Archives for 2004

“I was horribly self-conscious; I wanted everybody to look at me and think me the most fascinating creature in the world, and yet I died a small hideous death if I saw even one person throw a casual glance at me.”

M.F.K. Fisher, “The Measure of My Powers” (1927)

* * *

“More often than not people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone. Women are puzzled, which they hate to be, and jealous of the way I am served, with such agreeable courtesy, and of what I am eating and drinking, which is almost never the sort of thing they order for themselves. And men are puzzled too, in a more personal way. I anger them as males.

“I am sorry. I do not like to do that, or puzzle the women either. But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence. Men see me eating in public, and I look as if I ‘knew my way around’; and yet I make it plain that I know my way around without them, and that upsets them.

“I know what I want, and I usually get it because I am adaptable to locales. I order meals that are more typically masculine than feminine, if feminine means whipped-cream-and-cherries. I like good wines, or good drinkin’-likka, and beers and ales. I like waiters; I think the woman who said that waiters are much nicer than people was right, and quite often waitresses are too. So they are always nice to me, which is a sure way to annoy other diners whose soup, quite often, they would like to spit in.

“And all these reasons, and probably a thousand others, like the way I wear my hair and what shade my lipstick is, make people look strangely at me, resentfully, with a kind of hurt bafflement, when I dine alone.”

M.F.K. Fisher, “The Lemming to the Sea” (1938)

(Both essays appear in The Gastronomical Me.)

Here’s a more revealing version of yesterday’s story:

Boulevard Diner, ele_en-forty.

I down a hot cup of java.

It’s too quiet.

As a gun barrel whacks my noggin

I realize Dixie set me _p.

And here’s another story belonging to the same rarefied genre:

“Jefe–a burro I view like a pet–

vs. a burrow I dig.

I can tell my ass from a hole in the ground!”

Don Qu_xote eyed Sanc_o Panza: “I get it.”

Ninety-eight letters–the same ninety-eight letters–and two blanks. That’s right, they’re Scrabblegrams: they use all the letters and only the letters in Scrabble to tell a coherent if brief tale. Don Quixote was composed by Eric Chaikin, director of Word Wars, who must have felt smiled upon when it struck him that the names of the novel’s two main characters took care of the Q, the X, and the Z in one fell swoop. Boulevard Diner was written by Eric’s brother Andrew Chaikin, who maintains a website about all his many endeavors here.

Perhaps it’s not quite A Void, but it delights and impresses the hell out of me.

– James Lileks goes shopping for a new duvet:

Several styles are available for purchase: Laura Ashley having a screaming acid fit, Clown Pelt, creepy-crawly paisley, and one sage-hued item that I can only describe as “ribbed for her pleasure.”

Clown Pelt. Heh.

– In Slate, Timothy Noah points out that the Kerry campaign’s close-reading skills are in need of a tune-up.

Last month, Chatterbox urged John Kerry to drop the campaign slogan, “Let America be America again.” Instead, Kerry has wrapped his arms more tightly around the slogan’s regrettable source. As Chatterbox noted in the earlier column, “Let America be America again” comes from a poem published in 1938 by the Harlem renaissance poet Langston Hughes. But Hughes intended the line ironically. A black man living in the pre-civil rights era would have had to be insane to look back to a golden age of freedom and equality in America, and Hughes was not insane. Hughes was, rather, an enthusiastic cheerleader for the Soviet Union at the time he wrote “Let America Be America Again,” which explains the poem’s agitprop tone.

– In the Chicago Tribune book section, Scott McLemee looks askance at Dale Peck’s Hatchet Jobs and puts the Great Snark Debate in depressing perspective:

What is worrisome about contemporary book commentary is not that someone with Peck’s habitual mean-spiritedness has carved out a name for himself–though it does suggest that criticism is now as much a part of the entertainment industry as gangster rap and extreme makeovers. People laugh at his jokes, or at the skinhead Paul Bunyan impersonation on the cover of his book, or both. Yet they overlook his efforts to be thoughtful, which are, if anything, just as funny. Adolescents often feel the need to philosophize, after a fashion. And I’m afraid that is precisely the impression left whenever Peck turns from strident denunciation of a particular novelist to sweeping generalizations about the culture. Still, the latter are a necessary element of criticism–part of the job of sorting and judging literature and of making sense of life itself. Peck may do it badly, but what makes the situation a crisis is that scarcely anyone cares.

This ultra-short story seems simple enough, but it was composed under a rather exacting restriction. Can you figure out what it is?

Boulevard Diner, eleven-forty.

I down a hot cup of java.

It’s too quiet.

As a gun barrel whacks my noggin,

I realize Dixie set me up.

I’ll post another such story tonight.

(Yes, I concede that you can find the answer through strategic Googling. But wouldn’t it be more fun not to?)

It is my frequent practice to draft blog posts in bed late at night, email the drafts to my work address, and pass out with the ibook on my lap. In the morning I get to work, spruce up the drafts as time allows, and post them. So went last night, but I stumbled into the office this morning to find my work and personal email down and my drafts adrift in cyberspace. The techies say our email will be back up later this afternoon, which could mean tomorrow. Please do check back in–I’ll have lots to post once email is back, and in the meantime I should be able to muster some bits and pieces. And if you sent me any email since last night? I have a better excuse than usual for being slow to write back [cue eye-rolling among my beleaguered correspondents].

All you Chicagoans, Word Wars is now playing up at Facets. It won’t be there for long. Chicago Tribune film critic Michael Wilmington loved it. Your faithful correspondent is somewhat partial, but loved it, too (scroll down).

I’m in The Wall Street Journal this morning, writing about The Frogs, the new Nathan Lane-Stephen Sondheim musical, greatly expanded from Burt Shevelove’s original 1974 adaptation and choreographed and directed by Susan Stroman. The buzz was bad, and as so often is the case, it was accurate:

Unfortunately, Mr. Lane and his collaborators have forgotten the Iron Law of Modern Musical Comedy, which is that no musical, no matter how good its songs may be, can succeed without a bulletproof book. What works in a straight play does not necessarily supply enough emotional energy to propel a musical. As rewritten by Shevelove and bulked up by Mr. Lane, the largely plotless “Frogs” is driven by its one- and two-liners, which aren’t even close to funny enough to keep the show afloat: “What kind of a god are you? “The kind with lower back problems.”…

So what works? Pretty much everything else. Ms. Stroman’s spectacular staging of the title number, in which evil right-wing frogs fly through the air on bungee cords, is one of her happiest choreographic inspirations. The set and costumes, by Giles Cadle and the peerless William Ivey Long, are unimprovably good. Mr. Sondheim’s score includes three first-class songs, two old and one new. The new one, “Ariadne,” is a spare, elegiac ballad of regret sung by Mr. Lane (limply, I’m afraid, though he does his best). From the original “Frogs” come “Invocation and Instructions to the Audience,” a raucous curtain-going-up prelude, and “Fear No More,” a tender setting of Shakespeare’s poignant lyric from “Cymbeline.” It’s the only time Mr. Sondheim has set another man’s words, and the results are exquisite–one of his most haunting musical inspirations.

You’d think a show with so much going for it would soar like a skyrocket. Instead, “The Frogs,” which runs through Oct. 10, stumbles through the first act and fizzles out at the end, all because of an ill-crafted book. It’s an object lesson in Musical Comedy 101. Too bad it cost the students so much to sign up for the class.

I also wrote about Broadway: The Golden Age Rick McKay’s marvelous documentary, which you will find in the Top Five module of the right-hand column. Some additional details from this morning’s review:

Mr. McKay knows when to ease back on the throttle and simply let his subjects talk. And talk they do, often amusingly and always movingly, about what it was like to work alongside such near-forgotten giants as Laurette Taylor (who is seen in her Hollywood screen test, the only sound film she ever made) and Kim Stanley (where on earth did Mr. McKay dredge up what looks like a kinescope of a live performance of “Bus Stop”?). You’ll weep–I did–to hear them share their fond memories of crummy apartments, Automat meals and big breaks.

Produced and marketed on half a shoestring, this one-man labor of love is slowly making its way across America, one screen at a time. At present it’s playing in Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco, with additional openings scheduled for Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Diego, Washington, and other cities. (Go to www.broadwaythemovie.com for further information.) If it’s not coming to an art house near you, call and complain. A DVD will be released in due course, but “Broadway: The Golden Age,” like the performers to whom it pays unforgettably eloquent tribute, deserves to be seen in a theater–even one that sells popcorn.

No link–the Journal expects you to pay for your pleasures. To read the whole thing, buy this morning’s paper and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, where you’ll find me, Joe Morgenstern on film, and lots and lots of other irresistibly readable things.

“The only difference between comedy and tragedy is the point of view.”

Howard Hawks (quoted in Todd McCarthy, Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood)