Archives for December 2, 2004

Sorry not to have posted anything today, but I’m run ragged and seriously underslept, and it’s been all I could do simply to drag myself from point A to point F. Friday isn’t likely to be much different, but I’ll do my best to show my face. (Cheers to OGIC for taking up the slack!)

Later.

“It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously.”

Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide

A sampling from the recent cultural menu chez OGIC:

LISTENING: Erin McKeown, Distillation. I went on and on recently about her more recent album, Grand, and stand by my enthused prattling then. Distillation took me longer to warm up to, but its hold may be the stronger for that. If Grand charms your socks off, this album haunts you barefoot.

NETFLICKING: Richard Loncraine’s 1995 Richard III, starring Ian McKellen and Jim Broadbent and set lavishly in 1930s England. This was okay. McKellen is hammy, which seems to be by directorial design. (And by the way, check out Sir Ian’s home page, which–disturbingly or touchingly, I can’t decide–really looks homemade.) Broadbent makes a great, quietly calculating Buckingham, blending in with the background like a less loyal, more lizardy Tom Hagen. I also liked Annette Bening and Robert Downey, Jr., as Queen Elizabeth and her brother the earl of Rivers. They’re both wonderfully game at playing merry, mutually infatuated callowness in the carefree scenes before Richard really gets down to work. But I never could make out what was gained by the historical displacement of the story, other than the opportunities for visual sumptuousness offered by thirties style. Moving the action forward several centuries, though, should also work to highlight what’s universal in the play’s substance, enlarging its scope. This film somehow manages to shrink a giant–even if it does look great doing it.

ALSO NETFLICKING: The Secret Lives of Dentists. Thumbs way up. Sort of an American Beauty with recognizable human beings.

To be continued…

Blogger John Scalzi remembers the 10 Least Successful Christmas Specials. Who among you lit types could forget “An Algonquin Round Table Christmas” (1927)?

Alexander Woolcott, Franklin Pierce Adams, George Kaufman, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker were the stars of this 1927 NBC Red radio network special, one of the earliest Christmas specials ever performed. Unfortunately the principals, lured to the table for an unusual evening gathering by the promise of free drinks and pirogies, appeared unaware they were live and on the air, avoiding witty seasonal banter to concentrate on trashing absent Round Tabler Edna Ferber’s latest novel, Mother Knows Best, and complaining, in progressively drunken fashion, about their lack of sex lives. Seasonal material of a sort finally appears in the 23rd minute when Dorothy Parker, already on her fifth drink, can be heard to remark, “one more of these and I’ll be sliding down Santa’s chimney.” The feed was cut shortly thereafter. NBC Red’s 1928 holiday special “Christmas with the Fitzgeralds” was similarly unsuccessful.

And if you like that, how could you possibly resist “Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas” (1951), “A Muppet Christmas with Zbigniew Brzezinski” (1978), or “Noam Chomsky: Deconstructing Christmas” (1998)? You’d have to have a heart of stone. Link via Colby, with whom I have to agree when he says he’d really like to see a bunch of these. Round up the cast of Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle posthaste!

Uhh…on second thought, let’s round up the cast of Best in Show instead.

Today marked the second time I have locked myself out of my car. It’s a lousy enough situation by itself, but I seem to have a disposition to pile on exacerbating factors. The first time, I was driving from Chicago to Detroit on a hot June day with the cat in the back seat. I had stopped for some of the cheap gas they sell in West Michigan. My cell phone, newly acquired expressly for the purpose of aiding in any emergencies that might crop up while I was driving a newly acquired car, was of course in the car. But the moment when I realized my mistake wasn’t even the scariest of this episode. That came a few minutes later when I asked the cashier if she had any advice and she replied, in utter earnest and rather eagerly, “You got a hammer?”

If I’d had a hammer, I’m reasonably sure it would have been locked in the car. Damn good thing, too.

I was bailed out that time. While I got on the pay phone to AAA and settled in for a wait while poor Daffy melted away in the car, a local mechanic, name of Papa Bear, happened to pull in to fill up his wrecker. With striking facility he slim-jimmed his way into the car and I was back on the road east, away from this world where smashing a car window with a hammer seems like a viable solution to anything.

Today was different: not hot but cold, no trapped animal but a running car. No Papa Bear. No bailing out. The car and I were idling, waiting for the defroster to melt away a little obstructive ice on the rear window, when somebody started lobbying hard to have my parking space. Much too much the obliging type for my own good, I got out to quickly scrape away what ice remained. Mysteriously to me (gremlins?), the door ended up locked. Inside the car: car keys, house keys, purse, spare car keys, wallet, cell phone. Outside the car: me, scraper, gloves. Those scrapers are extremely useful when there’s ice on your car. Other times? Not so much. It wasn’t even my nifty-keen Red Wings scraper, humph.

The would-be parker rolled down her window, asked whether I’d locked myself out of the car, and registered regret that it was indeed so–regret for my distress or her inconvenience, I could not say. In any case, she found another spot within spitting distance, and seemed to be considering whether to offer any help to me, when out of the blue my friend Katie appeared with her devastatingly adorable child Siobhan and–more important, just this once–a cell phone she could spare for a little while. Ms. Not-Just-Any-Spot scurried into her nearby building, clearly relieved. As bad as the afternoon was, I must admit that Katie happening along was such a stunning little miracle that I almost feel churlish complaining about everything else. Almost.

Long story short: after trying a few local parties (University police, unmanned repair shop), I got in touch with good old AAA and joined on the spot. I even managed to dredge my American Express card number and expiration date from the recesses of my memory, digit by digit, to pay the fee. (Of this I am quite proud, even though all it probably means is that I shop too much on the internet.) They dispatched a locksmith who arrived after about 90 minutes, three times as long as billed. In fairness, Precise-Parking Lady let me into the warm vestibule of her building when she rediscovered me ten minutes before the locksmith showed. By that time, I was cutting quite a pathetic figure (and may have milked it a bit).

All told: Two hours. Thirty degrees. Maximum misery. All my dreams of being a sherpa died today.

I’m warm now. I cranked all the radiators in the apartment, closed what storm windows were still open, put on three layers of clothes and rolled myself up in a blanket until the temperature in here reached 83. After cracking a few windows and closing a couple radiators, I’ve attained a comfy 72–a fine atmosphere, don’t you think, in which to recreate the (actual arts-related) posts lost in the ether this afternoon when a suddenly disconnected modem cable made the ibook seize up, initiating this whole sorry series of events. I’ll reconstruct those for you as soon as I’ve had a little sleep. Tomorrow: much blogging, no excuses.

“As a food and travel writer, what I do for a living may seem trivial, but whenever I think of it as ephemeral to the great issues of the day, I am reminded of a scene in the play ‘The Diary of Anne Frank.’ Isolated for months in an attic but still believing they will soon escape, the family fantasizes about the first thing each member will do when they return to the world outside. Anne says she yearns to go to a dance. The teenage boy wants to go to a movie, a western movie! And the adults all start remembering and dreaming of a wonderful pastry shop, a good stew, a romantic restaurant with thick linen and fine wines. None, not one, declares that the first thing he wants to do is to change the political structure of Europe.”

John Mariani, “Gluttony, Reconsidered” (with thanks to Felix Salmon for the Topic Magazine link)