Time once again to upend the bag and pour out a pile of v. cool and/or amusing links.

– Michael Blowhard on the mysterious profession:

Actors generally don’t know who they really are. They find a center only when they pour themselves into the container of a “character”; they become most fully who they are when they turn themselves into someone else. Actors are often charming and gifted creatures, but they’ll drive you crazy too. An actress might say one thing at 8 a.m. and then say something completely contradictory at 4 p.m. She wouldn’t be bothered by this because in both cases she’s been true to her feelings of the moment–and because being “true to the moment,” whatever it happens to be, is what being an actor is all about. Men in romantic relationships with actresses often find these women a terrific turn-on–the passion! The excitement! The responsiveness! Yet the men often spend a lot of time scratching their heads in bewilderment too, wondering if anyone’s truly home….

This has not been my experience with actors, but I know plenty of people who beg to differ. Maybe I’ve just been lucky. (Or not.)

– Mr. Alicublog finally catches up with Sideways (what kept him?), and has some objections mixed with praise:

So what’s good? Mostly stuff that (forgive me) ripens over the course of the film. The dramaturgy is wicked smart. For example, throughout most of Sideways I wondered, what do these two guys see in each other? They spend most of the movie savagely attacking each other’s actions and motivations. Good friends may do that, of course, but underneath it all you expect to see traces at least of the ties that bind.

Payne was subtle about this–maybe over-subtle. The big clues came late: the attack at the golf course, and especially Miles’ reclamation of Jack’s wallet. After these the rest of their relationship, and the whole movie, made more sense. Jack may seem like a heedless horndog and Miles a volatile lush, but each has a strain of madness that the other can enjoy, if only because it’s different and thereby more exciting to him than his own….

– Mr. Thinking About Art has had it up to here, or maybe there, with theory:

What in the world does it add to the art viewing experience of 99.9% of the general public? Not much, I think. Certainly there is a place for theory in our academic institutions and surely contextualizing art among all the various -ism’s is valuable. But Jerry Saltz’s piece blasting Damien Hirst is a perfect example of why theory in art criticism and reviews in mostly useless. Give me Saltz’s 885 words without theory any day of the week. Saltz’s article actually means something to me. I can feel his experience of Hirst’s work. I can connect to his opinion. I can sense Saltz’s emotional response to the work.

Anyone can learn art theory if they wish. I’d venture a guess that if you took 100 art historians and asked them to write a theory-based critique of Hirst’s show, you’d get 100 very similar writing samples. It’s not unique like economic theory isn’t unique. We can all learn it. For me, econometrics is much more exciting and insightful. You can use some theory and techniques, but without some creativity and a personal approach, you’ll get stale results. Art for me is the same way and it’s why I write my reviews from a personal, opinionated viewpoint. Some may say, “We’ve all got opinions!” And my response would be, “That’s the point!” We don’t all have knowledge of theory….

– Guess who?

Confession time: We’ve never been able to finish, or even get half of the way through, a novel by Saul Bellow. Maybe it’s the language, which seems a bit overdone to us. Maybe it’s how discursive and repetitive the books are. Maybe the alleged revolution that he brought to the writing of the American novel has already been so thoroughly absorbed that we’re unable to appreciate how groundbreaking it truly is. In any event, we’re prepared to admit that the fault must lie with us: Enough of the people we admire and respect claim him as a genius; perhaps he’s the sort of writer that demands more attention be paid than our usual reading style (naked on the couch, a flask of bourbon at our side, Motorhead’s Orgasmatron blasting from the hi-fi) allows….

– Admirers (and non-admirers) of Truman Capote will have a field day with the Lawrence Journal-World‘s elaborate package of freshly reported stories commemorating the 40th anniversary of the publication of In Cold Blood. Here’s the beauty part: they were all written by college students. Print-media journalism may not be dead after all….

– Supermaud stumbles across a copy of another of my beloved books, the Viking Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I wonder why it went out of print?)

– “Heather,” the semi-anonymous California pianist who blogs at in the wings, one of my current faves, describes what it feels like to turn pages for another pianist:

The requirements for this duty are straightforward enough: make yourself invisible, make sure you never turn too early or too late, make sure you never turn two pages at once, make sure to turn back pages when repeats are taken, and make sure to turn ahead to codas. Considering how long I’ve been reading music, page turning ought to allow me the lucky opportunity to study the pianist’s technique, from fingering to pedaling to words muttered under the breath, but really, my levels of attention and perception rise near to performance level when I take that seat. And damn but I forgot how fast the second and fourth movements of Faur

– A good friend of mine is friendly with the significant other of a person to whom I gave a bad review the other day. (Sorry to be so roundabout, but I don’t want to leave any tracks.) Shortly thereafter, my friend made the mistake of mentioning to her friend that we were friends, whereupon–as Lester Young used to put it–she felt a draft. I was sorry to hear it, but glad she told me. Too often those who do what I do for a living overlook the fact that we’re writing about real people. We should never forget, or be allowed to forget, that we are capable of causing hurt and doing harm. Even the famous have feelings.

– My colleagues are forever encouraging me to make embarrassing taste-related revelations along the lines of the treasurable fact that Lionel and Diana Trilling were Kojak fans. (This reminds me to report the stop-press news that Sir John Gielgud liked Cheers, in part because he found Ted Danson sexy.) Alas, I never seem able to oblige, not because I’m unwilling but because I simply can’t come up with anything sufficiently uncultivated on the spot. So when I thought of a good one the other day, I resolved to pass it on to you at the earliest opportunity: two of the very first songs I downloaded from iTunes were Blue

I haven’t read my blogmail for the past few days. I won’t read it for the next few days, or at least not until I finish writing my three remaining print-media pieces. It’s nothing personal, I swear. I promise to read it all and get back to you all, sooner or later.

(O.K., later. But not too much later.)

“The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life–and it seems to be the port also, in sooth, to which my course again finally directs itself! This loneliness (since I mention it)–what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper, about me, at any rate, than anything else; deeper than my ‘genius,’ deeper than my ‘discipline,’ deeper than my pride, deeper, above all, than the deep counterminings of art.”

Henry James, letter to W. Morton Fullerton (1900)

I moved to New York twenty years ago this month. It never occurred to me as a young man that I would someday live here, and I’m still capable of being taken aback by the improbable fact that I do. Just the other day I was riding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a cab, and as I glanced out the window at the skyline of lower Manhattan, the city suddenly looked strange to me, as if I’d never seen it before. Perhaps you can never feel completely at home in a city to which you move at the ripe old age of twenty-nine.

I celebrated my twentieth anniversary as a New Yorker by slipping out of town for a few days–an appropriate gesture, I think, since Manhattan, for all its myriad wonders, has a way of getting on your nerves after a couple of months’ worth of continuous exposure. As I sat on a park bench by the Hudson River, basking in the sunshine and idly turning the pages of Du c

For those who’ve been elsewhere of late, we’re batting around
the possibility of coming up with a more striking name for the mental disorder known as “clinical depression.” One reader wrote to remind us that Winston Churchill referred to his own depression as “the black dog,” and a couple of classicists obligingly translated that homely phrase into resonantly medical-sounding Latin.

In case you didn’t see her announcement last Wednesday, Our Girl in Chicago has a new job and two full hands. In order to maintain her sanity, she’s decided to post mainly on Saturdays and Sundays (though you shouldn’t be too terribly surprised if she should poke her head in on the odd weekday), meaning that “About Last Night” now returns to its former status as a full-service 24/7 blog.

When I remember bygone days

I think how evening follows morn;

So many I loved were not yet dead,

So many I love were not yet born.