital cable TV now have the option of acquiring a fancy new cable box containing a built-in digital video recorder (DVR) designed to interface directly with Time Warner’s on-screen TV guide. Translated into English, this means you can record any TV program, or every episode of any TV series, simply by pushing a couple of buttons on your remote control, all for a ridiculously small monthly fee. I got a DVR a couple of days ago, and since then I’ve had to discipline myself severely in order to get any work done at all.

My new cable box does all sorts of cool stuff. Among other things, I can pause a TV show while it’s being broadcast live, then pick up right where I left off. (Please don’t laugh if all this is old hat to you. For me, it’s still a novelty.) But the most important part of the box is the DVR. You don’t have to read the admirably terse manual to figure out how it works: the menu-driven controls are intuitive to a fault. After fiddling with the remote for about 30 seconds, I was merrily clicking my way through the Turner Classic Movies schedule for the rest of the week.

If you own or have read about TiVo, the stand-alone home DVR system, none of this is news. The only difference is that Time Warner hooks its DVR up for you, and the whole shebang costs (as the old commercials used to say) just pennies a day. For this reason, given the ubiquity of cable TV and the rapid spread of digital systems, I can’t imagine that TiVo has much of a future. Everybody to whom I demonstrate my new cable box wants one–right now.

I have no doubt that the introduction of the cable-box DVR will have a massive and immediate effect on TV viewing habits, probably even greater than that brought about by the introduction of the VCR. Not only does the on-screen TV-guide interface make time shifting infinitely more convenient, but it encourages you to view TV programs whenever you please–and to skip the commercials, which is far easier to do on a DVR than a VCR.

I don’t care for the word “empowerment,” but I can’t think of a better way to describe what it feels like to use a DVR for the first time. I wrote the other day about how CBS’s decision to scrap The Reagans was really a new-media story that demonstrated the declining ability of Big Media to unilaterally shape the cultural conversation. Digital video recording is not a new medium per se, merely a technology, but it does have a quintessential new-media effect: it gives the viewer greater power to control the way he experiences network TV. In that sense, you might compare it to the way bloggers use links to cherry-pick the contents of Big Media Web sites, reshaping them into new on-line information packages over which the original publishers have no control–save by shifting to subscription-only access models, and thus taking themselves out of the new-media loop altogether. It’s an impossible choice: do you surrender control to the consumer, or do you walk away from the possibility of reaching younger viewers who are already deserting Big Media in droves?

The more you think about it, the more clearly you’ll see how hard it is to choose between these alternatives, not only in this context but in others as well. One of the Big Media publications for which I write, The Wall Street Journal, charges for on-line access to most of its daily contents. From the paper’s point of view, this model “works”: the Journal Web site turns a profit. From my point of view, however, it doesn’t work. Why? Because no one on the Web can link to my Friday drama columns, meaning that they don’t have nearly as significant a presence in the buzz-generating blogosphere as do, say, Ben Brantley’s theater reviews for the New York Times. (That’s why I post excerpts on this page first thing each Friday morning, even though I’m well aware that it’s not nearly as convenient as being able to read the whole column on your computer.)

What’s more, this isn’t only a problem for me. In my experience, most people out in the larger world of art and culture aren’t aware that the Journal runs any pieces about the arts, much less that it covers them regularly and well. For this reason, I’ve suggested that the paper consider posting all of its fine-arts coverage on its free Opinion Journal Web site, which now carries only one arts-related story each day. So far, the powers-that-be haven’t budged, and I understand why, though I’m still trying….

But I’ve wandered far afield from the tale of my new cable box, on which I have so far recorded five movies and three episodes of What’s My Line?, the wonderful old black-and-white game show which the Game Show Network runs in the middle of the night. (The box will store 35 hours’ worth of programming.) I’ve already watched a few shows in my spare time, such as it is. No doubt some will get watched and most of the rest erased, that being the way time shifting works. What I haven’t done since the box arrived is watch any TV shows in real time–nor have I seen a single commercial. In effect, I have replaced the existing TV networks with a homemade video-on-demand system on which I can watch what I want, when I want.

I wonder whether the people who run CBS, NBC and ABC realize that by doing so, I and my fellow DVR users have brought an end to the world as they know it? Probably not–but they will.