Archives for 2004

I inadvertently erased your phone message to me. Apologies, but it was a long day, and my trigger finger got itchy.

Could you please call again?

“The gates of the one class should be open to the other; but neither to one class or to the other can good be done by declaring that there are no gates, no barrier, no difference.”

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

Mark Barry of Ionarts got to the Milton Avery exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington:

One room is dedicated to notebook entries, dry-point etchings such as Reclining Nude
or Rothko with Pipe,
monoprints, and woodblock prints. Avery was quite prolific, constantly drawing portraits, still lifes, and landscapes, always searching: it sure inspired me to get to work.

Read the whole thing here.

A reader writes:

I enjoy your reviews in the Journal even if most of the shows don’t make it to Minnesota and we don’t make it to NYC often.

My wife & I went to the Producers at the St. James on Feb 14. I liked the show (she loved it) but I was very uncomfortable throughout the show with the closeness of the seats. I’m 6’2″ and was jammed into the seat. My shins had dents from the seat in from of me and every time the woman leaned back it mashed my shins. My knees stuck over the top of her seat. My back also hurt too. I’ll never go back to that place again. The play was not worth the pain.

Here’s my questions:

(1) Are all Broadway seats that close?

(2) Did they add extra rows in the theatre to sell more tickets?

(3) Are the seats better on the floor? We sat in Mezzanine N 15 & 17.

(4) Am I the only one to complain?

I work for an airline and so don’t expect too much room but it was way too tight for comfort. Even my 5’2″ wife could not cross her legs.

Well said, sir. My answers:

(1) No–seat pitch varies widely from theater to theater–but some are way too close for comfort.

(2) I don’t know whether the St. James packed in additional seats for The Producers, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

(3) I haven’t sat in the balconies of most of the major New York houses (critics always sit in the orchestra), but I do know some houses where the upstairs seats are appallingly cramped. I nearly had to call an ambulance a few years ago after spending an evening in the back row of the Vivian Beaumont, for example.

(4) Probably not, but I’ve never seen such a complaint in print, and so am happy to post yours. Send the management a letter!

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.