Archives for 2003

Some of my best friends are old crocks. No offense meant–I hope to be an old crock someday. Besides, I tend to think they’re right when they grumble about how things ain’t what they used to be. But if you’re one of those Gershwin-loving Luddites who thinks nobody knows how to write a really smart song lyric anymore, kindly go here.

Johnny Mercer it isn’t, but I still can’t get this song out of my head.

“I admit that it would never occur to me to ask a question of an electronic brain, chiefly because I’d be incapable of it. The interrogated electronic brain very quickly generates thousands, if not millions, of responses, and among those thousands of millions of responses, only one is right. Rather than bother with an extremely burdensome apparatus and spend months formulating a question, isn’t it quicker to have a stroke of genius and find the right solution right away?”

Olivier Messiaen, Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color

A reader writes, apropos of various recent postings about the possibility of New York City Opera’s moving to a new house at or near Ground Zero:

About the opera house on Ground Zero–I admire the idea, and would certainly think it moving. But really, how long would it be before some sort of play or production was put on commiserating with the plight of the poor oppressed hijackers? Or possibly a reading by some famous Jihadist poet? I’d love to see great art at Ground Zero, but the other possibilities make me fear the idea just as much as I love it.

Point taken. I myself have written testily on more than one occasion about what one might euphemistically call the wide-ranging responses of quarter-witted artists here and abroad to 9/11, and I’ve no doubt that somebody, somewhere, would dearly love to do just what my pessimistic correspondent fears most.

On the other hand, Paul Kellogg, who runs City Opera, is a man of taste, and I’ve also no doubt that anything he presented in a Ground Zero Memorial Opera House would be worth seeing–which doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d like it, of course. But if I required artists to make only works of art with whose underlying premises I agreed, I’d be an unhappy soul indeed. Kellogg, for example, is a fan of Jake Heggie’s operatic version of Dead Man Walking, which City Opera performed last season. I disagree, to put it mildly, but I also recognize that it’s a serious piece of work (as opposed to, say, the bisected pigs of Damien Hirst), and so I respected his intentions in producing it. If I didn’t–if I thought City Opera were in the hands of a cultural politician who didn’t give a damn about beauty–I wouldn’t be backing the company’s plan to move to Ground Zero.

So I guess the smart-ass answer to this perfectly reasonable question would be something like Opera houses don’t kill opera, opera directors do. Which is also a perfectly reasonable answer, when you think about it.

The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, a four-CD set containing 56 extremely well-chosen Warner Bros. cartoons from the Forties and Fifties (plus a couple of gazillion DVD-type special features), is now available for pre-ordering on amazon.com. Click here to do so. It’ll be on the street Oct. 28.

The amazon.com page also contains a customer review from an animation fanatic with inside skinny:

It’s hard to believe, but Warner Brothers is reportedly not sure that these cartoons can sell. This set is a test to see whether DVD collectors are in the market for Looney Tunes fully restored and presented with in-depth extras. If the set sells well, there will be more big boxes like this one, with still more cartoons (including earlier classics that are still in the process of restoration). If it doesn’t sell, all we’ll get is bare-bones samplers aimed at kids alone. So don’t buy the bare-bones “Premiere Collection,” a poorly presented kid-oriented release with no extras and only half of the cartoons on this set….Help make “The Looney Tunes Golden Collection” a best-seller and you’ll not only be helping the cause of classic animation on DVD, you’ll be getting some of the best comedy films ever produced, animated or live-action. You’ll be getting fascinating extras and supplements. You’ll be getting hours and hours of great entertainment. What could be better than getting great entertainment in a good cause? Buy this set, and if enough people do, we’ll get to see more sets of Bugs, Daffy, and the rest, to enjoy at home as often as we want–and believe me, we’ll want to watch it often.

Clearly, the Golden Collection is the set to buy. (And yes, I’ve put my money where my blog is.)

The Paul Taylor Dance Company will be performing for free next Tuesday and Wednesday at Damrosch Park, in between the Metropolitan Opera House and the New York State Theater, as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series. Both performances start at eight p.m. For those of you who know about modern dance, that’s all I need to say. (Did I mention the word free?)

For everybody else, a word of explanation: Paul Taylor is the world’s greatest living artist, irrespective of medium. I don’t deny that I’ve been known on occasion to exaggerate, but I happily stand by every word of that high-octane statement. If you want further details, I wrote the foreword to the 1999 paperback reissue of Private Domain, Taylor’s autobiography, in which I summed up my opinion of his work as concisely as possible. (Private Domain is a wonderful book, by the way, by far the best memoir ever written by a choreographer.) His dances are serious and funny, lyrical and frightening, harsh and poignant–sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once. If you’ve never seen any of them, go and be blessed.

P.S. Not to scare you off, but these are free performances, so try to get to Damrosch Park at least an hour before curtain time if you want to snag a halfway decent seat.

“All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

A reader writes, apropos of last week’s posting on vicious critics, in which I argued that “sometimes it’s your duty–your responsibility–to drop the big one. But you shouldn’t enjoy it, not ever. And you should always make an effort to be modest when writing about people who can do something you can’t, even when you don’t think they do it very well.” He thinks otherwise:

Why not take pleasure in “dropping the big one” on works that are truly hateful? (I’m thinking of stuff like Ancient Evenings, the films of Ken Russell or Peter Greenaway, The Night Porter, Piss Christ.) These works present issues that go way beyond quality of execution. They are fundamentally anti-human, not to mention anti-art. As such, their infliction on the culture should evoke righteous anger and disgust from any critic with blood in his veins. As I see it, identifying the false, the mindless, or the pretentious (which so often are taken for the real thing) is no less important than heralding the beautiful and the wise–and should afford the critic no less satisfaction. Of course, I don’t have in mind here works that are bad in a trivial or routine way. I’m speaking of stuff that is importantly or dangerously bad.

I think this is a fair distinction, and I won’t deny that I smiled quietly as I piled up dynamite around, say, Franco Zeffirelli’s Metropolitan Opera production of Carmen, with which I dealt rather summarily in the New York Daily News a few years ago:

The Met chorus covered itself with glory, but the orchestra was out of sorts, and James Levine conducted as if his mind were elsewhere. I sympathize: Mine was, too. I kept thinking, “Has everybody at the Met forgotten that ‘Carmen’ is a French opera?” Evidently so: Thursday’s performance featured a German Carmen, a Spanish Don José, a Romanian Micaela, a Russian Escamillo and an Italian director. The results were as confused as the casting. Bizet’s elegant, deadly opera is a feather-light soufflé with a pinch of cyanide; this production is a Wiener Schnitzel smothered in red sauce. Too bad the Met can’t send it back to the kitchen.

That was fairly nasty, and we’re not even talking anti-human anti-art, just a piece of gold-plated junk. So sue me. (No, don’t.) But I will say this in my own defense: now that I mostly pick and choose my own assignments, I find I want to spend as little time as possible putting myself through hell on the aisle. I’ve come to feel that as a rule, the thing I do best is point people in the direction of that which and those whom I love. Let somebody else ice “Piss Christ.” I’d rather spend my remaining hours on earth telling you how beautiful “The Open Window” is, especially if you’ve never seen it before. In the long run, silence may be the most powerful form of negative criticism.

Incidentally, please don’t bother to remind me of what I just said the next time you catch me beating up on a bad play in The Wall Street Journal. I mean, you don’t have to sit through it, right?

P.S. For those youngsters who only know Randy Newman as a composer of sappy movie scores, he’s had his moments, as the title of this post recalls.

“I detest a man who knows that he knows.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Holmes-Laski Letters