Via Boing Boing via Gaper’s Block via Coudal Partners comes news of a fortune cookie fortune that inspired someone to create a web page deeming it “the best fortune cookie ever.” That’s neat, but do they all know the very same fortune also inspired the lovely and talented Erin McKeown to write a terrific song, beloved by me and Terry? (See track #3, “Life on the Moon.”) Maybe someday we can live on the moon,” the song goes; but “because we can doesn’t mean we have to.” What’s next, the novel?

If you check out the Top Fives this week you’ll see that I’ve added an item specifically for Chicagoans or, I suppose, greater Midwesterners with weekend wanderlust. The item in question is a play that just opened at Strawdog Theatre here in town, where Terry and I so enjoyed Brian Friel’s Aristocrats last autumn. Now Strawdog, which is in the midst of its 20th anniversary season, is offering Richard III with the company’s Artistic Director, Nic Dimond, directing. It’s another winner.
I’m a sucker for a good villain. Even more so, I’m a sucker for casting villains against type. It’s not easy to pull off, but when successful creates a frisson like no other. Strawdog’s John Henry Roberts, who plays the title role here, struck me as just such a case–his open features and essentially empathetic demeanor assert themselves even through Richard’s blackest lines. And Roberts makes this work. He made me feel that I too would have been taken in. It makes the evil more insidious, the sting of its revelation in someone likable and trusted more devastating.
Strawdog’s performance space is challengingly small but seems to bring out the ingenuity of set designers and directors alike. For this production, however, that ingenuity seemed more directed at emphasizing the closeness of the space than overcoming it. Before any lines are spoken, an opening party scene crowds seemingly every actor in the production into this space, nearly bursting its seams. This establishes a creeping sense of claustrophobia that meshes well this Richard’s particularly insidious brand of malignancy.
In addition to Roberts’s performance, Strawdog ensemble member Jennifer Avery’s turn as Queen Elizabeth has to be singled out. In the earlier scenes, when she’s not yet widowed–and worse–she’s a perfect blithe Renaissance Heather. Later, she brings a quiet, heartbreaking conviction to Elizabeth’s sorrow and her last line of defense against Richard’s designs on her daughter. Nothing flashy here–just a thoroughly convincing and moving habitation of her character and flawless execution. Here and in Aristocrats, Avery did wonders with characters who start out hard and gradually are humanized. Whatever she does next, I hope to be there.

“My theory is–we don’t really go that far into other people, even when we think we do. We hardly ever go in and bring them out. We just stand at the jaws of the cave, and strike a match, and quickly ask if anybody’s there.”
Martin Amis, Money

Yep–I’m stealing a page from Carrie’s playbook. It’s a good book!
● David Ulin is wary of rereading once-loved books:

…you never know how a book will stick the second time around, whether it will continue to resonate or leave you oddly unfulfilled. That’s what happened with “Wise Blood,” a book that I revered in my late teens and early 20s; when I reread it this year, at the age of 45, it seemed to me less like a fully realized work of fiction than a young writer’s pastiche, flat in its way, two-dimensional, not about life as it really is but a naif’s projection of the way life could be.
It’s depressing when you lose a book like that, which is exactly what has happened: I’ve lost “Wise Blood” for good. It makes you gun-shy, wary of returning to an author; although O’Connor’s second novel, “The Violent Bear It Away” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $14 paper), was also recently reissued, I can’t bring myself to reread it, since I don’t want it to dissipate for me as well.

● Peter Suderman thinks that blogs are the vehicle that television criticism has been waiting for all these years:

Clearly, [the blogging of The Sopranos‘ last season] showed that the two mediums belong together. Traditional newspaper reviewing has never been all that successful at writing about television. Reviewers are given a few episodes of a show before a season begins and expected to extrapolate, based on just a few, early hours, on the show’s potential for success. But in the age of lengthy, arc-driven serials, one-time coverage of a story’s beginning doesn’t cut it. It’s the equivalent of a movie reviewer writing a review after seeing only the film’s first act. (Admittedly, this is easier than it sounds; rare is the movie that eventually reverses whatever opinion I hold of it at the 45 minute mark. But though you can often tell whether a film will be any good, it won’t leave you with much to actually say about it – which explains some of the weaknesses in television criticism.)
Even more to the point, regular blogging can cover the water-cooler buzz surrounding a show during a season. Part of the fun of being a TV fan these days is the anticipation, the guessing games, the questions and the chatter. No newspaper can really afford to devote enough column inches to the sort of obsession and minutiae that has become de rigueur for television fandom.

Who remembers Jayne Anne Phillips? In high school, in the heyday of my fiction-writing ambitions, I became just possessed by her short stories in the collection Black Tickets. I could recite whole paragraphs of the stuff, which to my teenaged ear had at once a daring, quickening urgency and a quicksand sensuality that could bind you to a word at a time. The story that particularly impressed me was the title story, which starts: “Jamaica Delilah, how I want you; your smell a clean yeast, a high white yogurt of the soul.” This, I thought, was how I wanted to write. Go ahead, laugh. I can take it.
Times change, and so do teenagers. I haven’t thought about Jayne Anne Phillips in many years, but the bits of her prose I remember don’t sound at all like what I’d like to write, if I were still writing fiction; to my adult ear, after a long evolution of taste, they sound for the most part pretentious and a little silly. But I wasn’t alone in embracing them. A copy of Phillips’s later story collection, Fast Lanes, recently turned up in a used bookstore and I picked it up out of curiosity and nostalgia. Its jacket boasts some pretty heady praise for her previous books (Black Tickets and her novel Machine Dreams) from some pretty powerful literary arbiters.
Robert Stone said “Machine Dreams in its wisdom and its compassionate, utterly unsentimental rendering of the American condition will rank as one of the great books of this decade.” Our old friend Michiko Kakutani, writing when still a wunderkind, offered that the novel “will doubtless come to be seen as both a remarkable novelistic debut and an enduring literary achievement.” As for Black Tickets, it is called “the unmistakable work of early genius trying her range” (Tillie Olsen) and “unlike any [stories] in our literature” (Raymond Carver). Nadine Gordimer pronounced her “the best short-story writer since Eudora Welty.”
Now, I haven’t reread Phillips, and any of this may be true. And of course we all know that praise in blurbs and book reviews is chronically overinflated. But it’s striking how enormous the claims are in these plaudits, and how very little one hears Phillips discussed today, just a few decades later. She just doesn’t seem to be part of the conversation, though she must have influenced some of the writers we do talk about. Without the benefit of rereading her, which I may try to do when I finish the book I’m reading now (Rabbit, Run, if you want to know), it’s impossible to say whether she was simply a less prodigious talent than the critics and writers (some of them doubtless her teachers) thought they were beholding or whether Phillips’s timing was unlucky, her style soon outmoded as literary taste changed. Who’s to say that in another thirty years she won’t be rediscovered and newly embraced by a new generation of readers, a la Dawn Powell?
As it happens, JL has been considering similar stories in the visual arts over at Modern Kicks: “It’s a familiar enough story: an artist seemingly poised for fame finds the aesthetic winds changing and her formerly-lauded work out of favor,” he writes of the painter Sonia Gechtoff, reminding us that failures like hers and Phillips’s to fulfill the promise attached to them aren’t always really failures at all.

There Will Be Blood and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly each begin by taking us somewhere most moviegoers, and indeed the people who made these films, could otherwise only imagine: Blood to the depths of a nineteenth-century silver mine, Diving Bell behind the eyes of a paralyzed patient regaining consciousness after three weeks spent in a coma. In both cases I found myself conscious of and a little awed by the flights of imagination required to stage and film these scenes–the surmise that was necessarily involved to answer the question “What must it have been like?”, not to mention the technical ingenuity (this piece in the Times last weekend on the production designer for Blood is illuminating on this point). And in both opening sequences space, vision, and movement are radically restricted so that we experience the passage into the rest of the movie as a widening of the given world–before it ultimately, inexorably narrows again.
I don’t think there is a lot that connects these very different movies, but I was struck in each instance by a sense of sharing or seeing a foreign experience, one unavailable outside the movie house or the imagination. Seeing these movies in the same twenty-four hours was not necessarily my brightest idea ever: they both have powerful, distinctive visions that demand their own space in which to be absorbed and appreciated. In their own singular ways, they each have a hallucinatory quality and a series of indelible images. For me, the experience of Paul Thomas Anderson’s booming, declamatory movie on Saturday overwhelmed the equally spectacular, but infinitely more delicate, sensual spectacle of Julian Schnabel’s, which I saw at a Sunday matinee.
Still, it was better to have these two bump up against one another than to miss either one. They were among the very best 2007 releases I saw. I left Blood uncertain of what it was really about–greed? capitalism? capitalism and evangelism? obsessive ambition?–and I remain unmoved by any of the answers put forward in reviews I’ve read or conversations I’ve had, while remaining tremendously moved by the movie–especially any scene in which Daniel Day-Lewis’s character, Daniel Plainview, wants something. The Diving Bell I might need to see again to fully grasp its beauty and its sharp irony: as seen, heard, and felt by a trapped and hungry mind, this world is an outrageously plenteous place.

Rats and consternation. Somehow, sometime, someway, M.S. Smith’s new incarnation of his nonpareil culture blog, Where the Stress Falls, fell off our blogroll. We don’t know how this happened–its predecessor site, CultureSpace, had been a longtime favorite here and in fact made an appearance as a Top Five–but we’re happy to restore it now, and to give special mention to Smith’s recently posted essays on his favorite movies and music of 2007.
And it’s with keen regret that we note the tentative retirement of another blogroll mainstay and another Top Fiver, James Tata, whose blog chronicling his cultural and literary enthusiasms has long been a reliable pleasure. He says:

I’m tired of having opinions about everything I read and watch and listen to. I think I’d like to be an open aperture for a while, just taking it all in.

Here’s to a rejuvenating break from opinion-having, and here’s hoping for a mere hiatus.

After I posted last week about seeing Chicago Lyric’s splendid production of Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten, Lisa Hirsch, who blogs knowledgeably about such matters at Iron Tongue of Midnight, wrote to me with an assessment of the opera’s plot that is just too brilliant not to be shared:

The plot drives me mad, between the idea that no one can possibly be fulfilled without children and the sheer ponderousness that results from taking “The Magic Flute,” layering on another dozen characters, replacing the Masonic allegories with something Hoffmansthal made up, and carefully cutting out all the wit and humor of the Mozart. Still, the music glitters and thunders, and the Empress’s transformation scene, done well, is one of the great scenes in all opera. But then I have to put my head in my hands during the damned chorus of unborn children–sheesh!

Hahahahaha! So it wasn’t just me.
Lisa was also kind enough to recommend to me some recordings of the opera: this full recording of a Wolfgang Sawallisch production and two cut versions conducted by Karl Bohm and Herbert von Karajan.