Archives for February 2004

Says MoorishGirl:

I wrote in Arabic and French when I was a kid but English superseded those languages by the time I started college. When I wrote in Arabic I found it hard to keep up with the rhythm. Pick up any novel in Arabic and you’ll see that a sentence can run a page or two. I needed the finality of the period, perhaps because I had been already exposed to non-Arabic punctuation from a very early age. In French I wrote mostly poetry, long pieces that were meant to sound like Lamartine or Hugo and later like Baudelaire or Verlaine. I started learning English in high school and liked the mechanics of the language and soon I was reading almost everything I could get my hands on in English….

Read the whole thing here. As for me, I’m one jealous monoglot!

I found this in my e-mailbox yesterday morning. It’s a story from the Chicago Sun-Times:

Mel Gibson’s controversial “The Passion of the Christ,” which recounts the final hours in the life of Jesus, finally opens Wednesday, and the Sun-Times’ own Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper offered an exclusive early review of the movie on their syndicated series “Ebert & Roeper” this weekend.

Giving “Passion” their trademark stamp of approval of “two thumbs way up,” Ebert and Roeper called it “a great film.”

“It’s the only religious movie I’ve seen, with the exception of ‘The Gospel According to St. Matthew’ by [Italian director Pier Paolo] Pasolini, that really seems to deal with what actually happened,” said Ebert, who is the Sun-Times film critic.

“This is the most powerful, important and by far the most graphic interpretation of Christ’s final hours ever put on film,” said Roeper, a Sun-Times columnist. “Mel Gibson is a masterful storyteller, and this is the work of his lifetime. You have to admire not just Gibson for his vision and his directing abilities, but Jim Caviezel [as Christ] and the rest of the cast.”…

As it happens, I was about to leave for a screening of The Passion of the Christ when that e-mail arrived. The screening took place at the Brill Building, an address well known to show-business aficionados: A.J. Liebling wrote about it in the Thirties, calling it “the Jollity Building,” and later on it became known as the Tin Pan Alley of Sixties rock. It struck me as nicely ironic that I would be seeing a movie about the Crucifixion in such a place.

Screening rooms are dismal little affairs, comfortable enough but far from atmospheric, and in no way suited to anything remotely approaching religious contemplation. This one, not surprisingly, was full of people making calls on cell phones and conversing in notice-me voices. One fellow was earnestly explaining how Mel Gibson couldn’t possibly be a good Christian, having previously expressed his longing to impale Frank Rich’s intestines on a stick. “On a basic level,” he intoned, “it occurs to me that Jesus was a gentle guy.”

The lights went down and the film started, accompanied at first by whispered conversation, though that faded out after a few minutes. I suspect that not a few people were shocked into silence by the film’s evident high seriousness, not to mention the high quality of its craftsmanship: the actors are excellent, the production design and photography handsome without ever lapsing into picturesque self-indulgence. The one exception is the overblown music, which can’t begin to compare with Mikl

“There is nothing, I think, in which the power of art is shown so much as in playing on the fiddle. In all other things, we can do something at first. Any man will forge a bar of iron, if you give him a hammer; not so well as a smith, but tolerably. A man will saw a piece of wood, and make a box, though a clumsy one; but give him a fiddle, and a fiddle-stick, and he can do nothing.”

Samuel Johnson, quoted in Boswell’s Life of Johnson

I’ve collected Edward Gorey books and miscellany since high school. Sometimes this has meant shelling out a hundred or two hundred dollars for a first edition or something signed, but it’s also a collection that I can grow on the cheap by scouring the fiction shelves of used bookstores for old Anchor and Vintage paperbacks with Gorey covers. On occasion I’ve spotted them on friends’ bookshelves and negotiated trades.

I adore these little pieces of book art and book history. Hunting them down is a blast, they rarely set me back more than a few bucks, and many of them are beautiful. The books themselves are good or great, the kinds of rich, distinguished works that pose a challenge to an illustrator. Gorey’s solutions are thumbnail interpretations, frequently bold and always fascinating. Sometimes he chooses to draw figures, sometimes landscapes, sometimes interior scenes. For some nonfiction titles, he sticks to abstract designs. In nearly every case, he manages to capture something of the mood of the book. His witty, thoughtful illustrations make you rue Oxford and Penguin’s comparatively lazy practice of slapping paintings on the covers of the books in their paperback Classics series.

Now you can view several of the covers online at Goreyography.com. There’s a brief history of Gorey’s work for Anchor and a gallery of the covers. Thanks to Coudal Partners for the tip.

Like Greg Sandow, I urge you to read Alex Ross’ New Yorker essay about classical music:

The Web site ArtsJournal features a media file with the deliberately ridiculous name Death of Classical Music Archive, whose articles recycle a familiar litany of problems: record companies are curtailing their classical divisions; orchestras are facing deficits; the music is barely taught in public schools, almost invisible on television, ignored or mocked by Hollywood. But the same story could have been written ten years ago or twenty. If this be death, the record is skipping. A complete version of the Death of Classical Music Archive would go back to the fourteenth century, when the sensuous melodies of ars nova were thought to signal the end of civilization.

The classical audience is assumed to be a moribund crowd of the old, the white, the rich, and the bored. Statistics provided by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that the situation is not quite so dire. Yes, the audience is older than that for any other art–the median age is forty-nine–but it is not the wealthiest. Musicals, plays, ballet, and museums all get larger slices of the $50,000-or-more income pie (as does the ESPN channel, for that matter). If you want to see an in-your-face, Swiss-bank-account display of wealth, go look at the millionaires sitting in the skyboxes at a Billy Joel show, if security lets you. Nor is the classical audience aging any faster than the rest of America. The music may not be a juggernaut, but it is a major world. American orchestras sell around thirty million tickets each year. Brilliant new talents are thronging the scene; the musicians of the august Berlin Philharmonic are, on average, a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.

The music is always dying, ever-ending. It is an ageless diva on a non-stop farewell tour, coming around for one absolutely final appearance. It is hard to name because it never really existed to begin with–not in the sense that it stemmed from a single time or place. It has no genealogy, no ethnicity: leading composers of today hail from China, Estonia, Argentina, Queens. The music is simply whatever composers create–a long string of written-down works to which various performing traditions have become attached. It encompasses the high, the low, empire, underground, dance, prayer, silence, noise. Composers are genius parasites; they feed voraciously on the song matter of their time in order to engender something new. They have gone through a rough stretch in the past hundred years, facing external obstacles (Hitler and Stalin were amateur music critics) as well as problems of their own invention (“Why doesn’t anyone like our beautiful twelve-tone music?”). But they may be on the verge of an improbable renaissance, and the music may take a form that no one today would recognize. For now, it is like the “sunken cathedral” that Debussy depicts in one of his Preludes–a city that chants beneath the waves….

Read the whole thing here. Now.

I don’t have time to write about it at present, and probably won’t for a few days to come, but I intend to do so as soon as I can. In the meantime, please take a look at what Alex has to say.

The Oscars have lost 22 million viewers since 1998. So what are the show’s producers going to do about it? The Wall Street Journal (no link) reveals the brilliant plan:

– “ABC has asked writers on its prime-time series to weave the Oscars into their story lines. In an episode of ‘It’s All Relative,’ for example, one character will get mad at another who breaks the remote control, spoiling plans to watch the Oscars.”

– “In addition, characters on three ABC daytime soaps–‘General Hospital,’ ‘One Life to Live’ and ‘All My Children’–will talk about the awards show, saying they plan to watch the Sunday telecast or attend an Oscar party. They will stop short of saying they are watching on ABC because the network figured that was obvious.”

– “For the ceremony itself, [producer Joe] Roth says he is building the Oscars as a comedy show, employing an army of writers to churn out one liners.”

– “And he is promising an appearance by Best Actor nominee Sean Penn, a no-show at the Globes.”

– “Marketing the show under the slogan ‘Expect the Unexpected,’ Mr. Roth says he hopes to foster the kind of spontaneity exhibited last year, when Best Actor winner Adrien Brody passionately embraced presenter Halle Berry on stage. But that ‘Unexpected’ slogan may be slightly misleading….Following the controversy over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime stunt, ABC has imposed a five-second delay on the telecast, meaning it will review comments and images before they are broadcast and could censor them” (emphasis added).

Would somebody come over here and break my remote, please? I don’t think I’ll be able to stand the suspense.

Bookslut didn’t like what I had to say over the weekend about link-poaching. That’s putting it mildly. Too bad, but you should read what she has to say, too.

Oh, and Jessa…thanks for the link.

UPDATE: Our Site Meter is jumping! In the blogosphere, at any rate, there is no bad publicity. (And with reference to this posting, I should certainly add that I didn’t have any of my fellow artsjournal.com bloggers in mind, as I suspect is now abundantly clear.)

An American blogging from Sweden at MemeFirst
writes:

Yet another belated New Yorker, delivered to Sweden on donkeyback, I’m sure it was, and yet again I couldn’t shake the feeling this institution is going through a spate of mediocre issues: A 34-year old student collects lost gloves on the Upper West Side? The diary of a neurotic webstalker with a boring target? A Shouts & Murmurs that is spectacularly unfunny in its exploration of “Instructions to everything”?

These stories wouldn’t make it into the blogs I read, I thought. Wow. Maybe it’s not that The New Yorker is getting much worse, but that New York blogs are getting much better. Eurotrash
is far funnier than Shouts and Murmurs; Gothamist
and Gawker
are better at trendspotting than Talk of the Town; Maud Newton‘s got her finger on the literary world’s pulse like none other; Felix, Terry Teachout
and Michael at 2 Blowhards
have got the New York arts scene covered — to name just a very few of the stars in the New York blog firmament. The New Yorker still holds the crown for long articles and fiction, but for much longer?

Can New York bloggers please all just stand back for a minute, look at what you have wrought, and pat yourselves collectively on the back? This has got to be New York’s most impressive literary renaissance since the Beat writers, and the snarkiest since the Algonquin Round Table held sway (and begat The New Yorker). Have there ever been so many New Yorkers writing as well as today, within a community that approaches a meritocracy?

For expat New Yorkers everywhere, you are a godsend. I kiss you.

Well, shucks. Glad to be of service. You can save the kiss for Our Girl, though….