April 2010 Archives

On the web, Google gives the words "too big to fail" new meaning. The company's dominance in directing the flow of information and people around the web is so big that if Google decides to block information, then there's not much you can do about it. And once you get caught up in its gears, it's difficult to extricate yourself without getting ground up in the process.

I run a small news site called ArtsJournal. Every day we look at a thousand or so arts stories from all over the world and aggregate the best of them into a daily digest of arts and culture news. I started the site in 1999, and was one of the first wave of aggregator sites of this sort. In those days I had to hand-code all the pages and paste each story into the html. No content management systems then.

Over the past 10 years we've become the leading digest of arts news, and cultural leaders and arts journalists all over the world use us to keep up with cultural news. We're also home to almost 60 arts bloggers, including some of the leading arts journalists on the web. And from time to time we host conversations about issues of the day. We don't get Andrew Sullivan numbers or Boing Boing numbers or Gizmodo or Mashable or Gawker numbers, but we reach a very specific niche. What Romenesko does for journalism news, we do for arts news.

What Happened

Monday night about 10:30 I had just sent out our daily newsletters when I got an email from a professor at the University of Oregon that he was getting blocked trying to get to ArtsJournal and that a notice had come up saying ArtsJournal was a "Reported Attack Page." The notice is red and scary-looking. We had been hacked.

Now, I'm a journalist, not a techie, but I have picked up enough over the years doing ArtsJournal that I can usually figure out the technical side. I followed the directions Google pointed to for how to scrub a site of malware. I made sure the software powering the site was latest-issue, and went through all the pages Google had flagged as being infected. When I couldn't see any of the code they referenced, I went back to the Google Webmaster page and submitted the site for review. A few hours later Google reported that we were still infected.

I redoubled my efforts and discovered that

So what do I know from technology? Nothing is what I know from technology. But I am bemused that someone took it upon themselves to hack ArtsJournal, thus de facto bringing it down.

These days, the unveiling of any new music by Wayne Shorter, the saxophonist and composer, qualifies as an event. Shorter's work represents a creative pinnacle of jazz composition, and his influence in this realm approaches the saturation point: Virtually everyone aspiring to write for small jazz ensemble has been influenced by him.

But it's been awhile. And so when Shorter and his working group - pianist Danilo Perez, bassist John Pattitucci, drummer Brian Blade - entered the Philadelphia Museum of Art's acoustically rascally Great Stair Hall Friday evening, they were greeted with a sense of anxious, almost nervous, anticipation. Where is the great man's head at right now?

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on "La Cage aux Folles" and "Sondheim on Sondheim" (The New Yorker)
Hilton Als on Khandi Alexander (The New Yorker)
Steve Barnes interviews Michael Kaiser (Times Union, Albany)
Robert Campbell explains how to save the ill-designed Greenway (The Boston Globe)
Thomas Conner on Hanson's "Blues Brothers" homage (Chicago Sun-Times)
Steve Dollar on Jakob Dylan's "Women + Country" (Time Out Chicago)
Steve Dollar on Corinne Bailey Rae (Time Out Chicago)
Michael Feingold reviews "Promenade," "La Cage aux Folles" et al (The Village Voice)
Judy Gerstel on the green impact of buying secondhand (Toronto Star)
Matthew Gurewitsch previews Jake Heggie's opera, "Moby-Dick" (The New York Times)
Matthew Gurewitsch interviews Elaine Stritch about Stephen Sondheim (Pundicity)
Christopher Hawthorne on architecture's fear of the future (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on the summer in 3-D (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on Jennifer Lopez's return to acting (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday interviews filmmaker Bahman Ghobadi (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on the online hit "Plastic Bag" (The Washington Post)
Marty Hughley reviews Oregon Shakespeare Festival's "Ruined" (The Oregonian)
Hillel Italie interviews short story writer Deborah Eisenberg (The Associated Press)
Hillel Italie on George W. Bush's book, "Decision Points" (The Associated Press)
Julia M. Klein on "You Don't Know Jack" (Obit Magazine)
Michael Kimmelman on French culture and francophone culture (The New York Times)
Michael Kimmelman on the volcano and cultural character (The New York Times)
Ruth Lopez on Mexican contemporary art fair Zonamaco (The Art Newspaper)
Ann Powers on inspiration and "American Idol" (Los Angeles Times)
Laura Sydell on YouTube yanking Hitler satires (NPR)
Jerome Weeks interviews "Moby-Dick" librettist Gene Scheer (KERA, Dallas)
Douglas Wolk on Archie Comics' new gay character (Salon)

It's been almost a week since I returned from the annual EMP Pop Conference in Seattle. The rubric this year was The Pop Machine: Music and Technology, and though in 1988 I gave a four-part freshman lecture series at MIT on a similar topic, I've moved so far in the old-fart direction that any worthwhile lecture on the topic would require research I just wasn't in the mood to do. Happily, I was asked instead to convene a panel on music in the '00s, and once I dug around and found out who else would sign on I eagerly agreed. My thanks to former Village Voice, Rolling Stone, and Blender editor Joe Levy, former Village Voice and Billboard editor Chuck Eddy, L.A. Times critic Ann Powers, former Ego Trip, Source, and XXL editor Elliott Wilson, and NAJP double-threat and ARTicles blogger Douglas Wolk, who with their honed-to-the-minute talks and irrepressible discussion provided nearly two hours exceptionally long on both ideas and laughs.

This was an amazing bunch. Wolk and Powers are EMP standbys known for quality presentations, but Wilson had shown up only once before and I'd been trying to get Levy and especially Eddy out to Seattle for years. You will note that all are certified arts journalists, and that all three of the newbies have a lot of "former"s in front of their rather illustrious credits: Levy now edits Maxim, Wilson is now the proprietor of the Rap Radar site, and Eddy now freelances like crazy from Austin, where the living is easier than in NYC. No need to expatiate on a situation we've been b&m-ing about for years, but it does connect to something I noticed during the two days I managed to squeeze in at EMP this year, constrained by an NYU teaching schedule that compelled me to miss a well-reviewed keynote session in which Powers moderated an artist panel comprising Janelle Monae, Joe Henry, and a show-stealing Nile Rodgers. EMP used to be a conference in which music journalists regularly outshone academics. This year the journalists still shone--Wolk on the celestial jukebox, Jody Rosen on Al Jolson, former Los Angeles editor RJ Smith on Ferrante & Teicher. But they were seriously outnumbered by the academics, many of whom were none too shabby.

Yeah, yeah, I know that bloggiquette says that you're not supposed to use the medium--especially a site with such a noble cause as "ARTicles"--as a dumping ground for previously unpublished work. But I plead two extenuating circumstances: 1) The piece, below, wasn't "rejected"; rather, the lit editor who greenlighted the essay decamped for foreign shores before it was irreversibly in the publication pipeline, and 2) I mentioned Bill James in my last entry, and want to post a fuller exegesis on his work. Anyway, it's not like I'm hogging finite space in a $5.95 magazine and depriving readers of that profile of John Tesh they were waiting for. So...

The first novel by Bill James (written under the name he was born with in Cardiff, Wales in 1929, James Tucker) concerned newspapering, his initial career. Titled "Equal Partners," it came out in 1959. His next-to-most-recent, "Making Stuff Up," published in 2006, is about what the author calls "the university creative writing industry." During the nearly half-century in between, James has constituted practically a novel-writing industry unto himself, concentrating on crime fiction, with a few diversions into espionage and, as though to keep himself literarily grounded, hatching a scholarly study of "The Novels of Anthony Powell" in 1976. But James's most successful project--and deservedly so--is also his largest: a 25-books-and-counting series of "Harpur and Iles" novels. The most recently published in the U.S. is "In the Absence of Iles," published in the U.S. by Norton in 2008.

There is going to be a great, big hollowness in the concert hall. Walt Disney Concert Hall, REDCAT, the church where Jacaranda plays in Santa Monica, wherever E.A.R. unit is, in short, wherever music is in Los Angeles. It's going to be harder to listen without Alan Rich, because when he was there - and he was always there - I partially listened through him. He and Mark Swed helped many in L.A. fall in love with listening. Alan's writing is what done it. A colleague of mine at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and at the LA Weekly, he wrote fast; that's because he loved writing as much as he loved listening, which I have to say I envied. "However often my ears are blessed by Schubert's Ninth Symphony, I am stirred every time by new things discovered and an uncontrollable urge to write about them," he wrote. Alan reveled in discovering new things, including new things in old things. He was never too old for any new thing. And, you know, one of the things I will miss most about him is how he would always treat me like a sweet, new young thing and ask me to sit on his lap. 

I'll miss the flirtation. And the reading. And him.

Saddened to hear from Mark Swed of the death, Friday afternoon, of Alan Rich. Alan could be cranky, eccentric and needlessly ad hominem. But many of his targets were dead on, and he was always an impassioned critic with wonderfully intense, personal tastes -- many of which I shared.

Help Desk/L.A. offers expertise in an area that most dance artists know is vital to their well-being, but which they would rather not have to think about: that is, how to market themselves, raise money, create a board of directors, and plan for short- and long-term growth. The project is directed by Felicia Rosenfeld of Pentacle, the 35-year-old, nonprofit arts services organization based in New York City. Patterned after a similar, now defunct program created by Pentacle co-director Ivan Sygoda, Help Desk came to Los Angeles almost by happenstance, when Rosenfeld relocated here in 2006. A lawyer, arts adminstrator and lifelong New Yorker, she spent more than a year talking with dancers, choreographers, academics and others to get the lay of the land. Pentacle, she noted, works from the "artists' point of view," directing services to help artists meet their own goals.

The program is just concluding its first year, and there is funding for a second year. The inaugural group included 10 individuals and small companies of markedly different styles and aesthetic development. Each was paired with an administrator mentor. Although the New York Help Desk was free for the artists, the Los Angeles dance artists all applied to participate, and they paid $600 for the program (which covered only a portion of the cost). Rosenfeld said having the artists pay for the mentoring showed they were "putting a value on the management side of their operation."

This is a condensed and edited version of our interview.

Some newspaper websites are so driven by clicks that stories go up on the front page for a few minutes and quickly get put back in cold storage if they don't draw mice. A/B testing is increasingly common in the web world, and reader usage data more and more drives editorial decisions at many publications. So how many newspapers would put a theatre review on their front page, even if for a few minutes? Okay, this big picture at the top of the page and its accompanying review were only up for a few minutes Tuesday night, but arts stories have frequently been making the Times's front. And the arts bug near the top of the second-from-the-left column is regular play.

On Friday in the Los Angeles Times, Mike Boehm reported more fallout from the cash crisis that recently imperiled that city's Museum of Contemporary Art: damning findings by the state and an embarrassing official slap.

The California Attorney General's office determined that the Museum of Contemporary Art skirted state law for years enroute to financial meltdown in late 2008 and ordered the museum to hire a consultant to help improve its financial management. The attorney general also required MOCA board members to receive special training in their fiduciary duties.

The findings and "required corrective actions" were included in a two-page letter to MOCA last November. The attorney general's office provided it to The Times this week after repeated inquiries.

Now comes news in The New York Times that the little-known, publicly funded New York State Theatre Institute "is rife with corruption, mismanagement, nepotism and possibly illegal conduct, according to a scathing report released on Tuesday by the state inspector general's office."

The report alleges that the artistic director, Patricia Snyder, treated the group as a personal fiefdom, routinely doling out acting roles, directing jobs, production work and other benefits to herself and her family members. Ms. Snyder steered a total of more than $700,000 in payments to her husband, her two sons, her two daughters-in-law and to herself, the report said.

Danny Hakim's story mentions that the report comes "four years after a New York Times article" -- his own -- "detailed nepotism and questionable spending practices by the institute."

Note those "repeated inquiries" Boehm made, and his aggressive reporting on the museum's crisis at the time. Note that long-ago Hakim story, the result of a careful examination of the theater's own records.

Boehm is an arts reporter, one of a diminishing number on staff at newspapers. Hakim covers Albany, not the arts, at least not usually; in this case, the two intersect. In arts journalism, we have a little habit of forgetting to include hard news in the definition of what we do. But it's one of the most important aspects of our coverage. It's also time-consuming, expensive, and therefore endangered. As these stories illustrate, killing the watchdog is a dangerous thing to do.

I was pleased for her and for the profession of paid dance criticism when Sarah Kaufman won this year's Pulitzer Prize for criticism. But there are two anomalies to her well-deserved win.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on Big Art Group (The New Yorker)
Misha Berson reviews the world premiere of "An Iliad" (The Seattle Times)
Laura Bleiberg on Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (Los Angeles Times)
Thomas Conner on the U.S. Air Guitar regionals (Chicago Sun-Times)
Francis Davis on Paul Motian (The Village Voice)
Christine Dolen reviews "Dying City" (The Miami Herald)
Steve Dollar on Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars (Time Out New York)
Steve Dollar on Dr. Dog (Time Out Chicago)
Jan Herman on a new book the censors won't love (Straight Up)
John Horn on Neil LaBute and "Death at a Funeral" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on Matthew Sweet's songs in the musical "Girlfriend" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Kick-Ass" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Secret in Their Eyes" (The Washington Post)
Marty Hughley on dancers and affordable health insurance (The Oregonian)
Hillel Italie on the volcanic ash cloud's London Book Fair impact (The Associated Press)
Hillel Italie on banning the "Twilight" books (The Associated Press)
Michael Kimmelman on the atomization of culture (The New York Times)
Dennis Lim on Gillo Pontecorvo's "Kapò" and Holocaust cinema (Los Angeles Times)
Dennis Lim on "Mulholland Drive," "Lost" and "2666" (Cinema Scope)
Mary Carole McCauley on actress E. Faye Butler (The Baltimore Sun)
Renee Montagne interviews Natalie Merchant (NPR)
Laurie Muchnick reviews Kitty Kelley's "Oprah" (Bloomberg News)
Claude Peck on James Schuyler's "Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems" (Rain Taxi)
Laura Sydell on controversial speech and Apple's gated community (NPR)
Jerome Weeks on 3-D modeling and the Rapid Sculpture project (KERA, Dallas)
Michael Z. Wise on Oscar Niemeyer's Communist landmark (The Wall Street Journal)

The dust-up over the Pulitzer award in drama has me feeling a little like my mother, who was a reflexive changer of subjects. But I never saw "Next to Normal," and I did recently see "Red."

Wonderful acting, wonderful sets. Then why did something I hoped to like leave me feeling lukewarm?

Reviewers have mainly been generous toward this play. Yet art critic Roberta Smith, whom I was glad to see writing about it, said that as soon as its two characters began talking, she longed for an ejector seat. (For the record, I do occasionally read writers other than Roberta Smith.) This, of course, is a problem, since with drama, talking is pretty much the big idea.

Charles Isherwood takes on the issue of critics who have different reactions to a show than the audiences around them. He calls it the "odd-man-out syndrome".

Does the critic have a responsibility to include any reference to the audience's response, if it appears to be markedly different from his own? The pearl-clutching answer from reviewers who favor the ivory-tower approach would be certainly not. The critic's job is not, after all, to poll the opinions of Row G and report the median response. It is to offer his or her own perspective, hopefully informed by expertise, knowledge and taste.

But tastes range widely, and a thoughtful critic knows there is some gray area here that demands consideration. What if you happen to be a classical music writer with a wholesale aversion to Mozart? Because responses to artworks are so personal, a responsible critic must acknowledge that idiosyncratic predilections may play into his or her responses to a show, and must be careful to separate considered aesthetic judgments from plain old personal prejudice. (Or at least admit to plain old prejudice; "I hate farce," my guest informed me before the curtain went up.)

One of the great things about the New York City Opera has always been the way they perform Handel, so it's a pleasure to see that after their hiatus, building renovation, and change of regime, they are still outstanding in this regard.  The rarely performed Partenope, which I saw there last night, was a complete delight from start to finish.  The two Princely counter-tenors, Iestyn Davies and Anthony Roth Costanzo, were both remarkable, with such a smooth, rich tone to their voices that they sounded more "natural" in their range than the perfectly good soprano and mezzo-soprano who played Queen Partenope and Princess Rosmira.  Another stand-out, I thought, was Nicholas Coppolo, who gave a beautiful performance in terms of acting AND singing in the small but important role of the braggart Emilio. In fact, all of the acting in this production was excellent, which can be attributed partly to the intelligence of Francisco Negrin's direction (restaged in this case by Andrew Chown).  What Negrin realized was that, in order for the opera to be both funny and moving, the repetitious lines and the exceedingly high vocal range had to be made sense of -- and he did this by essentially portraying all the characters (except the tutor Ormonte, a bass-baritone) as spoiled, querulous children.  It helped that all the singers were young enough to carry this off.  But that too is part of the pleasure of New York City Opera: it's always fun to discover great new singers on its stage before the rest of the world finds out about them, and in this production both Costanzo and Coppolo were having their New York debuts. Long may the reinvigorated NYCO reign in its redesigned (with aisles!  at long last!) David Koch Theater.

I've always taken it for granted that American culture is the most important culture in the world, and the evidence is irresistible. Its influence is felt everywhere, its modes copied endlessly, its forms enriched but not fundamentally altered by other societies. Here in Paris, for example, hip-hop has a broad appeal, which is why even the late Serge Gainsbourg, that master dilettante, ventured (awkwardly) into the genre. For a lot of French kids America is a giant middle finger raised to their parents, who tried to keep the U.S. out. They wear our brands, guzzle our Big Macs, and crave our gangsta rap. Our rebel styles are so attractive that it's plausible to argue, as one Frenchman with North African roots did recently in Le Monde, that the riotous behavior of the much-feared beurs--the teenaged sons of North African immigrants--is actually a product of American culture. Certainly the mass burning of cars in Paris (especially on New Year's Eve) recalls Detroit at its grimmest more than Algiers at its most insurrectionary. As does the rise of nasty French rap music by groups like NTM, a/k/a Nique Ta Mère, which means, yep, "fuck your mother." America, the great target of French calumny, is also the great source of French alterity, as it's been for a very long time.

But living in Paris has changed my perspective on American culture. I listen to the radio quite often here, especially a public station called F.I.P., which plays music in an astounding variety of idioms. I download whatever turns me on, and as a result I've amassed a collection of music I would never have heard in the U.S. Much of it is highly fusive, but not in ways I'd expect. For example, the style known as "balkan" mish-mashes gypsy, Romanian, Greek, and klezmer modes, usually with a rhythm that is Afro derived. My favorite is a song by a Romanian émigré named Shantel, in which he declares--in English, natch--"Some people say that I come from Russia/Some people think that I come from Africa/But...I come from Planet Paprika." The beat, I should add, is reggae.

There's a great scene near the beginning of the movie "In & Out" where Oscar nominee Cameron Drake (Matt Dillon), walking the red carpet on the way into the ceremony, pauses for an interview with entertainment reporter Peter Malloy (Tom Selleck).

"Everyone's saying that you won't be going home empty-handed," the reporter says. "How do you feel about that?"

"Well, basically, to me, uh, awards are meaningless," the star replies. "Um, I'm an artist, uh, it's about the work, all the nominees are artists -- we shouldn't be forced to compete with each other like dogs."

"Well, I hear ya. Good point," the reporter says. "So then why're you here?"

"'Case I win," the star says, flashing a smile. Then he turns and waves to the screaming fans.

I mention this because all day I've been trying -- futilely, as it happens -- to resist the urge to respond to Ben Brantley's take on this year's drama Pulitzer. "I have never bought a book, read a poem or seen a play because it was by a Pulitzer winner," he writes in today's New York Times. "So any indignation being vented over this year's Pulitzer Prize in drama leaves me a bit mystified."

Even if he hadn't qualified his lack of respect for the Pulitzers by confining it to "the categories devoted to the arts" -- a handy asterisk for a newspaper reviewer -- that would be a curious, rather navel-gazing thing for a critic to say. He's right, of course, that "the Pulitzers have usually gone to firmly middlebrow works." Even so, dismissing the awards as measures of artistic merit is one thing; denying their power is another. The Pulitzer Prize may be a marketing tool, but that doesn't make it meaningless.

This is the most essential sentence in Los Angeles Times theater critic and 2010 Pulitzer Prize drama jury chair Charles McNulty's brilliant broadside against the Pulitzer board for its shameful habit of tinkering with the drama prize: "Too bad the board doesn't have members who are better able to distinguish the merits of a production from the merits of a dramatic work."

Exactly, exactly, exactly. Theater is a collaborative art form, but the drama prize is awarded to playwrights, composers, book writers, lyricists: the people who write the work. If you can't tell the difference between what's on the page and what's on the stage, then you have no business ignoring the advice of people who can. The Pulitzer board has never given the slightest indication that it's in possession of this skill.

Surely every playwright has been foiled by an actor or director or designer's misunderstanding of the text, or inability to communicate it; that happens to Shakespeare every day of the week, and has for hundreds of years. Lucky for him, we don't base our estimation of him on the countless god-awful productions of his work. But even Shakespeare's plays can be elevated in production beyond what's written. That's part of the beauty of theater. A good drama critic, like anyone else steeped in the art, can see through the performance to the play underneath.

Also important in McNulty's piece: Although he praises "Next to Normal," he calls "its understanding of mental illness simplistic." This year's Pulitzer winner is arguably entertaining (not in my opinion; the box office begs to differ) -- but truthful, dramatically or otherwise? Hardly.

Bravo to Sarah Kaufman, provocative, insightful and graceful dance writer at The Washington Post, who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. The last dance critic to take home this award was Alan M. Kriegsman, who (coincidentally?) was also at The Post. 

Among the plethora of Nobel-Prize-potential ideas I've got floating around in my tiny brain is one that I've actually put into practice. I'll divulge it right here (and if any of you know a person or two on the Committee in Stockholm, a kind word or two about the concept would be much appreciated): Non-nutritive reading.

Although NNR (as history will call it) differs only slightly from the traditional rubric of "pleasure reading," the difference is crucial. NNR is based on the scientifically established dietary principle of consuming piles of non-nutritive fiber, so that the stuff can speed through your system like thousands (or tens of thousands, or millions, or whatever--I'm not too good at organic chemistry) of whisk brooms and keep your pipes slick and clean for the processing of healthful food. And NNR carries with it exactly that intent, so it's something more noble than your normal hedonist literary activity, such as reading, say, Kitty Kelley's Oprah bio over a latte and muffin in a Whole Foods booth. It's like taking a steam or a sauna at the gym--not exactly the hard part of doing the exercise you know you need, but still a justifiable aspect of putting your smelly sneakers into a backpack and forcing yourself to enter the chamber of grunts.

The entertainment industry is lining up against plans to create a futures market on movie box office grosses. The scheme would establish a market where investors could bet on how much money movies take in at the box office.

A week after expressing its opposition against the launch of two new movie futures exchanges, the Motion Picture Assn. of America has assembled a coalition of entertainment industry representatives to urge the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to delay its approval of the ventures.

Meanwhile, researchers at HP Labs report that they have been monitoring Twitter comments about movies and can predict box office sales with 90+ percent accuracy. They...

started by monitoring movie mentions in 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million users over three months. These included 24 movies in all, ranging from Avatar to Twilight: New Moon.

Then they took two different approaches, dealing with two very different performance metrics: the first weekend performance, which is largely built on buzz and the second weekend performance, which is largely built whether people actually like the movie.

To predict first weekend performance, they built a computer model, which factored in two variables: the rate of tweets around the release date and the number of theaters its released in. Lo and behold, that model was 97.3% accurate in predicting opening weekend box office. By contrast, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which has been the gold standard for opening box-office predictions, had a 96.5% accuracy.

Meanwhile, to predict second-weekend performance, the authors created a ratio of positive tweets to negative ones. Then they blended that with the Tweet rate metric in another prediction algorithm. This time, the method was 94% accurate.

Do box office grosses equal popularity? Not quality, surely. What, then? America is obsessed with movie box office grosses, even though those numbers are considered bogus. By Saturday night, stories about weekend box office numbers are already washing over the web.

Having structured my Sunday evening around the HBO premiere of David Simon's Treme, I got a little queasy when that morning I read a squib revealing more than I knew: that the creator of The Wire was doing a show set in post-Katrina New Orleans. What made me queasy was the news that the show would center around New Orleans music and that one of its chief protagonists was a trombone player. Look, I'm not putting down brass bands and Mardi Gras Indians, I promise. But having just read the first five Google hits for "simon treme review," I wish one of these earnest jokers had in any way suggested that there's a lot of hip-hop in New Orleans--if not, as seems undeniable to me, that the great New Orleans musician of the '00s was Lil Wayne. So for me and my family, the most exciting musical moment of a disappointing 80 minutes was the minute or so when the magnificent Mystikal single "Bouncin' Back (Bumpin' Me Against the Wall)" played in the background at some ruined home or other (and lest anyone suspect I'm retrofitting, "Bouncin' Back" was my number 18 single of the decade when I sent my ballot to Rolling Stone).

Second-best musical moment: the funeral stepping, complete with mournful brass, of the final sequence. Nevertheless, I have no intention of structuring next Sunday around Treme. HBO on Demand makes that an easier call. But it's one I'd make anyway.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on Raúl Esparza (The New Yorker)
Steve Dollar on the Low Anthem (Time Out Chicago)
Michael Feingold on "Red," "Bellona" and "Lend Me a Tenor" (The Village Voice)
Judy Gerstel on dressing "The Women" at the Shaw Festival (The Toronto Star)
Christopher Hawthorne on the Gateway Arch finalists (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on the season's independent films (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Runaways" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Eclipse" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein on the Mark Twain House & Museum (The Wall Street Journal)
Julia M. Klein on Sue Miller's "The Lake Shore Limited" (Los Angeles Times)
Adam Langer's video trailer to his forthcoming novel, "The Thieves of Manhattan"
Mary Carole McCauley on the "Phantom" chandelier (The Baltimore Sun)
Renee Montagne interviews Carol Burnett (NPR)
Renee Montagne interviews Angelique Kidjo (NPR)
Peter Plagens on "The Art of Victorian Photocollage" (Art in America)
Mark Rozzo on photographers, bloggers, indie publishers and interiors (T Magazine)

Not really.  Calm down. That's the title of an absolutely great movie (it also goes under the name Stairway to Heaven) that Michael Powell made in 1946 with Emeric Pressburger.  It was a complete financial failure at the time, and for a while was very hard to see; I first caught up with it in about 1992 at a second-run movie house in Berkeley, and since then I've watched it on the big screen every chance I get.  This movie has everything:  theatricality, ironic humor, courtroom drama, spectacular sets and camera work, David Niven in his best role ever, and a wonderful life-after-death sequence that is unlike anything I've ever seen in any other movie.  I don't know if A Matter of Life and Death is rentable, but it's always better to see it in a real theater, and if you are anywhere near New York, you have a couple of chances to catch it at MOMA's Titus Theaters in the coming week -- Saturday the 17th at 4:00 and Sunday the 18th at 5:45. If you are already a fan of The Red Shoes and Peeping Tom, you will be amazed that this movie, too, falls within Michael Powell's wide-ranging talent; and if you are not already a Powell fan, this movie will make you one.

Or, if you happen to be relaxing in the park in a hammock brought from home, perhaps a copy of the Daily News instead. Either way, there's a little romance to it.

This has, I admit, nothing to do with the arts and only a bit to do with journalism. Mostly, it has to do with the art of living. Extra points to this guy for having a hammock at the ready in April in Manhattan.

Elizabeth Strout has made her name as a fiction writer. Her three novels "Amy and Isabelle," "Abide with Me" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Olive Kitteridge" have each struck a deep note among readers. Strout is working on her fourth book, but between projects, she accepted the position of guest editor for the spring 2010 issue of Ploughshares, a journal of new writing published three times a year at Emerson College in Boston. What was it like for writers to be edited by a writer? "Liz was great," said Katha Pollitt, a journalist and poet whose "Angels" is included in the collection. "She very energetically extracted that poem from my fog of dithering. I'd probably still be revising it if it weren't for her. And in her comments she saw things I hadn't even realized were there!" And what was it like for Strout to pick up her pen as an editor? Her answers are below, but if you're in the Boston area next week, you can listen to Strout read from her work and talk about her editorial debut at 6 p.m. Thursday, April 15, at the Paramount Theatre at Emerson College.

What interested you about being a guest editor for Ploughshares?

Poetry. Obviously, I love the whole thing. But the truth is I love poetry. It's not like I ever studied it, but I read a lot of it including work by lesser known poets. I'm a member of all the poetry associations so I always have poetry coming through the door. I'm so interested in it. It was exciting for me to think of making some choices myself about poets. And I love literary magazines. Literary magazines were my food for so long. I read all of them endlessly.

So says Boston Globe Arts Editor Rebecca Ostriker, who reports that she's seeking an assistant arts editor. Here's the posting she sent along:

Assistant Arts Editor

The Boston Globe is looking to hire an assistant editor for its award-winning arts and entertainment department. The right candidate will be seasoned, ambitious, and passionate about the arts and culture. Creative energy, high standards, strong editing and planning skills are a must. Experience with editing arts coverage for a major newspaper or magazine is required, and expertise in subjects ranging from pop music to television, theater, and visual art are especially welcome.

If interested, please send a resume and clips or examples of sections you've edited to: Rebecca Ostriker, Arts Editor, Boston Globe, P.O. Box 55819, Boston MA 02205; ostrikerATglobe.com

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Alicia Anstead on the life and death of a dancer (The News-Item, Shamokin, Pa.)
Larry Blumenfeld on David Simon's new HBO series, "Treme" (The Village Voice)
Robert Christgau's April Consumer Guide (msn.com)
Edward M. Gómez's website, with news on Yoko Ono
Patti Hartigan on "Children Left Behind" (Harvard Education Letter)
Christopher Hawthorne reviews "Las Vegas Studio" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on 3-D conversions (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Secret of Kells" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein on a one-woman show about Molly Ivins (Columbia Journalism Review)
Dennis Lim on Fassbinder's newly restored "World on a Wire" (The New York Times)
Dennis Lim on three new films about North Korea (The New York Times)
Elizabeth Maupin's new theater website
Paul Parish on San Francisco Ballet's "The Little Mermaid" (Bay Area Reporter)
Paul Parish on Merce Cunningham and the Gay Closet (Bay Area Reporter)
Ann Powers on the Big Ears festival (Los Angeles Times)
Laura Sydell on the iPad and self-publishing (NPR)
Laura Sydell on the iPad and the future of the Internet (NPR)
Jerome Weeks on Neil LaBute (KERA, Dallas)

In related news, there will be a discussion and book signing Wednesday at 6 p.m. at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute to coincide with the publication of "Reality Radio: Telling True Stories in Sound" (UNC Press). Editor John Biewen will talk with contributors Jad Abumrad ("Radiolab"), Emily Botein (independent producer), Ira Glass ("This American Life"), Karen Michel (independent producer and NAJP fellow 1997-'98) and Joe Richman ("Radio Diaries").