Archives for August 2005

Here’s some of what I’ve run across on the Web in the past couple of weeks:

– Jay Rosen, journalism professor and mediablogger extraordinaire, holds forth on the subject of things he used to teach that he no longer believes. Among them:

I used to teach it implicitly: journalism is a profession. Now I think it’s a practice, in which pros and amateurs both participate. There were good things about the professional model, and we should retain them. But it’s the strength of the social practice that counts, not the health of any so-called profession. That is what J-schools should teach and stand for, I believe. I don’t care if they’re called professional schools. They should equip the American people to practice journalism by teaching the students who show up, and others out there who may want help….

Yes. Totally. And if you’re a blogger, you soooo know what he’s talking about.

– Online theater columnist Peter Filichia points out that the list of the ten longest-running plays on Broadway “is the same today as it was on June 13, 1982, the day Deathtrap finally called it quits”:

1. Life with Father (3,224 performances)

2. Tobacco Road (3,182)

3. Abie’s Irish Rose (2,327)

4. Gemini (1,819)

5. Deathtrap (1,793)

6. Harvey (1,775)

7. Born Yesterday (1,642)

8. Mary, Mary (1,572)

9. The Voice of the Turtle (1,557)

10. Barefoot in the Park (1,530)

He also explains why.

(Incidentally, how many of you recognize all ten of these plays? The only one of which I’d never heard was Gemini.)

– Found object: I saw a new one-woman play about Edna St. Vincent Millay the other night, and came away wondering what her actual speaking voice sounded like. The answer is here.

– Department of Posthumous Praise: The divine Ms. Althouse, who guested on Instapundit last week, used that space to pay a nice little tribute to the late Barbara Bel Geddes, and got a funny and revealing piece of e-mail in return.

I, too, thought Bel Geddes was a babe, especially in Blood on the Moon, one of my all-time favorite Westerns (not yet out on DVD, and why the hell not?).

– We don’t do politics here, but Mr. Alicublog was so funny the other day on the subject of conservatives who hate Hollywood that I just had to steer you his way:

I actually think rightwing cinephile Jason Apuzzo has a great idea–that conservatives who are forever bitching about ee-vil Hollywood should cease “verbally ‘rebutting’ these movies like dour lawyers in a courtroom” and start making movies themselves. I should certainly like to see Halliburton Films’ epic production, The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew, starring John Goodman as a hard-drinking Wisconsin Senator up against International Communism and the Democrat Party, played by James Woods. I would also enjoy a new version of The Grapes of Wrath in which the Joads toss flowers to the men who have come to bulldoze their home, and cheerfully take jobs at roadside hamburger stands built by a dreamy-eyed young Ray Kroc (played by Stephen Baldwin)….

While Mr. A and I rarely see eye to eye on matters of state, nobody, and I mean nobody, does the funky reductio ad absurdum the way he does.

– Ms. Bookish Gardener explores her “presumptuous familiarity” with Oscar Levant, one of my all-time favorite minor celebrities.

– Here‘s why litbloggers should post more often about out-of-print books…

– …and here‘s why they shouldn’t get so big for their britches that they forget the whole point of book reviewing (or any other kind of criticism, if I do say so myself).

– Mark Swed takes a long look at which American symphony orchestras are up and which down, and comes up with some interesting conclusions:

The orchestral landscape in America is not what it used to be. Once, American ensembles were lorded over by the “Big Five”–the main orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cleveland. East Coast critics, while conceding the orchestral energy emanating from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, continue to use that proprietary term, but it means nothing. The real scene has no center.

The hot conductors are in Los Angeles (Esa-Pekka Salonen), Boston (James Levine), San Francisco (Michael Tilson Thomas), Atlanta (Robert Spano) and Minneapolis (Osmo Vanska). This fall, David Robertson is expected to put St. Louis on the A-list. In 2006, when [Marin] Alsop begins in Baltimore, it too should join the party….

I don’t buy every name on that list, but it’s a good starting point for discussion.

– My favorite blogger (who says I can’t make a commitment?) goes to an exhibition of art by Richard Tuttle, and compares what she sees there to the recipes of Paul Bertolli:

The presentation of simple principles tends to leave meaning wide open, but Tuttle and Bertolli only flirt with abstraction. Tomato? Plywood? Wire shadow? Summer squash? One cannot help but reference a very personal relationship to these familiar materials, and this bit of “personal referencing” is what provokes comments of the sort I heard wandering through the Tuttle show: “Why, I could do this!” or “My son made a picture just like that in his second grade art class.” Sure, and your son could smash a whole tomato in a bowl and call it gazpacho, too. Viewing the simple as “art” is often a challenge and why Restaurant or Museum become almost necessary. Bertolli and Tuttle are virtuosos who turn our focus to something quite primary and basic; while not revolutionary, their work causes one to pay attention and realize that being simple is not so simple at all….

You can cook for me any time, ma’am.

– I love this map, at which I look several times each day. (Have you seen it yet, OGIC?)

– This is the best list I’ve seen on a blog in, like, ever. Be prepared to spend at least ten minutes relishing it.

– Finally, two from Supermaud, who filets Thomas Wolfe (me, too! me, too!), then remarks on an urban phenomenon I recently noted with similar wistfulness:

There are no stars in the Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky….

That puts me in mind of something I once wrote about small-town life: “A small town needs lots of explaining. It has no tall buildings, and the landmarks are all in your mind. When you look up, you see the sky; when you show somebody the sights, you see yourself.”

See you later.

Here’s some of what I’ve run across on the Web in the past couple of weeks:

– Jay Rosen, journalism professor and mediablogger extraordinaire, holds forth on the subject of things he used to teach that he no longer believes. Among them:

I used to teach it implicitly: journalism is a profession. Now I think it’s a practice, in which pros and amateurs both participate. There were good things about the professional model, and we should retain them. But it’s the strength of the social practice that counts, not the health of any so-called profession. That is what J-schools should teach and stand for, I believe. I don’t care if they’re called professional schools. They should equip the American people to practice journalism by teaching the students who show up, and others out there who may want help….

Yes. Totally. And if you’re a blogger, you soooo know what he’s talking about.

– Online theater columnist Peter Filichia points out that the list of the ten longest-running plays on Broadway “is the same today as it was on June 13, 1982, the day Deathtrap finally called it quits”:

1. Life with Father (3,224 performances)

2. Tobacco Road (3,182)

3. Abie’s Irish Rose (2,327)

4. Gemini (1,819)

5. Deathtrap (1,793)

6. Harvey (1,775)

7. Born Yesterday (1,642)

8. Mary, Mary (1,572)

9. The Voice of the Turtle (1,557)

10. Barefoot in the Park (1,530)

He also explains why.

(Incidentally, how many of you recognize all ten of these plays? The only one of which I’d never heard was Gemini.)

– Found object: I saw a new one-woman play about Edna St. Vincent Millay the other night, and came away wondering what her actual speaking voice sounded like. The answer is here.

– Department of Posthumous Praise: The divine Ms. Althouse, who guested on Instapundit last week, used that space to pay a nice little tribute to the late Barbara Bel Geddes, and got a funny and revealing piece of e-mail in return.

I, too, thought Bel Geddes was a babe, especially in Blood on the Moon, one of my all-time favorite Westerns (not yet out on DVD, and why the hell not?).

– We don’t do politics here, but Mr. Alicublog was so funny the other day on the subject of conservatives who hate Hollywood that I just had to steer you his way:

I actually think rightwing cinephile Jason Apuzzo has a great idea–that conservatives who are forever bitching about ee-vil Hollywood should cease “verbally ‘rebutting’ these movies like dour lawyers in a courtroom” and start making movies themselves. I should certainly like to see Halliburton Films’ epic production, The Joe McCarthy Nobody Knew, starring John Goodman as a hard-drinking Wisconsin Senator up against International Communism and the Democrat Party, played by James Woods. I would also enjoy a new version of The Grapes of Wrath in which the Joads toss flowers to the men who have come to bulldoze their home, and cheerfully take jobs at roadside hamburger stands built by a dreamy-eyed young Ray Kroc (played by Stephen Baldwin)….

While Mr. A and I rarely see eye to eye on matters of state, nobody, and I mean nobody, does the funky reductio ad absurdum the way he does.

– Ms. Bookish Gardener explores her “presumptuous familiarity” with Oscar Levant, one of my all-time favorite minor celebrities.

– Here‘s why litbloggers should post more often about out-of-print books…

– …and here‘s why they shouldn’t get so big for their britches that they forget the whole point of book reviewing (or any other kind of criticism, if I do say so myself).

– Mark Swed takes a long look at which American symphony orchestras are up and which down, and comes up with some interesting conclusions:

The orchestral landscape in America is not what it used to be. Once, American ensembles were lorded over by the “Big Five”–the main orchestras of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cleveland. East Coast critics, while conceding the orchestral energy emanating from the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony, continue to use that proprietary term, but it means nothing. The real scene has no center.

The hot conductors are in Los Angeles (Esa-Pekka Salonen), Boston (James Levine), San Francisco (Michael Tilson Thomas), Atlanta (Robert Spano) and Minneapolis (Osmo Vanska). This fall, David Robertson is expected to put St. Louis on the A-list. In 2006, when [Marin] Alsop begins in Baltimore, it too should join the party….

I don’t buy every name on that list, but it’s a good starting point for discussion.

– My favorite blogger (who says I can’t make a commitment?) goes to an exhibition of art by Richard Tuttle, and compares what she sees there to the recipes of Paul Bertolli:

The presentation of simple principles tends to leave meaning wide open, but Tuttle and Bertolli only flirt with abstraction. Tomato? Plywood? Wire shadow? Summer squash? One cannot help but reference a very personal relationship to these familiar materials, and this bit of “personal referencing” is what provokes comments of the sort I heard wandering through the Tuttle show: “Why, I could do this!” or “My son made a picture just like that in his second grade art class.” Sure, and your son could smash a whole tomato in a bowl and call it gazpacho, too. Viewing the simple as “art” is often a challenge and why Restaurant or Museum become almost necessary. Bertolli and Tuttle are virtuosos who turn our focus to something quite primary and basic; while not revolutionary, their work causes one to pay attention and realize that being simple is not so simple at all….

You can cook for me any time, ma’am.

– I love this map, at which I look several times each day. (Have you seen it yet, OGIC?)

– This is the best list I’ve seen on a blog in, like, ever. Be prepared to spend at least ten minutes relishing it.

– Finally, two from Supermaud, who filets Thomas Wolfe (me, too! me, too!), then remarks on an urban phenomenon I recently noted with similar wistfulness:

There are no stars in the Brooklyn sky at night. And when I say none, I mean zero.

After six years in these parts, their absence begins to seem normal. You actually forget that it’s not natural to look to the spire at the top of the Chrysler Building, and to the rest of the Manhattan skyline, for illumination after dark. You notice the moon maybe once a month, when it’s red and hanging low in the sky….

That puts me in mind of something I once wrote about small-town life: “A small town needs lots of explaining. It has no tall buildings, and the landmarks are all in your mind. When you look up, you see the sky; when you show somebody the sights, you see yourself.”

See you later.

The one thing you can almost never tell an artist friend is that you don’t like his art. It’s dicey merely to say that you don’t understand a particular work, much less that it doesn’t speak to you (even if you go out of your way to assure him that the failing is yours). It’s all but impossible to have a friendly relationship, or even a cordial one, if you simply don’t respond to anything he does. In some cases this is a function of the artist’s vanity, but I’m sure that more often it has to do with his deep-seated uncertainties. Many of the artists I know have fragile egos, and though some of them are amazingly successful at hiding this fragility, most are not. As Orson Welles once said to Peter Bogdanovich, “A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.”

What is less well understood is that the problem runs in both directions. I’ve met and liked artists whose work I later discovered I didn’t much care for, and that fact invariably had an adverse effect on the way I felt about them as people. Indeed, I now go well out of my way to avoid being much more than polite to artists whom I meet socially until I have a chance to look at or listen to their work–and most especially if I like them on sight, as is occasionally the case.

I met the Mutant, a friend of mine who sings jazz, under circumstances that forced us to sit together in a shuttered nightclub and chat for an hour or so one afternoon, then return to the same club that evening to hear a performance by a mutual friend. When we parted, she gave me one of her demo CDs. I’d enjoyed talking to her so much that I actually took a cab straight to my apartment and listened to the whole CD before coming back to the club. Oh, God, I hope this is good, I said to myself all the way home. It was, and we immediately became and remained very close friends. Would that have happened if my response to her singing had been lukewarm? I doubt it.

It is, needless to say, surprisingly easy to admire the work of artists you can’t stand personally. In addition, I find it all too easy to steer clear of occasions to review their work, which is why I go out of my way to do the opposite and write favorably about them whenever I can. It’s one of the ways I keep myself honest (though I don’t write profiles of artists I dislike personally–that’s where I draw the line).

The one thing you can almost never tell an artist friend is that you don’t like his art. It’s dicey merely to say that you don’t understand a particular work, much less that it doesn’t speak to you (even if you go out of your way to assure him that the failing is yours). It’s all but impossible to have a friendly relationship, or even a cordial one, if you simply don’t respond to anything he does. In some cases this is a function of the artist’s vanity, but I’m sure that more often it has to do with his deep-seated uncertainties. Many of the artists I know have fragile egos, and though some of them are amazingly successful at hiding this fragility, most are not. As Orson Welles once said to Peter Bogdanovich, “A bad word from a colleague can darken a whole day. We need encouragement a lot more than we admit, even to ourselves.”

What is less well understood is that the problem runs in both directions. I’ve met and liked artists whose work I later discovered I didn’t much care for, and that fact invariably had an adverse effect on the way I felt about them as people. Indeed, I now go well out of my way to avoid being much more than polite to artists whom I meet socially until I have a chance to look at or listen to their work–and most especially if I like them on sight, as is occasionally the case.

I met the Mutant, a friend of mine who sings jazz, under circumstances that forced us to sit together in a shuttered nightclub and chat for an hour or so one afternoon, then return to the same club that evening to hear a performance by a mutual friend. When we parted, she gave me one of her demo CDs. I’d enjoyed talking to her so much that I actually took a cab straight to my apartment and listened to the whole CD before coming back to the club. Oh, God, I hope this is good, I said to myself all the way home. It was, and we immediately became and remained very close friends. Would that have happened if my response to her singing had been lukewarm? I doubt it.

It is, needless to say, surprisingly easy to admire the work of artists you can’t stand personally. In addition, I find it all too easy to steer clear of occasions to review their work, which is why I go out of my way to do the opposite and write favorably about them whenever I can. It’s one of the ways I keep myself honest (though I don’t write profiles of artists I dislike personally–that’s where I draw the line).

“It is sometimes the case with first-rate people that their lives seem to come to an end–sometimes very suddenly–just when they have finished performing their function.”

Edmund Wilson, “Lytton Strachey” (in The Shores of Light)

“It is sometimes the case with first-rate people that their lives seem to come to an end–sometimes very suddenly–just when they have finished performing their function.”

Edmund Wilson, “Lytton Strachey” (in The Shores of Light)

Terry does indeed know where to insert the knife–and has a wicked twist of the wrist when it’s called for. Another critic
pretty well-versed in the art of punishment is Ebert, who has posted this list of the worst movies he has had the misfortune of seeing. It’s a nice enough little parade of potshots.

I wonder, though: wouldn’t it be so much more fun if one had, you know, seen more than a handful of these movies? (If you have–I’m sorry.) I recently took part in an impromptu summit meeting on bad movies while waiting for Wedding Crashers (not at all bad) to start, during which my friend averred that to make a truly bad movie, you must have pretensions to goodness or, better yet, greatness. I think I agree.
Is it news to anyone that “Baby Geniuses” is terrible? How much fun is it to stick your finely honed pin in “Halloween III”? Once in a while Ebert’s list gets a little more controversial, and that’s where the fun begins. For example, he hates “The Usual Suspects”: “Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: “To the degree that I do understand, I don’t care.” Now we’re getting somewhere. This is the kind of movie that has actual fans who may take one’s derision as an indictment of their judgment and taste. More like this, please.

Which leads to a question. What are your favorite sacred-ish cows to slaughter? And by “sacred-ish,” I mean revered, or at least taken seriously, by your own peer group. You know: movies it actually costs you something to cut down. I can ridicule “American Beauty” or a lot of other Best Picture winners until I’m blue in the face, but it takes a Jarmusch-directed roll of the eyes to really get my friends’ attention. (About Jarmusch, it’s not all that fair a blanket judgment, as I haven’t seen a thing the man’s made since the highly unwatchable “Night on Earth,” while most of the JJ fans I know seem to pin their fandom on “Dead Man,” unseen by me. Still, “Night on Earth” was bad enough to instantly tar many a Jarmusch film as of then unmade, and I don’t regret missing any of them. But I’m certain to break the boycott at last for Bill Murray in “Broken Flowers” even though I’m growing a little weary of Murray’s indie-film rounds-making. It’s starting to remind me of the way every city needs their Frank Gehry structure, and a lot of them look interchangeable–these days every young Turk director needs a Bill Murray performance, and a lot of them look pretty interchangeable as well. Give me Bilbao and “Rushmore” and let’s move on already.)

But as I was saying: if you were to draw up your own Ebertesque hit list, what would the most controversial entries be? Email me.

• I wrote what I thought was a pretty funny theater review this morning. It took me two and a half hours to finish the first draft and an hour to polish it. I spent most of that last hour cutting 120 words out of my 1,070-word first draft. None of the cuts was longer than a single sentence–it was mostly a matter of trimming individual words and phrases. The first draft contained all the jokes that made it into the final version I e-mailed to my editor, but they were much funnier when I was done.

To the extent that I have a reputation for being funny (though only on paper, alas), it’s probably because I take such pains to trim away superfluous verbiage from my best lines. Wit, I suspect, is mostly a matter of self-editing. Beyond that, I learned a long time ago that one of the easiest ways to be funny is to say exactly what you think. Some critics pull their punches, but I never do. Often I pass over bad things in merciful silence–I try whenever possible to give working actors a break, for instance–but when I do throw a punch, I always go straight for the jaw.

It’s not quite the same thing, but Somerset Maugham once wrote a short story called “Jane” about an unsophisticated woman who acquired a reputation as a high-society wit simply by telling the truth:

I’d said the same things for thirty years and no one ever saw anything to laugh at. I thought it must be my clothes or my bobbed hair or my eyeglass. Then I discovered it was because I spoke the truth. It was so unusual that people thought it humorous. One of these days someone else will discover the secret, and when people habitually tell the truth of course there’ll be nothing funny in it.

George Bernard Shaw agreed: “My way of joking is to tell the truth. It’s the funniest joke in the world.” That’s what I try to do. An example is my Wall Street Journal review of the recent Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, in which Christian Slater played Tom, the character based on Williams himself. I compared Slater’s bluntly straightforward performance to the “careful, over-enunciated” acting of Jessica Lange as his mother: “The bluff, easygoing Mr. Slater is all wrong, too, but at least he acts like a real person, albeit one from some other play (I wanted to send him a telegram at intermission saying DIDN’T ANYBODY TELL YOU TOM IS GAY?).” That’s not a joke, nor is it a comic exaggeration. It’s a near-verbatim transcript of what I was thinking as I watched Slater on stage–but it’s funny.

• Said today by my trainer: “You know, I think God is like a little kid with an ant farm. Sometimes he squashes you, sometimes he only pulls off a couple of legs. Or caves your tunnel in. Or sprays you with Raid.”