Archives for April 9, 2004

“The opera: consistency of character and reality of events are qualities which need not be accompanied by music.”

Karl Kraus, Beim Wort genommen

I’m in The Wall Street Journal this morning, reviewing Stephen Belber’s Match, which opened at the Plymouth Theatre last night. The play itself is somewhat uneven (though very funny), but Frank Langella’s performance is wonderful:

“Match” might have been written for the sole purpose of giving Mr. Langella a platinum-plated chance to flounce his stuff. No sooner does the curtain go up than he grabs the reins and gallops down a theatrical steeplechase that leads straight from outrageous bitchery to unadorned, heartfelt emotion. If Mr. Langella doesn’t own this play, then at least he’s got a thousand-year lease.

He’s so exciting, in fact, that “Match” comes off looking rather better than it really is. Not that Mr. Belber’s play is shoddy goods–far from it–but it’s possible to head for the subway thinking you’ve seen something other than a highly efficient tearjerker lightly sprinkled with honesty, a somewhat deceptive impression for which the star of the show deserves most of the credit.

Alas, you’re going to have to take my word for it, since “Match” is built around a series of surprises that critical etiquette forbids me to disclose. Were it a clunker, I might blow the gaff out of sheer spite, but it’s so entertaining that I wouldn’t dream of spoiling the fun. This much, however, I can say: Mr. Langella plays Tobi Powell, a first-class dancer turned second-class choreographer who now teaches at Juilliard and lives in a dingy, souvenir-crammed apartment far from the scenes of his flaming youth. Shy, mousy Lisa Davis (Jane Adams) and her regular-guy husband Mike (Ray Liotta) pay him a visit, ostensibly to interview him for Lisa’s dissertation about ballet in New York in the ’50s. Before long, though, the “interview” has morphed into an inquisition, Mike has revealed himself to be a raving homophobe who can no longer conceal his disgust at Tobi’s effeminacy, and…well, I’d better stop there….

No link, so to find out more–though not too much more–buy this morning’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section, and give me the once-over.

I gave Mr. Elegant Variation a tour of the Mus

In lieu of me:

– By way of Bookish Gardener (new in “Sites to See,” and very highly recommended) comes this link to a Dutch Web site devoted to paintings of women reading. I’m not quite sure why I think this is so cool, but I do.

– You’re going to hear Luciana Souza tonight
at Joe’s Pub, right? No? Well, at least pay a visit to the Web site of WNYC-FM and check out her guest shot on John Schaefer’s Soundcheck, which aired yesterday and has now been archived. Go here to listen.

– In case you haven’t read enough about The Triplets of Belleville, animation expert Michael Barrier reviews it on his Web site, which isn’t quite a blog but nevertheless contains lots of interesting stuff, updated semi-regularly. Everything Barrier writes is worth reading.

– This one’s purely for fun: Elsa has written a sort of found poem (I can’t explain it any better) based on Mr. TMFTML‘s blogroll. Most amusing.

– My Stupid Dog tells us what Tony Kushner and Tim LaHaye have in common:

Kushner’s entire oeuvre prior to Homebody/Kabul could be considered an extended exercise in red-diaper fundamentalism. His wilder moments, like the physical manifestation of the Devil in Bright Room Called Day, the character of Thomas Browne’s Soul in Hydrotaphia, or the postmortem appearance of the Rosenbergs in Angels in America: Perestroika, aren’t crass attempts to perk up an otherwise dull evening by invoking the supernatural. In these scenes, Kushner concretizes his belief system, and tries to will its obvious falsehoods into the realm of objective, unquestioned truth.

Usually we notice such desperate rhetorical strategies only when they come from the Far Right: Take, for example, the much-discredited system of dispensationalist eschatology espoused throughout Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind books. Kushner’s drama offers occasional glimpses into the mind of its fundamentalist author, much as the Left Behind books do, though in Kushner’s case that fundamentalism is Marxist-Leninist rather than Christian-traditionalist….

– Everybody’s posting to and commenting on Camille Paglia’s essay on “The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age,” which I liked but found more than a little self-consciously showy, as is her wont. The best take I’ve seen so far is from The Reading Experience (readability: 100%).

– Finally, start your weekend off right by going here and scrolling down approximately seven screens to the listing for James P. Johnson’s 1927 recording of “Snowy Morning Blues” (the 1944 remake is almost as good). Click on the link and RealAudio will pour something into your computer that’s guaranteed to make you smile.

See you tomorrow, unless I check back in today. Meanwhile, keep an eye peeled for Our Girl, whose return to the blogosphere, she claims, is fairly imminent.

James Tata recently posted a list of “the last twenty books of fiction or literary essays I have read.” I enjoy reading this kind of list, in much the same way that I like looking at other people’s bookshelves. When the listkeepers in question also happen to be famous, of course, the results are interesting for a different reason. Justice Holmes, for example, kept a written record of every book he read as an adult, and I find it both amusing and illuminating to know that he read (among many other things) both Swann’s Way and Rex Stout. Yet I take equal pleasure in knowing what my fellow bloggers are reading, looking at, or listening to, not only because I’m interested in them as personalities but also because such knowledge can lift me out of my own preoccupations and preconceptions. Though I own a wide variety of books and CDs, I have a tendency to run the plow through the same old furrows when left to my own devices. Sometimes a passing mention by a fellow blogger reminds me of a book I love but haven’t reread for years, or makes me want to click through to amazon.com and buy one I have yet to read.

I also like the fugitive nature of reading lists, which I find wholly compatible with the fugitive nature of blogging itself. One of the things I missed while I was working on All in the Dances was the welter of discussion set off by the posting in which Return of the Reluctant suggested that bloggers ought to set their sights higher: “This whole

OK, I’m going to be easing back into this thing you call blogging, starting now. Thanks to those who missed me; that really makes a girl feel guilty…er, good.

Hm, what’s this greater-than sign? Oh yeah, coding. It’s all beginning to waft back.

To kick things off again, I wanted to call attention to something excellent I read today. An ex-colleague of Colby Cosh’s died recently, and Colby has posted a really indelible remembrance of him. You’re unlikely to have heard of Candian reporter Terry Johnson; his death won’t make the faintest ripple in the wider world. But Colby’s artful, unsentimental character sketch surely will make you remember him. It put me a little bit in mind of the late great Robert McG. Thomas, the idiosyncratic obituarist for the New York Times, but it’s a different ball of wax–a stickier one–to effectively memorialize someone you knew. Colby’s piece is less anecdote-driven than Thomas’s obits, and fundamentally different in that it’s a record of personal experience. Although the subject was as eccentric as any of Thomas’s, Colby captures him in an everyday key and produces a condensed, vivid character study. Here’s a taste:

Terry was so defenceless against the basic demands of life that he never, to anyone’s knowledge, owned a winter coat during the time he lived in Edmonton. A fellow housemate made an annual ritual of frogmarching him to the barber to get his Karl Marx beard and his spirit-of-’68 hair hacked at. No piece of furniture in the common area of the house lacked for holes made by his cigarettes. He had the barest acquaintance with bathing and probably none, in his adulthood, of dentistry. He made do, defiantly. Somehow he acquired a whole wardrobe of other people’s clothing; one got the distinct impression he didn’t get it from Goodwill or Value Village, but that he just somehow gravitated home from the pub wearing a bowling shirt with “Larry” on the breast pocket.

In short, he seems now to have been an addict in training. When I lived with him I knew him to possess no vices more severe than beer, in modest bachelor quantities, and pot, in quite massive ones. Actually, he had one that was arguably more harmful, at least to his ability to meet deadlines: video games, particuarly Sid Meier’s Civilization. No one ever burned a deadline with more determination than Terry Johnson. The rest of us copy-breeders began to get nervous around Friday sundown, with the magazine going off to the printer on Sunday, but Terry would carry on Minesweeping until Saturday afternoon and not give it an apparent second thought. He would vanish from home and office for 48 hours at a time when he was supposed to be quizzing farmers about genetically modified seed or fuel prices.

The alive quality of this sets me to wondering, should Colby drop some of the opinionating and get to work on a novel? (Partial answer: not if that means he would stop covering the NHL playoffs.)

If I were
Our Girl in Chicago, I’d be much prettier.

(And no, she’s not Joseph Epstein, either.)

– Last night I watched the new Criterion Collection DVD of Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street. Was there ever a full-fledged movie star who looked weirder than Richard Widmark?

– Today I’m reading Barbara Pym’s A Very Private Eye: An Autobiography in Diaries and Letters. V. relaxing fare for a brain strained by excessive writing.

– Now playing on iTunes: Stephen Hough’s recording of Federico Mompou’s Charme pour inspirer l’amour. (I should be so lucky.)