Archives for 2003

Here’s just a quick Saturday evening post while my weekend guests–you know them as Cinetrix and the ‘Fesser–have popped out to see some other friends in the ‘hood. I expect them back in a little while with some Ribs ‘n’ Bibs; a good, greasy time will be had by all.

I know I’ve been scarce around these parts since before Thanksgiving. This was in large part because I was consumed with worry on behalf of the resident cat, Daffy, who had tentatively been diagnosed with a serious heart problem. She had an ultrasound yesterday, though, that revealed a normal, healthy heart. Relief all around.

Next week should be better. I have plans, including an interview with a young filmmaker (and friend of About Last Night) who just had his first film selected for the Sundance Film Festival, in the documentary category. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, all good wishes to poor Terry with his headcold and blizzard. Terr, we’ll call you tomorrow! Hang in there with the Theraflu and DVDs! (Hm, this could be the perfect opportunity for you to watch L’Atalante! I promise you’ll adore it!)

New York is covered with fifty feet of snow. (That’s what it looks like from my window, anyway.) My throbbing head is full of some unmentionable goo. I’m not going to the press preview I was supposed to cover tonight, for fear of being found in a snowdrift weeks from now. I may never post again.

And how’s by you, OGIC?

“Everywhere in the world literature is in retreat from politics and unless resisted the one will crush the other. You don’t crush literature from outside by killing writers or intimidating them or not letting them publish, though as we’ve all seen you can make a big fuss and have a lot of fun trying. You do better to induce them to destroy it themselves by inducing them to subordinate it to political purposes, as you propose to do.”

Kingsley Amis, The Russian Girl

I’m in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, reporting on this week’s major musical openings:

Uptown at the Broadhurst Theatre, “Never Gonna Dance,”
a fizzy, friendly stage version of the 1936 Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movie “Swing Time,” is pleasing crowds. Downtown at the Public Theater, Tony Kushner’s “Caroline, or Change,”
a pop opera about race relations in the Sixties, is pleasing critics. You wouldn’t think such different shows could have anything at all in common, but they do: They both play it safe….

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about “Never Gonna Dance,” because I really did enjoy it. The problem is that I don’t enjoy the Astaire-Rogers films–I adore them. Next to that solid-gold emotion, anything else (and anyone else) is bound to come off looking like a pale imitation of the real right thing.

At least “Never Gonna Dance” is entertaining, whereas “Caroline, or Change” is a great big self-righteous bore. Had anyone but Tony Kushner written the libretto, everyone in town would be snorting at this eye-rollingly earnest fable of an angry black Louisiana maid (Tonya Pinkins) and Noah, the shy, effeminate little Jewish boy (Harrison Chad) to whom she teaches a Lesson in Love. Or maybe not, since Mr. Kushner, the Arthur Miller of our time, is not so much a playwright as a cultural politician who has an uncanny knack for telling New York theatergoers exactly what they want to hear–and no more….

Also included are words to the wise about Doug Wright’s I Am My Own Wife, which transferred to Broadway this week after a successful off-Broadway run at Playwrights Horizons. Here’s the money quote: “This show deserves every prize there is.”

No link, as usual, so to read the whole thing, extract a dollar from your wallet, take yourself to the nearest newsstand, buy this morning’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and there I am, along with lots of other interesting stuff.

I have a COLD, and I feel CRAPPY. And I don’t have a play or concert or screening to go to tonight, praise be, since New York is in the process of receiving fifteen inches of snow. Did I say arrgh?

Take it away, OGIC! I’m headed for bed….

I belong to the last generation to have grown up without VCRs. Born in 1956, I was raised in a small town that had one movie theater. The only “arty” films I saw in high school were 2001: A Space Odyssey and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. The nearest public TV station was in St. Louis, just beyond the range of our rooftop antenna–this was before the invention of cable TV–so it wasn’t until I left home to go to college that I saw any old movies other than an occasional Saturday-afternoon John Wayne.

I went to a small school near Kansas City, and lived near there for several years after graduating. As a student, I had a tiny TV set in my room but was too busy to watch it more than occasionally, though I did catch three or four foreign films (among them M and Grand Illusion). My campus had no film series. At that time, Kansas City was home to a grand total of two “art houses,” one of which showed first-run foreign films and the other domestic revivals. All told, I probably saw no more than a couple of dozen old movies in Kansas City, including Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, Duck Soup, and Casablanca, none of them more than once.

If you grew up in New York or Chicago, my experience will doubtless sound alien to you, but I suspect that most Americans of my generation could tell similar stories. For us, seeing a classic film was an occasion–one not likely to be repeated anytime soon–and for that reason, we never quite absorbed the abstract notion of Film as Art. To be sure, I “knew” that film was an art form, but this “knowledge” had little or no basis in experience, and so it had no real meaning.

In 1983, I moved to a big-campus college town, Urbana, Illinois, where I got my first VCR, hooked up to a decent cable system, and started haunting the local art house and the various campus film series. That was when I started taking movies seriously. Prior to that time, they’d been little more than casual entertainment, made to be experienced once and then put aside. Thereafter, I started thinking of great films as art objects that could be revisited and restudied as often as I wanted. They soon became as important to me as books or music, and stayed that way.

Nowadays, of course, pretty much everybody takes movies seriously. It’s taken for granted, for instance, that an educated person will have seen Citizen Kane at least once. (If you doubt it, ask yourself this: how many people of your acquaintance would know what you were talking about if you mentioned “Rosebud” in a casual conversation?) Film is now a central part of the middle-class cultural landscape–but that wouldn’t have happened without the invention of cable TV and the VCR.

This is why I have no trouble imagining life without movie theaters. Having spent nearly two decades living in New York City, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to watch classic films in a theater, but there are still any number of important films I’ve only seen on TV. I know it’s not the same thing–I well remember how stunned I was the first time I saw Kane on a large screen–but the fact remains that most people see most movies at home, which is infinitely better than not seeing them at all.

Nor do I expect this situation to change much. For better and worse, film has become a species of home entertainment. Of all the seismic shifts in American art and culture that have taken place since my childhood, that one may ultimately come to be seen as the most fateful of all.

“Schiller distinguishes the naive–and the sentimentalisch: sentimentalisch doesn’t mean sentimental. He distinguished between artists who create naturally, who are not troubled by the burden of the tragic disorder of life, who do not seek salvation in art as some people seek personal salvation in religion or Socialism or nationalism. Verdi in that sense is simply a craftsman of genius with the simple strong moral ideas of his time and place–no tragic self-torment. He was a marvellous composer, a divine genius who created in a natural way as Homer and Shakespeare and perhaps Goethe did.”

Sir Isaiah Berlin, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin

What Dale Peck has to say in this interview–which is as engaging and compulsively readable as all of Robert Birnbaum’s author chats–reminded me of a book that I have been obsessed with off and on the last ten years, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood: Mary McCarthy’s classic, heartbreaking account of her embattled childhood. Peck’s latest book, What We Lost, is a memoir of his father’s childhood, an essentially uncategorizable work that its publisher calls a work of fiction “based on a true story”:

I always got confused in English classes and such where you would be reading Colette and then they would tell you it was based on such-and-such love affair and they would tell you the name of the real person and all this kind of thing. And I’d think,