Archives for 2003

“In the Bag” has been temporarily suspended due to excessive life-related activity, but Household Opera is playing a similar game today. If the storm troopers came marching into your town, which books would you stuff in your backpack? It’s a nice, practical game, which is what makes it interesting. No less interesting is her list–Ashbery, Austen, Barthes, Bishop, Borges, Herbert, Puttenham (?!), Stevens, Woolf–which you can peruse by clicking here.

From BuzzMachine:

I’m in the middle of watching the Jessica Lynch movie and let me state the obvious: TV movies are crap. They weren’t always, but they are now. They are an utterly discredited form of media. As a form, they are scripted in neon and shot through the wrong end of a periscope. They are insultingly obvious and shallow. They are artistically inept. They are unwatchable and unwatched….

And there’s more!

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday’s posting on the New Jersey Performing Arts Center and its effects (or lack of same) on downtown Newark:

I’ve walked through downtown Newark countless times now and the more I hear about Newark’s Renaissance, the less I believe it’s actually happening.

That’s not to say Newark is getting worse, but I definitely haven’t seen NJPAC have any significant impact on the downtown area. It is bleak. There are a ton of “historic” (really old) buildings that you can tell were once beautiful and now are empty, dilapidated and depressing. No one is buying them or refurbishing them or using them. They just sit there with their broken windows and moldy brick getting more broken and moldier. The businesses that do exist fall into two categories: 1) big business commuter offices (notice I say “commuter” and those buildings really only include Prudential, IDT, Robert Treat Hotel, Hilton, Seton Hall Law, etc) and 2) low-end multi-purpose stores (the likes of Valu-Plus, Lot Less, Pay/Half–and I didn’t make up any of those names; hell, our Rite Aid even closes at 6 pm most days).

What’s really sad is that, if there were just more investors, downtown could become beautiful and happening. But that takes big money. Newark, the city itself, and its small business owners–concentrated in Portugese district of the Ferry Street area–definitely don’t have the capital it will take to help Newark reach its full potential–and there’s a lot of potential to be met. But I’m glad Newark has NJPAC. I like going to performances there. Honestly, though, I’m always afraid one of these days the [Newark] Star-Ledger is going to have to report that it’s in danger of closing due to lack of patronage if more people don’t start going. I think part of it too is advertising. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything beyond a brochure’s calendar of events in little piles around campus. Is there any advertising in New York for NJPAC? Doubtful–once again due to money. Anyway, that’s my reaction.

This comes from a smart and observant student at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, by the way.

It’s always fun–and interesting–to find someone in cyberspace who shares one of your private enthusiasms. OGIC and I, for instance, are great fans of the Parker novels, a hugely diverting series of sixty-minute eggs written by crime novelist Donald E. Westlake under the pen name of “Richard Stark,” but I don’t have any other friends who read them, so I wrongly take it for granted that nobody else knows about them. Hence it was a surprise to skim through the blogroll this morning and discover that Forager 23 has been holding forth on the subject of what Hollywood actor might make a convincing Parker on screen.

I’ve never written anything extended on the subject of Stark, but I did review Payback, an awful movie of a few years back in which Mel Gibson played Parker:

“Payback” was adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s tough-minded 1962 novel “The Hunter” (published under the pen name “Richard Stark”) which was also the source of John Boorman’s “Point Blank,” one of the most impressive crime films of the ’60s. “The Hunter” was the first in a series of novels featuring Parker (he has no first name), a no-nonsense career criminal who specializes in shrewdly planned heists. Largely forgotten save by connoisseurs of crime fiction, these novels are striking for the way in which the reader is made to sympathize with Parker, a thoroughly unappetizing near-psychopath whose only virtue is his professionalism. The plot of “Payback” is drawn directly from the first part of “The Hunter”–the film’s advertising slogan is “Get ready to root for the bad guy”–and so it is surprising to see how completely [director Brian] Helgeland has failed to catch the tone of the book. In “The Hunter,” Parker is a truly hard man, as amoral as a loaded shotgun; in “Payback,” he is a coarsely drawn caricature who has a soft spot for pit bulls and prostitutes but blows away anybody else who crosses his path.

Mel Gibson is a very good actor, but he’s all wrong as Parker, and not just because he’s too handsome. Lee Marvin, who played the same part in “Point Blank,” was anvil-hard, with a bass-baritone voice that sounded like large rocks falling from a great height. Not so Gibson: you keep expecting him to say something amusing. One wonders, then, what could have possessed so talented a performer to waste his time on so witless a project. No doubt money is the answer–as I write these words, “Payback” is the most popular movie in America–but given the fact that Gibson is also said to be both a devoted father and a good Catholic, one further wonders what possessed him to make a film that is morally and aesthetically odious. Money, they say, has no smell, but I can’t say the same for “Payback”: it stinks of the cheapest kind of cynicism.

(No link–sorry.)

Now over to Forager 23:

Parker is an affectless heavy, who’s always a couple of steps ahead of the law and a couple of crosses ahead of his fellow crooks. He’s a professional criminal, a mechanic–not a thug, but not Raffles, either. Both my friend and I thought that Mel Gibson, who played Parker in the relatively recent film version of the first novel, Payback, was completely wrong for the part. Gibson is all bug eyes, all acting, and, quite frankly, not very scary….

Lee Marvin is, not surprisingly, just about perfect as Parker. Now here’s the problem: actors like Lee Marvin just don’t seem to exist anymore. Tough guy stars are a thing of the past: no more John Waynes, Charles Bronsons, or Clint Eastwoods. What happened to the heavy?

1). Audiences today are younger than ever, while guys like Lee Marvin and John Wayne appealed to more mature moviegoers. They often played world-weary characters who resorted to violence only reluctantly. If Rio Bravo were made today, Ricky Nelson would’ve gotten top billing and John Wayne would’ve just had a supporting role.

2). Action movies have become more about effects than about action. You only have to go back about ten years to find stuff like Steven Seagal’s Hard to Kill and Under Siege, which were genuine action movies, that is, they focused on the actions the main character had to take to get revenge/get justice/save the day, etc. For better or for worse, these movies center on Seagal. Compare this with the Vin Diesel pictures The Fast and the Furious and XXX. Diesel’s role in these movies is to act as if he is ironically amused by all the spectacular effects going on around him. I think he does a pretty good job, but I never get a sense of his characters accomplishing anything–doing anything–taking action.

So what does that leave us when we try to cast our hypothetical hard-boiled action flick? Not too much. The straightforward, low-frills action feature–the kind that Don Siegel used to make–is a thing of the past. These movies are still made, but they’re either direct-to-video or from Hong Kong. Big screen action movies have been emasculated. Casting Parker has become impossible.

I agree, reluctantly. Read the whole thing here.

If any of this piques your interest, the latest Parker novel is Breakout, published last year. (Go here
to check on the current availability of other novels in the series.) The unofficial Parker Web site is here. And Donald Westlake talks about Parker (among other things) here.

It’s a puzzlement, by the way, that Westlake, a writer who is now best known for his charming comic crime novels, should also have dreamed up so comprehensively unfunny a character as Parker, which presumably tells us something interesting about human dualism, the subject matter of all film noir and noir fiction. See today’s almanac entry for further details….

P.S. Speaking of noir, everyone’s favorite hieratical sourpuss has posted a very knowing Raymond Chandler parody. (I’m jealous–I’d kill to be able to write parodies, which I regard as the most subtle form of literary criticism.)

“I do not believe that there is any man, who if the whole truth were known of him, would not seem a monster of depravity; and also I believe that there are very few who have not at the same time virtue, goodness and beauty.”

W. Somerset Maugham, Don Fernando

I just got an e-mail from OGIC, who went to see Lost in Translation a second time (something I mean to do next weekend). Her note contained the following sentence, which I am sneakily and unilaterally sharing with you all:

That movie is a great example of what an artist knows that the rest of us don’t.

That’s Sunday night’s almanac, as far as I’m concerned.

I wrote about the arts for Time magazine from 1997 to 2001–mostly about music, though I also published a number of articles about dance. The experience was fun and frustrating in like proportions, for those were the years when Time was slowly winding down its century-long commitment to full-scale coverage of the fine arts. I didn’t realize it, but Time‘s decision to outsource its coverage of classical music and dance to a freelance writer was itself an ominous sign of things to come. It grew harder and harder for me to get pieces into the magazine, and after 9/11 it became impossible. (Watching Time walk away from the fine arts, by the way, was part of what gave me the idea to start “About Last Night.”)

Even during the good years, writing for Time could be exasperating, especially when one of my stories got bumped for lack of space, then killed outright, usually because it had gone “stale” in the preceding week. I still hold it against Bill Clinton that my 50th-birthday profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov ran only in the Latin American edition of the magazine–the U.S. edition required a couple of extra pages that week to cover the first installment of Monicagate. And even though I’m a great fan of Robert Hughes, it irked me no end that his big piece about the opening of the Guggenheim’s Bilbao branch squeezed out my own one-pager about the New Jersey Performing Arts Center.

I hung onto that piece, hoping I’d be able to do something with it someday. I just returned from a Sunday matinee at NJPAC, and it struck me on the way home that today might be a good time to revisit what I wrote about the center when it opened its doors in 1997. It appears here for the first time:

On paper, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center looks like a sure thing. The 250,000-square-foot facility, built at a cost of $180 million, contains two handsome theaters–a 2,750-seat multi-purpose auditorium and a 514-seat “performing space”– and a full-service restaurant….Easily accessible via four major highways, NJPAC has a potential audience of 4.6 million people living within 25 miles of its front door. There’s just one catch: It’s in Newark.

Thirty years ago this July, two white policemen from Newark’s Fourth Precinct arrested a black cabdriver. They said he resisted arrest; he said they beat him up. The people believed the cabby, and took to the streets. Five days later, 26 people were dead, and Newark had acquired a bad name it has yet to lose. White flight was already well under way by 1967, but no sooner had the smoke of the riots cleared than the diaspora to the suburbs became multi-ethnic, and between 1967 and 1994, the city’s population shrank by more than a third, from 406,000 to 259,000. You don’t need a demographer to know something is still terribly wrong with Newark: All you have to do is take the five-minute walk from the train station to NJPAC, noticing along the way that none of the newer, post-riot buildings has street-level windows. The architecture of Newark is a fever chart of middle-class fear.

Can a stiff dose of the fine arts cure the malaise that has gripped New Jersey’s largest city for three decades? To stay in business, NJPAC must coax hundreds of thousands of nervous suburbanites back to downtown Newark, and every aspect of its operation has been planned with that uphill battle in mind. Architect Barton Myers has created a building in which beauty and practicality are shrewdly combined in a style less dazzling than comfortable: The brightly lit brick-and-glass facade is warm and inviting, while the main auditorium, done in cherry wood and copper, is unexpectedly intimate. “It feels like being inside a cello,” says NJPAC president Lawrence P. Goldman.

Perfect sight lines (even in the cheap seats) make Prudential Hall a near-ideal venue for ballet and modern dance, and as the cost of performing in New York continues to soar, touring troupes are taking note of the center’s close proximity to midtown Manhattan, a 15-minute train ride away….

Unlike more traditionally minded arts centers, NJPAC is making a highly sophisticated effort to attract the widest possible audience, a must in so ethnically diverse a community. “It’s not enough just to put artists on the stage,” says programming vice-president Stephanie Hughley. “We’ve got to figure out ways to facilitate conversations between people who think they’re different.” The center’s offerings are as inclusive as a stump speech by Bill Clinton–Andr

I mentioned in a posting
the other day that I’d been using my fancy new cable box to record episodes of an old black-and-white game show called What’s My Line? For the past few years, the Game Show Network has been airing WML reruns at 4:30 every morning. (To see a schedule, click here.)

I watched What’s My Line? as a child, and its return to the small screen inspired me shortly after 9/11 to write a piece for the New York Times of which I’m particularly fond. I didn’t include it in A Terry Teachout Reader because it didn’t seem to fit, so in the interest of boosting the show’s audience, I’d like to make this first-hand reminiscence of the Age of the Middlebrow available to the readers of “About Last Night.” Here are some excerpts:

The basic premise of “What’s My Line?,” which made its debut in 1950, was elegantly simple. The first two guests each week were ordinary people with odd jobs: professional egg-breakers, dynamite manufacturers, makers of square manhole covers. John Charles Daly, the avuncular host, invited them to “sign in, please,” whereupon they would scrawl their names on a blackboard, take a seat, and submit to yes-or-no questioning by four panelists who tried to guess what they did for a living, with each “no” answer winning them five dollars. After the middle commercial, the panelists put on blindfolds and sought to identify the Mystery Guest, a celebrity who disguised his voice in an attempt, usually but not always unsuccessful, to fox his inquisitors.

The fun came partly from the contestants, who were chosen whenever possible for their intrinsic incongruity–the dynamite maker, for example, was a distinguished-looking woman of a certain age–but mostly from the droll byplay of the panel and guests. Of the three longest-serving regular panelists, Arlene Francis, a stage actress turned small-screen personality, exuded unfeigned warmth, while Dorothy Kilgallen, a bite-the-jugular newspaper reporter and columnist, and Bennett Cerf, the gentleman president of Random House, played the game to win. The wild-card fourth panelist was sometimes a nimble-witted comedian (Fred Allen and Steve Allen both had long runs on the show), sometimes a celebrity of another sort (Van Cliburn, Moss Hart, John Lindsay, and Gore Vidal were among the more surprising occupants of the fourth chair).

As for the Mystery Guest, “What’s My Line?” was so hot in its heyday that it was able to book pretty much anybody it wanted: Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, even Eleanor Roosevelt. Stars with ultra-familiar voices would struggle mightily but vainly to disguise them (Louis Armstrong never had a chance), invariably reducing the studio audience to a puddle of laughter. Trickery was encouraged–Jack Paar lisped his answers through a bullhorn, Paul Muni played his on a violin–and on one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday evening, Bob Hope succeeded in persuading the panel that he was really Bing Crosby….

Much of the charm of “What’s My Line?” arises from the fact that it is so palpably of another era. The pace was slowish and agreeable, the repartee good-humored but unabashedly urbane. The host and panel all wore formal evening dress; John Daly addressed his female colleagues as “Miss Arlene” and “Miss Dorothy.” The set was penny-plain, the guests signed in on a dimestore blackboard, and Daly kept score by flipping cards. The contestants, who were treated with the utmost courtesy, were clearly content to earn a mere $50 for stumping the panel. Even though all 876 episodes were originally broadcast live, it never occurs to you for a moment that anyone on stage would have dreamed of saying anything naughty.

Perhaps most strikingly, the collegial bonhomie of the participants leaves you with the distinct impression that the show is taking place in a parallel universe of famous people who all know and like one another and probably stroll over to the Algonquin for a drink afterward. Or so, at least, it seemed to myself when young, sitting in front of a black-and-white TV in the living room of a small house in a small town in southeast Missouri….

To read the whole thing, go here.

After this piece ran in the Times, I received a letter from a Hollywood agent who collects old TV shows, and who through means too complicated to recount here acquired a complete set of videocassettes of every surviving kinescope of What’s My Line? From time to time he hears from aging former WML guests (or their children), and whenever possible he sends them a copy of the episode on which they appeared. He’s also dubbed more than a few WML reels for me. The world is full of lovely people who like nothing better than sharing their pleasures, and this kind gentleman (who now reads “About Last Night” regularly) ranks high among them.