October 2010 Archives

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Alicia Anstead on the culture of miners and fishermen (The Boston Globe)
Robert Campbell reviews Graham Gund's new high school (The Boston Globe)
Robert Christgau reviews Of Montreal's "False Priest" (NPR)
Thomas Conner on Elton John and Leon Russell's "The Union" (Chicago Sun-Times)
Christine Dolen on a plan for the Coconut Grove Playhouse (The Miami Herald)
Steve Dollar on NY indie film producer Larry Fessenden (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on Catalan film fest Sitges 43 (GreenCine Daily)
Michael Feingold on "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson" et al (The Village Voice)
Matthew Gurewitsch on the Lepage "Ring," Wieland Wagner and Vegas (Capital)
Christopher Hawthorne on envisioning L.A. after the sprawl (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on making Danny Boyle's "127 Hours" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Inside Job" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on the importance of sound in cinema (The Washington Post)
Hillel Italie on the audio version of "Catcher in the Rye" (The Associated Press)
Julia M. Klein talks to the Barnes Foundation architects (The Wall Street Journal)
Anne Midgette on the excitement of Valery Gergiev (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on D.C.'s re-embrace of classical guitar (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne interviews Elton John and Leon Russell (NPR)
Ann Powers on Taylor Swift and the meaning of "mean" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers reviews Elton John and Leon Russell's
"The Union" (Los Angeles Times)
Laura Sydell on the dangers of playing games online (NPR)
Douglas Wolk on "Doonesbury" at 40 (Techland)

Spoiler alert: The following post of necessity reveals the endings of two old movies.

Spoiled alert: The following post is pulled from the author's hip pocket (or from somewhere in that general region), and contains almost no serious research, or even research, period. (But isn't that part of what the privilege of blogging is all about?) The post doesn't even have much of a point. (Blogging, privilege, etc.)

Each of two nights this past weekend, after a couple of grind-it-out days in the studio getting some paintings on paper done (no suffering-artist bleat intended here; I just got it into my head to finish them there and then), I wound down with old movies on TV--one on IFC and the other on TCM. The first night, 'twas the newer, the British film, "The Wicker Man" (1973), with Edward Woodward as a straitlaced mainland cop, Christopher Lee as a sinister lord of the manor who runs a pagan-hippie cult on his inherited island, Diane Cilento as a colluding earth mother, and Britt Ekland as one of the hippies. (Yes, there are a couple of quick, gratuitous nude shots of Ms. Ekland.) Wooodward arrives on the island to investigate the disappearance of a young girl who, he comes to suspect, will be a human sacrifice in the cult's rites on behalf of successful crops. (The cult is apparently a pioneer in the local food movement.)

"Somebody who describes an accident to an eyewitness."

-- Music critic Martin Bernheimer. Pianist and conductor Leon Fleisher quoted Bernheimer at a lecture-demonstration Fleisher gave this week in Irvine, CA.

So I'm writing a Miranda Lambert piece for MSN and as is my practice reading a bunch of other people's reviews in search of stray facts, tracks that hadn't fully registered, conventional wisdom to contravene or get beyond, and general context. And among the Revolution reviews that come up in Google is one signed Jackson Blake dated September 29, 2009, that begins like this:

Although "Kerosene," the debut album from Miranda Lambert, did offer an artistic exuberance that was refreshing and disregarded the methods and conventions that her would-be peers employed at the time, the album did suffer from its lack of refinement artistically as well as narrative naivety.  With "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," Lambert's second album, her artistic vision was brought into clearer focus.  The album showcased a young singer that had become more road weary and much less blindly optimistic at that point than when she first started on her musical journey.

Pretty crappy review, albeit representative of the Nashville meme in which Lambert's previous album, Crazy Ez-Girlfriend, was, how can I resist quoting, "bogged down with struggling with aggression and firepower that Lambert's image had come to be defined by." It also reports that the CMA-nominated "The House That Built Me" is the only song she didn't write on an album enhanced by Julie Miller, Fred Eaglesmith, and John Prine covers. And the prose--well, read the samples again if you dare.

So I stop Googling and start writing and then, early the next day, avoid negotiating a troublesome transition by Googling a little more. At which point I discover a review signed Jim Malec and also dated September 29 that begins like this:

While Miranda Lambert's debut album Kerosene offered a refreshing burst of artistic exuberance and a relative disregard for the conventions and methods employed by her then would-be peers, the album suffered from a certain narrative naivety and a notable lack of artistic refinement. With her sophomore effort, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Lambert brought her artistic vision into clearer focus on an album that showcased a young woman who was a bit more road-weary and a hell of a lot less blindly optimistic than when she began her musical journey.

Internet plagiarism--ain't it grand? It comes in so many different forms, including, apparently, the un-Googlable bad rewrite. Which came first, the Malec or the Blake? Well, FWIW, I also found Malec's double-somersault "then would-be peers" at Amazon's Askville, whatever that is. And he had my other quote as the somewhat more literate "mired in a struggle between the firepower and aggression that had come to define Lambert's image." So my guess is that Malec is the originator--that all Jackson could think to do to conceal his tracks was convolute the syntax even more. This skill set being why he thought the review was worth ripping off in the first place.

Further Googling, however, reveals that "Jackson Blake" also has reviews up of concerts by Celine Dion, Ray LaMontagne, and the Pixies. In different cities no less. Gets around, that Jackson. So perhaps he's a pseudonym employed by some touring service company that filches real writers' reviews and puts them on tour sites? I dunno--it's almost one in the morning and this isn't my problem except insofar as every new insult to arts journalism is my problem. Jim Malec, take up your cutlass.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Larry Blumenfeld with more on Wynton Marsalis in Cuba (The Wall Street Journal)

Somehow, after all these years, I have missed the work of Tere O'Connor, a downtown New York choreographer whose dances -- I'd come to surmise -- were of a specific, idiosyncratic style that had steadily garnered awards, foundation grants and important commissions for him from more well-known institutions like Lyon Opera Ballet and White Oak Dance Project. 

So I promised myself I would get to Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in downtown Los Angeles this weekend to see O'Connor's "Wrought Iron Fog" (2009). I caught the 60-minute piece Friday night.

O'Connor has a long blog entry about "Wrought Iron Fog" on his company's website. He writes in dense, complex sentences about the piece. With his essay banging uneasily about my head, I anticipated that his work would be equally complex, and maybe as obscure-sounding as the title (which was partially inspired by the iron decorations inside the George Eastman House in Rochester, a favorite place for O'Connor to visit as a child).

I was as open as possible to the work, but I also allowed myself to be more audience member than critic. I wasn't going to try to categorize. I was not going to push meaning on the work; I would let it come to me, if it was going to. I approached it like a passenger voyaging through a country I'd never visited, looking out the train window, and delighting when ordinary objects looked slightly alien.

I cared a great deal about painting in the '60s, when Warhol and Lichtenstein and particularly the less well-remembered Tom Wesselmann helped me clarify many of my growing suspicions about pop on the one hand, art on the other, and under what conditions the twain could or should meet. Under the tutelage of my painter friend and mentor Bob Stanley, I looked back at the abstract expressionists, read me some seductively magisterial Rosenberg and arrogantly self-serving Greenberg, and met a lot of artists. But prophetically openminded though Bob was about movies and rock and roll and Pop Art itself, he had no use for certain celebrity artists. Picasso and Pollock, sure. But with Andrew Wyeth or Grandma Moses or God knows Norman Rockwell, he shared his NYC colleagues' disdain. And that disdain extended to Salvador Dalí. With Rockwell I've happily gone along with the recent reassessment spearheaded by Dave Hickey, but the only reason I found myself thinking about Dalí is that my family passed through his stomping grounds on the Costa Brava on a European trip that began and ended in Barcelona and then settled down in Toulouse before returning.

October started, for me, with a frantic cross-country dash in both directions.  I flew from New York to Berkeley purely to catch Mark Morris's new dance, Socrates, which is set to Erik Satie's music of the same name.  (I had missed its February premiere at BAM because I was back in Berkeley at the time, and I was damned if I was going to be on the wrong coast twice.)  As it turned out, the new piece was, as everyone had told me, one of Morris's most beautiful works--at once deceptively simple and incredibly complicated, with fifteen dancers deployed in every possible combination, using mimetic gestures and graceful dance moves as well as purely sculptural poses, all done with a finely tuned sense of musicality and flow, and all adding up to a tremendous emotional impact.  "Why is this so moving, in ways that go beyond the Platonic tale about Socrates' death and even the gut-wrenching combination of tenor and piano?" I kept asking myself, and I still don't have the answer. 

And then, after two nights at Zellerbach Hall, I got on a plane and flew straight back to New York, where I was just in time to catch Gustavo Dudamel's concert at Carnegie Hall, with Yo Yo Ma and the Vienna Philharmonic.  I had seen Dudamel only once before, a couple of years ago, when he conducted the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, the Venezuelan group out of which he arose--and though I was impressed with his energy and enthusiasm at the time, I was not overwhelmed.  Either he has changed or I have (or maybe the Vienna Philharmonic, as a sharply honed tool, is better able to display his virtues), for this time I was overwhelmed, and mainly by his excellent conducting.  The program itself--Brahms's Tragic Overture, Schumann's cello concerto, and Dvorak's "New World" Symphony--was not a big draw, so it was the performers that caused the concert to be sold out weeks in advance.  And in the event, the Brahms was merely well done, while the Schumann was a piece of bizarrerie (why did the composer even choose the cello as a solo instrument, if this is how he felt about it?) that was, for once, made fun and exciting by Ma's incomparable playing and the orchestra's equally brilliant accompaniment.  But the performance of Dvorak's Ninth--for which, I have to admit, I have a soft spot anyway--was no doubt the best I will ever hear.  It was not just that the Vienna musicians were up to it; it was that Dudamel had shaped their performance so cunningly, so intelligently, that this previously overplayed chestnut sounded, for once, like a fresh and delicate piece of music.  I was particularly struck by the conductor's ability to raise and lower the volume at a moment's notice, so that the pounding ending was concluded with a singularly quiet and almost wistful adieu that transformed the feel of the whole work.

Dudamel himself is a charming figure:  extremely youthful, rather short of stature, with a mop of curly dark-brown hair, a repertoire of wildly enthusiastic gestures, and a firm wish to hide himself among his players (he rejects any attempts to make him take a solo bow).  This is all very nice.  But what really matters is the sound he can get out of the orchestra, especially when it is a very good orchestra.  He is one artist it is definitely worth crossing the country to hear, and I expect I will be doing so again before long. 

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Alicia Anstead on the "Laramie Project" 10th-anniversary tour (The Huffington Post)
Larry Blumenfeld on pianist Jason Moran (The Wall Street Journal)
Larry Blumenfeld on Wynton Marsalis in Havana (The Wall Street Journal)
Robert Christgau reviews David Byrne's "Studies of Tom Zé" (MSN Music)
Laura Collins-Hughes interviews playwright Annie Baker (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes does a Q&A with Mark Morris (The Boston Globe)
Christine Dolen interviews playwright Nilo Cruz (The Miami Herald)
Steve Dollar on the rock band Swans (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on Olivier Assayas et al (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold on "Mrs. Warren's Profession" and "Pitmen" (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Pavement (The New Yorker)
Brandon Griggs makes a tech-movie wish list (CNN)
John Horn on pushing the Academy Awards ceremony up (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on marketing "Secretariat" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Nuremberg: Its Lesson for Today" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Secretariat" (The Washington Post)
Joseph Horowitz reviews Santa Fe Opera for TLS (The Unanswered Question)
Hillel Italie on Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prize win (The Associated Press)
Hillel Italie on shortening Ralph Nader's novel for paperback (The Associated Press)
Michael Kimmelman on Monet as spectacle in Paris (The New York Times)
Anne Midgette on Washington National Opera's "Salome" (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on the Monk Jazz Vocals Competition (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne interviews Bill Bryson about "At Home" (NPR)
Claude Peck on Nicole Krauss and her new novel (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Claude Peck swoons anew for "Glee" (Star Tribune, Minneapolis)
Ann Powers on the next move for "Glee" (Los Angeles Times)
Craig Seligman reviews Bob Woodward's "Obama's Wars" (Bloomberg News)
Craig Seligman reviews Philip Roth's "Nemesis" (Bloomberg News)
Laura Sydell watches "The Social Network" with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs (NPR)

From Peter Schjeldahl's review of a controversially uncanonical 2000 Guggenheim show called 1900: Art at the Crossroads, which of course I missed--review and show both. Due to the magic of a technology called the book and an economic risk called the essay collection--Schjeldahl's 2008 Let's See, which reads just great two years late--I recently came across the following quote and feel I can still do a service by sharing it with you a week later:

[Organizer Robert] Rosenblum's brand of art-love vexes me with its levelling embrace of the good, the bad, and the kinky. Liking so much, can one care for anything? But such caprice is a timely antidote to the ten-best-list mentality in a field where most people's attention flags after the top two or three items. We need to recover the pleasure principle in our experience of art and in our public talk about it. Taste cannot be exercised too often or on objects too lowly. Art works are like people who are mysteriously possessed of a will to please us. Perhaps they fail--they may be fools, for example--but how can we not be touched by the effort? Grateful tact is most in order when the intention succeeds to a degree, but less than wholly. That's where art's engines of pleasure are most instructively exposed. A cultivated appreciation of the pretty good sets us up to register the surprise of the great, which baffles our understanding and teaches us little except how to praise. Greatness, a bonus for those who are in the game, can occur only when the game is widely and gladly played.

Though it omits the cleansing catharsis of the well-earned, sharply worded pan, hell, it's only a paragraph, and as such can serve as a credo--one among several, in the best case--for anyone on the criticism beat. What Schjeldahl doesn't mention is that it's best to write as sharply as he does when putting it into practice--or at least to try. So I'll mention it for him.

I am not in the camp that has it in for Oliver Stone. Still, for me, "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps," presented an insurmountable problem.

The opening scene features Gordon Gekko leaving prison after a stint of about eight years. Gekko of course is the antihero first brought memorably to life in Stone's 1987 film, "Wall Street." At its end, Gekko has been brought down for insider trading, and is about to do time.

So fast-forward. As Gekko leaves prison, an official hands him the items he was stripped of before entering. The usual whatnots include a mobile phone the size of a loaf pan.

Cute.

Audiences in the know will remember how Gekko was constantly doing deals over that thing; he must have been yakking away until the last possible minute. Right?

An interesting letter from Rhode Island School of Design president John Maeda in today's Providence Journal, protesting the paper's recent scale-back of visual arts coverage -- criticism in particular. He writes, in part:

A good critique is what lets an artist grow, helping the ideas behind her work come alive and make an impact in the world. By seeing work through another's eyes, the artist learns more about herself, and the world learns more about what she was trying to say. It's what inspires interest in art. Our curriculum is based on critique as a methodology, and our culture in Rhode Island holds it dear, I know. I hope that you see the value of critique and art in the public sphere, and will reconsider your decision to limit art reviews in your publication.

To read the full letter, go here and scroll down to "Don't short visual arts."

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

MJ Andersen on Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom" (The Providence Journal)
Robert Campbell on Phillips Academy's enlarged art gallery (The Boston Globe)
Thomas Conner does a Q&A with M.I.A. (Chicago Sun-Times)
Thomas Conner on Britney Spears' "Glee" turn (Chicago Sun-Times)
Jeffrey Day on artist Lesley Dill (Free Times)
Steve Dollar on "Tuesday, After Christmas" and "Carlos" (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar interviews "Inside Job" director Charles Ferguson (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews "Divine Sister" and "Alphabetical Order" (The Village Voice)
Matthew Gurewitsch talks "Pitmen Painters" with playwright Lee Hall (Capital)
Matthew Gurewitsch reviews a problematic "Lohengrin" (Opera News)
John Horn on the sales pitch for the latest "Narnia" installment (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on athlete-turned-director Deon Taylor (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Social Network" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on the studio behind "Waiting for 'Superman'" (The Washington Post)
Hillel Italie on e-books' kids-vs.-parents divide (The Associated Press)
Julia M. Klein on the play "Suicide, Incorporated" (Obit Magazine)
Dennis Lim on heist movies (The New York Times)
Dennis Lim on Humphrey Bogart (Los Angeles Times)
Anne Midgette on Placido Domingo leaving the WNO (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on the classical crossover genre (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon on ear-catching fall album releases (NPR)
Ann Powers on this year's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers on who the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame overlooked (Los Angeles Times)
Laura Sydell on cloud-based music services (NPR)
Douglas Wolk on Comic-Con's future (Techland)
Douglas Wolk does a Q&A with comics artist Nicola Scott (Techland)

Last Thursday, choreographer Steven Petronio made a guest appearance with Trisha Brown Dance Company -- currently celebrating its 40th anniversary -- to walk down the side of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Petronio, secured with ropes and harness, was walking parallel to the ground. He was reprising Brown's 1971 "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building," one of her simple yet spectacular "equipment dances." As he took his first steps over the edge, the crowd gasped, noted dance critic Roslyn Sulcas in The New York Times. She said it took him only about three minutes to walk to the ground, his body and head straight, strolling as though there was nothing extraordinary about it. 

About five hours later and 3,000 miles away, six dancers of Project Bandaloop, an Oakland, CA, company founded by Amelia Rudolph, skittered and leapt about the wall of the Orange County Performing Arts Center. I was among the 5,000 gathered in the Performing Arts Center's plaza for this free concert and the premiere of "IdEgo," a complex, 50-minute  piece with six dancers, live music, text and digital projections. This kind of dance requires sophisticated climbing equipment. No attempt was made to hide the ropes that held the performers, but it didn't diminish the powerful and dizzying effect: the dancers' huge jetés enacted in slow motion, one dancer holding up another with just his fingers, and other feats that looked, to those on the ground, to be proving wrong the laws of physics (when, in fact, it was just the opposite). 

More than miles separate these two companies and two choreographers, women who bring differing visions and intentions to their choreography. But I also liked the symbolism -- dancers walking on walls on the same day, at opposite ends of the country, a very dramatic demonstration of how one artist breaks boundaries for another.

On the misery-loves-company front, Michael Cunningham offers some solace to those who, in meeting their deadline and staying within their word count, have written something that falls short of the crystalline and indelible prose they'd meant to achieve. He's speaking of the novelist's experience, but it's not far removed from the journalist's:

A novel, any novel, if it's any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist's grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It's all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I've come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a "definitive text."

Cunningham's larger discussion of translation, meanwhile, put me in mind of editing, and how difficult and essential it is for the editor to both respect and -- where necessary -- channel the writer's intent.

His essay in today's New York Times Week in Review section is here.