Archives for 2007

Ingmar Bergman was important–but not to me. I blogged about him in 2003, and haven’t seen any of his films since then. No doubt the loss is mine, but his work and my temperament were incompatible.
I saw his adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts on stage around the same time, and reviewed it for The Wall Street Journal:

Speaking of socially significant plays, the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden is performing Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” this week at Brooklyn’s BAM Harvey Theater in a new version translated, “adapted” and directed by the 84-year-old Ingmar Bergman, who says it is his farewell to the stage. Written in 1881, “Ghosts” was the great problem play of the Victorian era, a veritable hurricane of sexual candor, but even in Mr. Bergman’s goosed-up adaptation, which makes coarsely explicit every kink Ibsen left to the viewer’s imagination, it now comes off as a tiresomely talky piece of bourgeois-baiting, as smug as Shaw but without his compensating wit.
The staging itself is painfully static–almost exactly what you’d expect from a film director who didn’t know his way around a proscenium stage–and had I not been listening through infrared headphones to an English translation of a Swedish adaptation of a Norwegian play, I would have sworn I was watching a mediocre regional-theater production rather than the swan song of one of the indisputably major moviemakers of the 20th century. Would that Mr. Bergman had contrived a better exit for himself, but you can’t win ’em all.

So sue me.

E-mail like this reminds me of why I do what I do:

Thanks for your post d’aujourd’hui. Not that you asked, but it’s thanks to your blog that I started buying more Louis Armstrong records. I was already into Blossom Dearie and Chet Baker and listen to that obsessive Charlie Parker show on the radio in the mornings, but it was one of your posts on Louie that made me think, hmm…I think my CD collection may be missing something.
Also, when you reccomended that Morandi show in Chelsea a few years ago, that was just heaven, and it was instant love for me! I had never heard of that artist before. When I visited the Vatican last fall, of course the Michelangelo and Raphael rooms were packed to the gills, but do you know that they have at least six really beautiful (is there any other kind) Morandi paintings in their contemporary art rooms, which almost everyone skips over? The guards couldn’t believe I knew who Morandi was. When the dollar and my bank account gets stronger, a trip to Bologna for me is the first item on the list.
I look forward to hearing about other cool stuff you turn me on to in the future.

I suppose the best thing about my job is getting to see all the wonderful things I see, but the second-best thing–and it’s a close second–is getting mail like this. To communicate aesthetic delight to another person, and know that they’ve responded, is one of the most satisfying experiences imaginable. To be able to do it en masse is…well, I can’t even begin to say what it is. All I can tell you is that it’s the whole point of my professional life.
Some say that critics are remembered, if at all, for their bad reviews. I’d much rather be remembered for my good ones.
P.S. Follow the second link and you’ll find your way in due course to one of my old Washington Post “Second City” columns. That was a good month in New York! I’d briefly forgotten how much I enjoyed writing “Second City,” but reading an old column brought it back to me in a rush of remembered pleasure. Thank you, Washington Post, for having made it possible for me to make money doing something so intensely pleasurable.

“Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.”
James Thurber, A Thurber Garland

Over lunch I finally got to “that bonobo article” everyone’s been talking about in last week’s New Yorker. Not far into the article, Ian Parker mentions meeting “a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind … who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the [bonobo fund-raiser]. He was a musician and a former practitioner of ‘metaphysical counselling,’ which he also referred to as clairvoyance.” (Favorite sentence: “Wind told me that he once wore a chimpanzee T-shirt to a bonobo event, and ‘got shit for it.'”)
Something about this description — call it clairvoyance, or call it a decade of standing at parties chatting to men with names like Raven and El Niño — made me think that the city from which Wind hails in North Carolina might be Asheville. And, unless the guy has a flute-playing, bonobo-supporting doppelganger, that turns out to be correct.

It’s Bele Chere weekend in Asheville. If you’re not familiar with it, Bele Chere is a giant street festival held each year in the last hazy days of July. Downtown is closed to traffic, and the citizens overtake the streets in sweaty, plodding hordes. Generally, you walk around, look at people, listen to music, eat, drink, and then stand in line at the Port-a-Potty.
If you live or work downtown it’s a fairly epic weekend. For every transcendent moment of sitting out on your fire escape, drinking margaritas & watching hundreds of strangers do the Electric Slide, there’s an offsetting low ebb, when it’s 4 am and packs of drunks are still roaming the streets howling for Lynyrd Skynyrd (it’s like they’re meta-drunk!).
This year I’m making a curtailed foray — tomorrow night we’re meeting my sister and her S.O. at the local brewers’ tent, then hopping up the street to hear the Goodies (recommended song: “Madame Devillia”). Report to follow Monday.

My latest Wall Street Journal drama column is another report from the road, this time on the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s As You Like It and Barrington Stage Company’s revival of Black Comedy. Both shows are nifty:

Summer Shakespeare festivals are thick on the ground in America these days, and more than a few of them are a pleasure to behold. If you’re searching for the best of all possible times, though, you’ll have trouble topping the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. I see a lot of Shakespeare, but I can’t think of another outdoor festival that has a higher overall batting average. Hudson Valley’s deliberately informal productions are a model of cultural populism at its most engaging and effective, and Kurt Rhoads’ uproariously loony staging of “As You Like It,” performed in the shoot-’em-up style of a bottom-of-the-bill B Western, is one of the cleverest updatings of the Bard to have come my way….
The brightest star of the show is Joey Parsons, the fascinating Ariel of Terrence O’Brien’s 2005 “Tempest,” who is no less striking this time around as Mr. Rhoads’ Rosalind. Decked out in tight jeans and a red cowboy hat à la Annie Oakley, she plays the ardent lover-in-disguise of “As You Like It” with an eager, sexy zest that put me in mind of the young Annette Bening….
Peter Shaffer is better known for such bristlingly serious plays as “Amadeus” and “Equus,” but with “Black Comedy,” first seen on Broadway in 1967, he proved himself to be no less adept at strewing the stage with banana peels. It’s a standard-issue British comedy about a poverty-stricken ultra-modern sculptor (Brian Avers) who’s juggling two unsuspecting ladies (Ginifer King and Nell Mooney), enhanced by one brilliant twist. The action takes place during a power failure–and the onstage lighting is reversed. When the lights are on, the stage is black. When the lights are off, we see the actors lurching around in the “dark.” Add a priceless porcelain sculpture of Buddha and a strategically positioned trap door, and the result is collective hysteria….

No free link. Get with the program already! Buy a copy of Friday’s Journal or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will give you instant access to my column and all the rest of the Journal‘s extensive arts coverage. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

“When the aspiration and exclusiveness of high art were countered with the vigour and craft of entertainment, then the pretensions of the one and the sentimentality of the other were both under mutual surveillance, and it was somewhere there, in the middle of this collision that you were likely to find a healthy–a Shakespearean–kind of theatre.”
Michael Blakemore, Arguments with England: A Memoir

I was pleased to be asked by Carrie to file this week’s installment of 5×5. But when I thought back to what I’ve been reading this summer, I realized that it has consisted solely of comfort reading, which in my case typically means: series. So there’s no really new news here for regular readers of this blog, who already know of my guilty affection for MacDonald, the flirtation with Powell that’s recently been upgraded to an actual involvement, and my longstanding crush on Fisher.
But in a world rife with readers (like CAAF her very self!) who are facing the end of the Harry Potter series with a lead sinker in their gut growing weightier as they advance through the seventh volume–maybe the time is right to revisit some of the series and sets of books that I rely on to patch me through spells of readerly indecision. Of all these I can say that it soothes me to know they’re at hand and it buoys me to know there’s plenty of them. Maybe some of them will provide a next harbor for some of you soon-to-be Potter refugees out there.
1. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (link is to the first volume). Twelve novels in four volumes following the life and times of an Englishman following World War I. Powell writes in an apparently meandering fashion behind which lurks–I’m certain it’s there though I don’t, after reading two of the novels, quite yet discern it–a masterful design. The novels are quietly infectious, with truly great (though seldom conspicuous or showy) insights and feats of writing strewn about liberally to be stumbled over like half-buried treasure. Rarely have I felt so ravished and so comforted at the same time.
2. The Travis McGee novels by John D. MacDonald (link is to the first book in the series). Residing at the opposite end of the world from #1, these crime novels have not a subtle bone in their sizable body. Their charms lie wholly elsewhere. Belonging to the series does a lot for the individual books, somehow; they gain appeal and impact when read in quantity, filling in at length–detail by detail, stratum by substratum, hustler by con man, felony by misdemeanor–a lurid panorama of southern Florida from the 1960s to 1980s. Pure buttered popcorn.
3. Dalziel and Pascoe mysteries by Reginald Hill (link is to the first book in the series). I just tonight finished what must have been about my tenth of these smart, wonderfully written English mysteries, On Beulah Height. While nearing the end and thus the whodunit, I remembered again how little of my affinity for Hill’s mysteries has to do with their, er, mysteries. His plots are always clever and sometimes deft but, it seems to me, tend to turn the screw a time or two too many, so that by the end I don’t much even care who did. No matter; the characters are glorious and so is the writing. Not that I’m one to sniff at genre fiction–couldn’t be further from the truth–but how often does one turn to genre fiction for the writing? Not sodding often, as Dalziel might say.
4. The Art of Eating by M.F.K. Fisher. But you really want these separate editions of the five books collected here: The Gastronomical Me, Serve It Forth, An Alphabet for Gourmets, How to Cook a Wolf, and Consider the Oyster. They’re lovely, and she is gorgeous in the pictures on their jackets. Long ago, I defended Fisher from charges of preciosity here.
5. The Waverley Novels by Sir Walter Scott (link is to their namesake). Rejoice: you’ll never get through them all! Just kidding, sort of. The best of them (The Bride of Lammermoor, The Heart of Midlothian) are terrific, but others have defied my best efforts to get up a head of steam for them. it’s true. Outside English departments, though, who reads Scott anymore? Consider this a gentle reminder that the man arguably had about as great an influence on the history of the novel, and not only in English, as anyone else you can think of. And–you’ll never get through them all!
By the way, I’ve never read a Harry Potter book myself. It was, in fact, only ten days ago that I saw my first Harry Potter movie–which I much enjoyed, thanks in no small part to the whispered running tutorial of my better-versed companion. He, incidentally, finds himself in a bit of a conundrum on the occasion of the last book’s appearance: he has followed the movies devotedly but not read the books, and wishes to know what happens sometime ahead of 2009, or however long it will take the sixth and seventh installments to reach the screen–and presumably wishes not to find out by overhearing a conversation on the elevated train. Should he start with the 6th book, picking up where the movies currently leave off? Skip straight to the 7th? Friendly advice may be sent in care of ogic@artsjournal.com.