Archives for January 2004

Scrabble has always struck me as one of the more incendiary of your basic roster of living room games. In my experience, conditions can get toasty. One’s normally liberal sense of humor can be tested, bent, and sometimes broken. The ice cubes and olives (in a properly lubricated game) can fly.

If Scrabble can bring out the beast in the most domesticated, pleasure-seeking players, what about those who play for fame and cold cash? They do exist, you know. If you don’t, my friends Eric Chaikin and Julian Petrillo want (with a little help from a smart film distributor or cable channel) to show you. I suspect the title of their documentary about the world of knock-out, drag-down Scrabble–Word Wars–will seem intuitively right to anyone who has played much so-called friendly Scrabble at all. The film reaches its first public audience this weekend. Out of 540 films submitted, Word Wars was one of 16 selected to compete in the documentary category at the Sundance Film Festival, which kicked off yesterday.

I saw an early trailer for Word Wars in 2002, and it looked to me like a happy marriage of the respective virtues of Spellbound and Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control–two movies I adored. If you’ve read Stefan Fatsis’s excellent book Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, you’ll understand why I bring up Errol Morris’s film. As characters, the perennial championship contenders in Scrabble fall in the general ballpark of those charming yet ever-so-slightly unnerving fellows in Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control, who display such feverish involvement in their curious lines of work, and somewhat less interest in other matters.

Word Freak falls into that Subculture-Exposed genre that produces so many middling, midlist, paint-by-numbers books (many of which, I hasten to add, are very good reads). But it rises to the top of its category by virtue of Fatsis’s good writing, and two pieces of luck. First, Fatsis turned out to have enough talent for the game to partly break out of his journalist role and compete very seriously. Second, the major players were, to a man, great characters: fascinating meetings of utter brilliance (in the game) and willful social marginality (outside of it). The more you read, the less this seems accidental. Dominating this game takes, aside from labor, a pretty beautiful mind.

Getting back to Word Wars, the documentary originated with Eric, a compulsive and talented anagrammer (throw him “sharecrop” and you get a fast “horsecrap” back) whose path reversed the one Fatsis had followed. Eric first entered this demimonde years ago as a competitor, wandered away from it for a time, and came back later with a camera. (Eric is a minor character in Fatsis’s book, where he reveals his favorite anagram, “eleven + two” = “twelve + one.” Believe it.)

“I was a wordplay lover in college,” Eric says, “but I realized that if you want to be a champion, you have to devote your life to memorizing words. That made me give up, but as I got to know the players I realized I wanted to capture the whole milieu on film. I was around when Stefan was researching Word Freak and I thought, someone should have a camera here.”

When Eric decided that the world’s best Scrabble players could and should be a cinematic subject, he called Julian, his college pal and a twelve-year veteran of the film industry. Julian’s r

From Eve Tushnet:

LISTENING TO GEORGE JONES, “SHE THINKS I STILL CARE.” Somebody make Chan Marshall cover this.

I’d buy it. I must have played that song three times a night for two years back when I was in a country band, and I still love it. (For the original recording, go here.)

For further proof that We Happy Few are no better than a bunch of 10-year-old girls giggling on the playground–and that includes me–go here. (I’m writing in Our Girl, by the way.)

Maybe that stuffy lady
from the Washington Post was on to something….

Find out your own personal Scrabble score. Via the well-nigh unbeatable Pejman Yousefzadeh, he of thirty points, not to mention impeccably good timing.

I caught up with recent off- and off-off-Broadway shows in my theater column for this morning’s Wall Street Journal. I raved about Private Jokes, Public Places:

The funniest new play to hit New York in months… has taken up residence in the least likely of venues: Oren Safdie’s “Private Jokes, Public Places,” a comedy about architecture now being performed downtown at (wait for it) the Theater at the Center for Architecture. Implausible as it may sound, Mr. Safdie has done the impossible: He’s written an unpretentiously witty play of ideas about some of the most pretentious ideas known to man.

Since 9/11, Americans have been exposed to more up-to-the-second designs for high-profile buildings–most of them bad, some downright hideous–than at any other time in recent memory. What kind of thinking, if any, goes into these white megaelephants? Mr. Safdie, a student of architecture at Columbia University turned struggling playwright (and, not coincidentally, the son of celebrity architect Moshe Safdie), has drawn on personal experience to answer that question….

As for Aunt Dan and Lemon, well, here’s the lead:

The word “transgressive” was not yet chic when Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon” was first produced in 1985, but it could have been coined to describe this vomitous piece of blather, which has been revived by the New Group in a production directed by Scott Elliott and running through Jan. 31 at the Harold Clurman Theater.

Like most works of art (I use the term loosely) that are praised as transgressive by easily impressed critics, “Aunt Dan and Lemon” is actually anything but. To be sure, Mr. Shawn dabbles in theatrical shock tactics, but stripped of its gratuitous nudity and violence, his play is a one-sided piece of sucker bait that will offend only those thin-skinned right-wingers who take unkindly to being portrayed as capital-F fascists by a smug left-winger….

No link, so to read the whole thing (including brief mentions of The Beard of Avon and Anna Bella Eema), pick up a copy of this morning’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section and keep flipping pages until you find me. I’m there, together with other good things.

I took a musician friend to see New York City Ballet last night. On the program were two of George Balanchine’s masterpieces, Apollo (whose score is by Igor Stravinsky) and Concerto Barocco (set to the Bach Two-Violin Concerto). I learned long ago not to expect miracles out of the NYCB pit orchestra, but I was shocked by what I heard. The playing of the string section in both pieces was ill-tuned and inaccurate, and in the case of Concerto Barocco the performance, particularly in the first movement, was so rhythmically uncertain as to adversely affect the quality of the dancing on stage. Dancers can’t do their job when they’re not sure what tempo to take.

My friend was appalled. I was embarrassed.

Musical standards at New York City Ballet have rarely been much better than mediocre at any time since I started looking at the company 17 years ago. A few years ago the orchestra actually dared to go on strike, in the process inspiring a joke that circulated widely among New York musicians and dancegoers: “The worst orchestra in town just went on strike. What do they want? Fewer rehearsals.” (That was actually pretty close to the truth.) Fortunately, the strike failed, in the process giving NYCB sufficient leverage to pry a more favorable contract out of the orchestra. The company then hired Andrea Quinn, an excellent conductor, as its new music director, and within months the musical side of its performances had improved noticeably.

I haven’t been looking at NYCB as regularly as usual for the past couple of years (I was preoccupied with finishing and promoting my Mencken biography), but now that I’m writing a brief life of Balanchine, I’ve been making a point of going more often. Last week and this, I noticed that the orchestra had fallen back into its old habits–not consistently, but often enough to be alarming.

Most dance critics don’t have musical training. A few, in fact, are downright unmusical–I’ll name no names, but New York balletomanes know who they are–while others know when an orchestra sounds bad but are understandably reluctant to say so in print because of their lack of musical knowledge. Hence the work of the New York City Ballet Orchestra and its conducting staff (whose role in the current crisis should not be overlooked) almost always goes unmentioned in reviews. Like George Balanchine, I’m a trained musician, so I considered it my personal responsibility to speak out about NYCB’s low orchestral standards when I was covering the company for the New York Daily News. I also talked about the problem with other critics, and encouraged them to do likewise, with some success.

Again, I’m not saying that the orchestra always plays badly. It sounded pretty good last week in Prokofiev’s score for The Prodigal Son. On the other hand, the performance of Mendelssohn’s Scotch Symphony on the same program fell well below any acceptable standard of musical quality, and what I heard last night was even worse. It grieves me that a company whose founder knew music from the inside out should be forcing its audiences to listen to such unprofessional performances. It also makes me angry.

New York City Ballet is celebrating the centennial of George Balanchine’s birth this year. I think that’s a highly appropriate occasion for his company to clean its musical house.

I think maybe my musical juices are flowing again. It started when Luciana Souza sent me a CD-R of the rough mix of her next album, a beautiful song cycle on poems by Pablo Neruda. Then I read a Wall Street Journal piece about a new bluegrass CD, Del McCoury’s It’s Just the Night, which was so interesting that I went right out and bought the album. (I’m a great fan of McCoury’s.) That broke the logjam. Now I’m listening to Fats Waller’s “Baby Brown” on my iBook, soon to be followed by Elgar’s Cockaigne. After that, who knows?

Where there is sound, there is hope.

P.S. The Elgar was way cool. I believe I’ll write a piece about him for Commentary.

I found the following note in my e-mailbox this morning:

Perverse as it will seem to you, I have always liked jury duty, as a great escape. My last stint began on 9/11, and we were evacuated just in time for me to see the second tower collapse.

I also found the weather forecast for Thursday, printed in capital letters and sounding very much like a message in a fortune cookie: TRAVEL IS STRONGLY DISCOURAGED THIS MORNING. Opening the blinds, I saw five inches of freshly fallen snow. I bundled up, headed downstairs, and started to make my way from the Upper West Side to the courthouse at 111 Centre Street. It was nine a.m., an hour before I was scheduled to report for my second day of jury duty.

No subway line goes directly from my neighborhood to Centre Street, and I didn’t care to walk halfway across town from the Canal Street station to the courthouse in eight-degree weather, so I trudged four blocks north to the nearest bus stop, figuring to take a crosstown bus through Central Park to the Lexington Avenue subway line, board a southbound express train, and change for the local at Fourteenth Street, emerging just two blocks from the courthouse. (If you live anywhere but New York, that itinerary will give you a taste of the travel-related decisions we carless Manhattanites make every day.) On paper, it was a brilliant plan, but it started to break down almost immediately under the pressure of real life, as such plans are wont to do on snowy winter mornings.

The trouble began at the bus stop, where I found a jam-packed crosstown bus that turned away a dozen or so shivering passengers and drove off. It was followed by two empty out-of-service buses, followed in turn by a bus into which the rest of us crammed ourselves. As anyone who has boarded a New York bus at rush hour will know, I use the word “crammed” literally: the last few people who forced themselves through the open door shoved me three-quarters of the way into the lap of a well-dressed woman. The going was slow and got slower, and by the time I reached Lexington Avenue, a half-hour had crawled by, most of which I spent staring at a “Poetry in Motion” placard on which was printed the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” surely an odd choice for the purpose of diverting bored commuters. I amused myself by imagining ignorant armies clashing by night on the M86 crosstown bus, though it struck me that a line or two from Joseph Conrad might have been even better suited to the occasion. I couldn’t decide whether to opt for “The horror! The horror!” or “Exterminate all the brutes!”

I got off the bus and inched my way down the snow-encrusted stairs to the subway. As I approached the turnstile, I ran into a mob of irate passengers who told me through clenched teeth that the downtown express trains weren’t running. I barely caught the next local, which pulled into my station a half-hour later. From there I slithered atop the icy sidewalks to 111 Centre Street, where I lined up to file through the security checkpoint, then waited 10 minutes for an elevator. I finally reached the jury room at 10:20, just as the clerk started calling the roll.

Much to my surprise, the atmosphere in the waiting room was light–almost festive–and several of the people around me were actually chatting. A pleasant