Archives for December 11, 2007

A cameraman from WCBS-TV is taping me as I type these words.
Here’s the backstory: No sooner did I return home from this morning’s press conference at Avery Fisher Hall than I got a call from a TV producer who wanted to know if I’d do an on-camera interview about the New York Philharmonic’s visit to North Korea for Channel 2’s five-thirty newscast. I said I’d talk to them if (A) they sent the camera crew to my apartment and (B) the interview was wrapped up by three o’clock. (I’m taping a Contentions videoblog this afternoon.) The producer agreed, and an hour later Deborah Garcia was knocking on my door.
Once we’d finished taping the interview, Deborah’s cameraman asked if he could shoot what in the TV news business is known as B-roll. He suggested that I walk into my office, sit down at my desk, and spend a minute or two clacking away on my laptop. I decided that it would be way meta if I were to blog on camera, which is what I’m doing.
To see how much of the interview (if any) makes it onto the air, tune into WCBS at 5:30 ET and cross your fingers. If you don’t live in or near New York City, you can go here to watch me–or not–in streaming video.

I just got back from a press conference at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall at which the New York Philharmonic officially announced its plans to play in Pyongyang on February 26. Present were Paul Guenther, the orchestra’s chairman; Zarin Mehta, the orchestra’s president and executive director; and Pak Gil Yon, North Korea’s ambassador to the UN. Christopher Hill, an assistant secretary of state in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, was also supposed to be at the press conference, but sent his apologies, claiming that “responsibilities” in Washington prevented him from attending.
Highlights:
• The Philharmonic will spend two and a half days in North Korea. During that time it will give a single concert in Pyongyang in a hall seating 1,500 people. It will then fly to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, to give a second concert there.
• Lorin Maazel, the orchestra’s music director, will conduct both performances.
• The Pyongyang program will consist of Gershwin’s An American in Paris and Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony, plus the national anthems of the U.S. and North Korea. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony will be played in Seoul.
• According to a statement released earlier this morning, the Philharmonic is making the trip with “the encouragement and support of the U.S. Department of State.”
• Paul Guenther said that the orchestra’s “somewhat unusual journey” to North Korea would be a reflection of its “calling to serve, which the New York Philharmonic has never shied away from.”
• The concert will be broadcast, but as of this morning Zarin Mehta had no information on whether or how it would be heard inside North Korea, or who will be permitted to attend the performance. “I would guess they do not have the kind of system we have of advertising concerts and selling them,” he said.
• Fifty members of the international media will accompany the orchestra to Pyongyang. Mehta does not know what restrictions will be placed on them by the North Korean government.
• The orchestra wants to give master classes in Pyongyang for “music students and other professionals,” but so far no final arrangements have been made to do so.
• Ambassador Pak dodged the question of whether news of the concert has been released by North Korea’s state-controlled media as of this hour.
• Asked whether the concert would be a propaganda coup for North Korea, Mehta replied, “We’re not going to do any propaganda.”
• More quotes from Mehta:
“One small symphony is a giant leap.”
“All we can do is show the way that music can unite people.”
“We’re going there to create some joy.”
* * *
To read “Serenading a Tyrant,” my original October 27 Wall Street Journal column on the Philharmonic’s trip to Pyongyang, go here.

Dear OGIC and CAAF:
As you know, I haven’t watched a film in a theater since Capote, and the only new films I saw on TV during that long interregnum were Coeurs, about which more below, and Little Miss Sunshine. (Things were a little hectic!) After I went to a screening of Sweeney Todd last week, I decided that the time had finally come to find out what I’d been missing. To this end, would both of you please be so kind as to post lists of the ten films released since the fall of 2005–current releases included–that you think Mrs. T and I might like best?
No spinach, please: I’m out for pleasure, very broadly construed, so don’t send me to anything I “ought” to see (whatever that means) unless it’s also something that you loved.
For purposes of calibration, the last ten then-new movies I watched with pleasure on a large screen were Bright Young Things, Capote, Collateral, Garden State, The Incredibles, Junebug, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Look at Me, Me and You and Everyone We Know, and Sideways.
Over to youse.

Seeing as how I’m on an Alan Ayckbourn kick, I wanted to let you know that Coeurs, Alain Resnais’ 2006 French-language film version of Ayckbourn’s Private Fears in Public Places, is showing this week on IFC.
The play, which received its American premiere off Broadway in 2005, is one of Ayckbourn’s most important works, and even though Resnais’ bittersweet screen adaptation is very French, it’s surprisingly faithful to the original and more than worth seeing in its own right. To read what I wrote about it earlier this year, go here.
Six showings are scheduled:
• Tonight at 11:05 p.m. ET
• Wednesday at 5:25 a.m. and 3:05 p.m. ET
• Saturday, December 22, at 11:40 a.m. and 5:05 p.m. ET
• Sunday, December 23, at 4:55 a.m. ET
For more information about Coeurs, or to view the trailer, go here.

“Solitude would be an ideal state if one were able to pick the people one avoids.”
Karl Kraus, Beim Word genommen (trans. Harry Zohn)