Archives for 2004

“His taste in opera was uncomplicated and robust; he had no time for people who talked opera all day but seemed to find it shameful to accept a simple pleasure simply. Those tedious affairs in East Anglia, that strangulated lieder-singer pretending to be a tenor! Why, in Italy they wouldn’t have let him on the stage. And as for Mozart in Sussex, you could have all of Sussex and much of Mozart. Charles Russell liked good red meat and the closer the bone the better. Der Rosenkavalier–now that was something. He’d been wallowing (his own word) the night before. Bloody marvellous. The Marschallin had lost her young lover and was taking it gracefully as the woman of the world she was, so the three of them sood there and sang it out, no tiresome action, just a glorious noise. Hab’ mir’s gelobt, the knife in the heart as the warm soprano went up and up, they you thought that the orchestra was coda-ing out, and Jesus it wasn’t, the woman had five notes left. You couldn’t take them but you had to, and back you came for more agony, time and time again. Now that was opera, the real thing. Unbearable.”

William Haggard, A Cool Day for Killing

I’m afraid that, like Terry, I’m going to be away from computers on Thursday. My parents are in town for a short visit, I’m taking the day off from work, and we’ll be crisscrossing the city all day. Back Friday with answers to the remaining two of Terry’s five questions, and more. And this weekend I’ll answer my e-mail!

Here’s some recommended reading for the interim:

Maud’s musings on writers and childhood, complete with links to her own off-blog writing.

Peter Campbell in the LRB on late Vuillard.

Jim Treacher hails the “puppet episode” of Angel, comparing it to the tremendous Buffy musical and making me wish I’d never stopped watching the show. Perhaps one of my Angel-watching correspondents will be moved to file a report.

Joan Acocella–surprise!–likes Robert Altman’s ballet film The Company. Robert Gottlieb, another dance critic assigned to review the film, pretty much hated it.

That’s all from thawing Chicago for now.

Color your own Cezanne apples. Or Madame X. Or find your own favorite here.

What famous painting would I wish out of existence? I’m not sure I hate any single painting quite that much. That being the case, I incline toward banishing art whose mind-numbing ubiquity and unharnessed reproduction as stupid merchandise, more than any of its intrinsic qualities, are responsible for making it the visual equivalent of fingernails scraping a chalkboard.

“The story was thoroughly English. There was a little fox-hunting and a little tuft-hunting, some Christian virtue and some Christian cant. There was no heroism and no villainy. There was much Church, but more love-making. And it was downright honest love,–in which there was no pretence on the part of the lady that she was too ethereal to be fond of a man, no half-and-half inclination on the part of the man to pay a certain price and no more for a pretty toy. Each of them longed for the other, and they were not ashamed to say so. Consequently they in England who were living, or had lived, the same sort of life, liked Framley Parsonage.”

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography

My septuagenarian mother and I watched Lost in Translation yesterday afternoon. Somewhat to my surprise, she liked it, though she initially found Sofia Coppola’s elliptical style of storytelling a bit hard to follow. (Gen-X moviegoers suckled on MTV take jump cuts for granted, but most people born before 1950 or so are accustomed to films in which the plot elements are laid out fairly straightforwardly.) In addition, it hit me after about 10 minutes that she didn’t know what jet lag was, meaning that she couldn’t understand why Bill Murray didn’t just lie down and take a nap. Once I explained his problem, she was fine.

My mother said two things that stayed with me:

(1) She’d never heard of Scarlett Johannson. “At first I didn’t think she was very pretty,” she said, “but then I changed my mind. Isn’t her skin beautiful?”

(2) About two-thirds of the way through the film, she remarked, “They didn’t have to spend much time learning the dialogue, did they?”

Not long ago, a reader wrote:

I was reading a few of your articles and noticed biographical details scattered throughout the prose. My suggestion is that you gather them all
together, fill in the gaps and post the expanded “about me” as a permanent addition to your blog. Where are you from, why did you become a critic, and where did you get your first break, long-term goals, etc. What could be more interesting for your regular readers?

A lot of things, actually. It’s not that I’m averse to autobiography–indeed, I once went so far as to commit a memoir–but like most natural-born short hitters, I find that I prefer as a rule to salt my writings with personal detail rather than serving it up as a main course. I did try squashing the story of my professional life into an annotated resum

God of the Machine is waxing fogyish this morning about the five questions I asked Our Girl on Sunday. I can hear his joints creaking all the way from here.

As for his attempt to crack wise about my knowledge of art history, I’ll leave it to those bloggers privileged to have viewed the Teachout Museum. Go get him, Lizzie! (And if he’s trying to make fun of OGIC, too, he’s a dead man….)