Archives for 2005

“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.”

I’ll be spending the coming week covering the New York International Fringe Festival, an undertaking that invariably keeps me jumping. I saw two full-length plays earlier this evening, one at 5:15 and the other at 9:45 (not in the same place, needless to say!), with five more to go between now and next Monday, not to mention a pair of Wall Street Journal deadlines on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings and a performance of Mark Morris’ L’Allegro on Thursday at Lincoln Center.

For all these reasons, I’m going straight to bed instead of staying up late to blog. See you when the smoke clears.

I’ll be spending the coming week covering the New York International Fringe Festival, an undertaking that invariably keeps me jumping. I saw two full-length plays earlier this evening, one at 5:15 and the other at 9:45 (not in the same place, needless to say!), with five more to go between now and next Monday, not to mention a pair of Wall Street Journal deadlines on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings and a performance of Mark Morris’ L’Allegro on Thursday at Lincoln Center.

For all these reasons, I’m going straight to bed instead of staying up late to blog. See you when the smoke clears.

Today would have been Bill Evans’ seventy-sixth birthday. Here’s something I wrote about him in the New York Times Book Review in 1998:

Many jazz musicians resemble their music. Who could have looked more worldly-wise than Duke Ellington, or wittier than Paul Desmond? But sometimes a musician embodies a contradiction, and then you can read it off his face, just as you can see a fault line snaking through a tranquil landscape. Such was the case with Bill Evans. His shining tone and cloudy pastel harmonies transformed such innocuous pop songs as ”Young and Foolish” and ”The Boy Next Door” into fleeting visions of infinite grace. Yet the bespectacled, cadaverous ruin who sat hunched over the keyboard like a broken gooseneck lamp seemed at first glance incapable of such Debussyan subtlety; something, one felt sure, must have gone terribly wrong for a man who played like that to have looked like that….

So it did, which is why Evans isn’t around to celebrate his birthday with us. But rather than dwell on the unknowable sorrow at the heart of his exquisite artistry, I’d rather point you toward five recorded performances which, taken together, say all that really needs to be said about the most influential jazz pianist of his generation:

– “Young and Foolish,” on Everybody Digs Bill Evans

– “My Foolish Heart” and “Some Other Time,” on Waltz for Debby

– “Love Theme from Spartacus,” on Conversations with Myself

– “I Loves You, Porgy,” on Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival

No one has ever made more beautiful music.

UPDATE: Go here for Doug Ramsey’s thoughts on Evans, plus a link to the unofficial Evans Web site.

Today would have been Bill Evans’ seventy-sixth birthday. Here’s something I wrote about him in the New York Times Book Review in 1998:

Many jazz musicians resemble their music. Who could have looked more worldly-wise than Duke Ellington, or wittier than Paul Desmond? But sometimes a musician embodies a contradiction, and then you can read it off his face, just as you can see a fault line snaking through a tranquil landscape. Such was the case with Bill Evans. His shining tone and cloudy pastel harmonies transformed such innocuous pop songs as ”Young and Foolish” and ”The Boy Next Door” into fleeting visions of infinite grace. Yet the bespectacled, cadaverous ruin who sat hunched over the keyboard like a broken gooseneck lamp seemed at first glance incapable of such Debussyan subtlety; something, one felt sure, must have gone terribly wrong for a man who played like that to have looked like that….

So it did, which is why Evans isn’t around to celebrate his birthday with us. But rather than dwell on the unknowable sorrow at the heart of his exquisite artistry, I’d rather point you toward five recorded performances which, taken together, say all that really needs to be said about the most influential jazz pianist of his generation:

– “Young and Foolish,” on Everybody Digs Bill Evans

– “My Foolish Heart” and “Some Other Time,” on Waltz for Debby

– “Love Theme from Spartacus,” on Conversations with Myself

– “I Loves You, Porgy,” on Bill Evans at the Montreux Jazz Festival

No one has ever made more beautiful music.

UPDATE: Go here for Doug Ramsey’s thoughts on Evans, plus a link to the unofficial Evans Web site.