November 2010 Archives

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Martin Bernheimer on "Utopia, Limited" at Symphony Space (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer on "Don Carlo" at the Metropolitan Opera (Financial Times)
Misha Berson on the Intiman Theatre's debt-reduction plan (The Seattle Times)
Tim Cahill announces his new blog (Art & Document)
Jeanne Carstensen on preserving images of the past (The New York Times)
Robert Christgau on Kings of Leon (MSN Music)
Robert Christgau's Consumer Guide returns, renamed (MSN Music)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Stephen Schwartz in producer mode (The Boston Globe)
Thomas Conner reviews Kanye West's "Dark Twisted Fantasy" (Chicago Sun-Times)
Steve Dollar talks to a newly sober Justin Townes Earle (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar riffs on Kentucker Audley's "Open Five" (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews "A Free Man of Color," "The Coward" (The Village Voice)
John Horn on the making of Andrew Jarecki's "All Good Things" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Burlesque" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Love & Other Drugs" (The Washington Post)
Hillel Italie on the letters of Saul Bellow (The Associated Press)
Hillel Italie on the death of Norris Church Mailer (The Associated Press)
Allan M. Jalon channels a furious Leonard Bernstein (The Huffington Post)
Adam Langer reviews Damon Galgut's "In a Strange Room" (The New York Times)
Anne Midgette reviews the Met's "Don Carlo" (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews the Tokyo Quartet with Jeremy Denk (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne interviews "Modern Family" co-creator Steven Levitan (NPR)
Ann Powers on Kanye West's attempt to grow up (Los Angeles Times)
Craig Seligman reviews Salman Rushdie's new children's book (Bloomberg News)

Expert Witness, as my new MSN blog--spell it, B-L-O-G--is called, has been a gleam in my eye since June and seriously in the works since August. There've been a lot of hurdles, most of them bureaucratic one way or another. Finally, however, Consumer Guide Mark III is, as they say in the virtual print biz, live. Since another name for this line of work is the discrete visitor biz, I'd appreciate your checking out the details at MSN. Most of what you need to know is in the intro that went up yesterday, but I thought I'd wait till I'd posted my first set of  reviews before providing a link:

Canny music fans will note that my first two reviews are of records many months old, both of them already essay subjects for me in The Barnes & Noble Review: M.I.A.'s Maya and the Arcade Fire's The Suburbs. But I bet not everybody can guess which one ended up an A and which one ended up an A minus--I wasn't sure myself until I wrote the capsules, several months after the fact. I have a bunch of reviews stockpiled, and for a while a lot of Expert Witness will be more retrospective than is the blogging norm. But a) the CG was always like that anyway and b) having it live is already making me more news-oriented in my listening.

As for why I'm doing it, the intro explains that pretty candidly. Bottom line, I wouldn't enjoy music as much as I do without the discipline of rating and reviewing it.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Martin Bernheimer reviews Leonard Bernstein's "A Quiet Place" (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer reviews Richard Strauss' "Intermezzo" (Financial Times)
Larry Blumenfeld on pianist Danilo Pérez (The Wall Street Journal)
Robert Campbell reviews Foster + Partners' new MFA wing (The Boston Globe)
Robert Christgau on Tom Zé (Barnes and Noble Review)
Laura Collins-Hughes interviews Bob Glaudini and Peter DuBois (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on formalist sculptor Erwin Hauer (The Boston Globe)
Thomas Conner reviews Lee DeWyze's "Live It Up" (Chicago Sun-Times)
Jeffrey Day on two decades of Vista Studios (Free Times, Columbia, S.C.)
Steve Dollar on "William S. Burroughs: A Man Within" (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on composer Glenn Branca (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews "After the Revolution" et al (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Das Racist and Odd Future (The New Yorker)
Matthew Gurewitsch on competing editions of "Don Carlo" (The New York Times)
John Horn on Hollywood chasing women over Thanksgiving (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Deathly Hallows - Part 1" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on the Oscar documentary shortlist (The Washington Post)
Hillel Italie on "Catch-22" as an e-book (The Associated Press)
Anne Midgette on Virginia Opera firing its founder (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews Susanna Malkki and the NSO (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon on Girl Talk's "All Day" and Josh Groban's "Illuminations" (NPR)
Laurie Muchnick on the National Book Awards (Bloomberg News)
Ann Powers reviews Bruce Springsteen's "The Promise" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers on the "Pink Friday" backlash against Nicki Minaj (Los Angeles Times)
Laura Sydell on MySpace's entertainment makeover (NPR)
Douglas Wolk on "Amazing Spider-Man, You're Hired!" (Techland)

When I started losing my hair, which is to say developing patches of male pattern baldness, I started cutting my hair shorter. Way short. Now, I get myself "buzzed" every month or so with electric clippers with the little attached plastic gizmo set for the shortest length. It's a step-and-a-half removed from a shaved head, a length (or lack of it) to which I won't go because I don't like the sight of my own blood flowing from a scalp wound. (I also wear a short beard--the product of getting, several years ago, some god-awful skin infection from keeping my razor for the gym in a plastic bag in the locker, not being allowed to shave while it healed under some medicinal cream, and liking the release from having to shave. Since I'm white on the top of my head and white on the bottom, many people ask me--presumably not from intellectual indicators--whether I've got my cabeza on right side up.)

Wearing a hairpiece--a.k.a. rug, hair hat, "Did something crawl up on your head and die?"--never occurred to me. Not having as much hair as I did when I was younger (thick brown hair runs in my family) never seemed a particular appearance detriment (I didn't have that much to lose), let alone a cosmetic disaster. The reason I cut my hair real short now is not to disguise the fact that I've gone fairly bald, but that combable-length hair with large patches of skin visible through the strands is ugly, like a big toe visible through the worn material of an old sock is ugly.

Best Music Writing 2010 is out, this year's model edited by Ann Powers, a good friend I've praised here and elsewhere many times. I devoured it; I devour it every year. But the only one I've enjoyed more consistently is the 2007, which I put together myself. Really, no more than four or five pieces out of 36 that wouldn't have made it to my final round. And although I'm an opponent of affirmative-action agendas in assembling such collections, Ann's long-established and here restated interest in exposing feminist and gay perspectives occasions several of the essays etc. I found most stimulating--notably Michelle Tea on the Gossip, Barry Walters on Wendy & Lisa, and Raquel Cepeda on "Another Love TKO: Teens Grapple With Rihanna vs. Chris Brown." Kudos as well to examples of very different kinds of old-fashioned craft: Jason Fine's monumental Rolling Stone profile of Merle Haggard and Philip S. Bryant's memoiristic and literally poetic Utne Reader meditation on the jazz fandom of his father and his father's best friend. Powers also made the decision to include a lot of online writing, some of which I think cries out for editing. I'm not sure I would have made the same call. But since the pieces are for the most part clearly original and worthy even if not polished (or sometimes, for brief passages here and there, altogether coherent), I was kind of glad she did.

Even before she took her first misstep, it was a given that Sarah Palin's daughter Bristol, the latest misfit on reality TV's insanely popular "Dancing with the Stars," would be a finalist.

Even before we knew if she was any good -- and the judges' consensus is, she isn't -- it was clear Bristol would send the ratings through the roof, and that the show's producers and ABC network officials would want her around until the very end.

And of course, that is what's happened. More than 20 million viewers have been watching this season, number 11, up 3.3 million viewers from the year before, according to the Los Angeles Times.

But when Bristol beat the sophisticated and elegant Brandy on this week's show to make it to the final round, people were surprised anyway. And mad. Really mad. (Eliminations are made through a "secret" formula that combines the judges' scores with viewer voting.) It was even reported that a fellow in Wisconsin blasted his television with a shotgun in response. (Extenuating circumstances: His wife told the Wisconsin Journal her husband has bipolar disorder.) NPR's Robert Siegel invited ballroom dance's Pierre Dulaine onto "All Things Considered" for his reaction to this stunning development and to offer advice to Bristol on how to improve. Ugh.

In this morning's Times, Anthony Tommasini points out that the New York Philharmonic sounds much better at Carnegie than at Avery Fisher, its home base in Lincoln Center. This is undeniably true.  In fact, there is no concert hall in America (with the possible exception of LA's Disney Hall) where an orchestra sounds as good as it does in Carnegie Hall.

Being located so near to this marvel of architectural and acoustical pleasure has caused the comparatively charmless Avery Fisher Hall to have a terrible inferiority complex.  But in fact, if the music is good enough, one can overlook most of the auditorium's minor shortcomings, as I learned during my two most recent visits to Avery Fisher.

On Sunday, October 31, as part of Lincoln Center's White Light Festival, the Dresden Staatskapelle, under the baton of Daniel Harding, performed a marvelously moving rendition of Brahms's German Requiem.  I have noticed before that Avery Fisher is not at all bad for vocal pieces, and this occasion was no exception.  The Westminster Symphonic Choir was in excellent voice (though one poor singer fainted mere seconds from the end of the piece, causing a brief local skirmish in the stands), and Harding conducted both the choir and the orchestra with such consummate grace and delicacy that every wave of the monumental Brahms work had its desired effect.  I had no sense of acoustical shortcomings of any kind: I was just immersed in the music, and it was terrific.

And then, two Sundays later, I returned to Avery Fisher for a Philharmonic-sponsored chamber music concert:  a set of Beethoven string trios performed by Anne-Sophie Mutter, Yuri Bashmet, and Lynn Harrell.  To perform chamber music in a hall this size is madness, of course, and it was not the intimate experience it would have been in, say, Weill Hall (the jewel-box chamber venue at Carnegie).  But then, thousands more could hear the concert at Avery Fisher, and thousands evidently wanted to, because the orchestra section and the two upper balconies appeared to be almost completely filled.  These three eminent musicians were at once sufficiently brilliant and sufficiently in sync with each other to fill the space in a manner that was recognizably Beethovenesque.  One could get a sense of structure and texture on the most detailed level; and one could even hear the subtle playfulness in the answering strands of the final piece, the String Trio in E-flat Major, as first Mutter, then Bashmet, then Harrell handed on the melody in turn.  I have had less involving chamber-music experiences in the old Alice Tully Hall, which is about a third the size of Avery Fisher -- though granted, these took place before Alice Tully was remodeled, and the new space is far more intimate in feel.  Perhaps when Avery Fisher gets its promised remodel, we will all stop complaining about the venue and start judging the actual merits of the performers.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Alicia Anstead on John Cariani's "Last Gas" (The Callie Crossley Show, WGBH) 
Alicia Anstead on the Shirley, VT Plays festival (The Callie Crossley Show, WGBH) 
Larry Blumenfeld on Nick Gold and AfroCubism (The Wall Street Journal)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Foster + Partners' MFA intervention (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on the MFA's Olmsted embrace (The Boston Globe)
Thomas Conner on holiday CDs by Mariah Carey, Susan Boyle (Chicago Sun-Times)
Steve Dollar talks to Arthur Penn (from 2008) about "Mickey One" (GreenCine Daily)
Steve Dollar on "Requiem for Fossil Fuels" (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews Lisa Kron's "In the Wake" et al (The Village Voice)
John Horn on waging an award campaign on a budget (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Morning Glory" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "127 Hours" (The Washington Post)
Joseph Horowitz's Met review in the current TLS (The Unanswered Question)
Hillel Italie on the death of Dino De Laurentiis (The Associated Press)
Michael Kimmelman on defending cultural identity in Corsica (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein interviews Ted Gup about "A Secret Gift" (AARP.org)
Anne Midgette on the critic's job, nastiness included (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews Emanuel Ax (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne interviews Nora Ephron about "I Remember Nothing" (NPR)
Ann Powers interviews Cee Lo Green (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers on John Hawkes' song, "Bred and Buttered" (Los Angeles Times)
Craig Seligman reviews Laura Hillenbrand's "Unbroken" (Bloomberg News)

No, it's not just Tom Moon's kind use of the reference, "Mr. Plagens" (something I'm not too often called, for reasons inherent in this comment), that draws me to me his very good, very thoughtful, very honest post. The issue he raises is a meaty one, albeit all but rendered moot by the blogosphere. (If Huey Long were around today, his famous speech might have to be reworked as, "Every man an online critic.")

In sum, being an artist never caused me any trouble as a critic, but being a critic caused me lots of foreseeable but endurable trouble as an artist. The art world in which I grew up--way smaller, way poorer, way more ingenuous than today's--had a tradition, and an ongoing practice, of artist-critics, from Selden Rodman to Robert Motherwell to Don Judd to a whole bunch of people in what was called the "Women's Movement" in the 1970s. Practically everybody worked two jobs--artist/teacher, artist/critic, artist/entrepreneur, or, the hardest row to hoe, artist/curator. True, hardly any staff critics for major dailies or popular magazines were known to be working artists (who knew what they did in their apartments in the dead of night?), but more often than not the authors of art-magazine reviews were also artists. Nobody ever said to me, officially or not, you shouldn't be a critic because you're an artist, too.

Ever since August, when I began to seriously consider sharing some of my original music, I've been thinking of Gene Foreman, longtime managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

I can't remember who said I had to read Leonard Michaels. Maybe it was just an insistent reviewer. But I herewith pass along the insistence.

I like voices. Not just the singing kind (among which I happen to prefer raspy, gargly male throats along the lines of Joe Cocker, Rod Stewart, Leonard Cohen, and Fats Waller--not Tom Waits: too inverse-show-offy), but speaking voices. That, plus my rapidly fading showbiz knowledge (I can't keep up with the stroboscopic succession of ever-younger, ever more vapid movie actors), used to enable me to nail the voiceovers on a lot of commercials. Hey, that's Gene Hackman for--if I remember correctly--United Airlines, Lowe's and the Oppenheimer Fund. Richard ("'night, John Boy") Thomas for Mercedes-Benz was easy. Isn't that the leading man from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and any number of Lifetime Network woman-in-jep movies, doing those Applebee's commercials?

I have a harder time with female voices. Part of it's due to residual chauvinism (shared, apparently, by "the industry": they don't seem to spend the money Dolby-ing up women's voices in the movies like they do Russell Crowe whisper-growling that he's going to break his innocent wife out of prison), part of it's due to plain ol' discomfort with the higher registers, and part of it's due to the fact (actually, I'm guessing) that commercial-makers don't go in for female celebrity voices as much as they do for those of males that one subliminally recognizes. The only one I know in New York is longtime radio veteran Patricia McCann ("Hi, this is Patricia McCann...) on the AM radio I listen to for traffic reports. She introduces herself on commercials because, these days, she's known for doing commercial voiceovers--a variation on historian Daniel J. Boorstin's theme of people who are well-known for being well-known. (Another variation is "reality TV star.")

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Robert Campbell on the beauty of a new children's chapel (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes profiles the MFA's Elliot Bostwick Davis (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on UK artist Nicola Green's Obama project (The Boston Globe)
Anthony DeCurtis on Bruce Springsteen and "The Promise" (The New York Times)
Steve Dollar on downtown NYC filmmaker Lena Dunham (The Wall Street Journal)
Steve Dollar on "Raging Bull," Pedro Costa, et al (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold on the revival of "Angels in America" (The Village Voice)
Matthew Gurewitsch investigates shadow areas of "La Bête" (Capital New York)
Matthew Gurewitsch profiles star baritone Gerald Finley (The New York Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on the election and L.A. mass transit (Los Angeles Times)
Will Hermes on the lost songs of Bruce Springsteen's "The Promise" (NPR)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Fair Game" and "Client 9" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Due Date" (The Washington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on artists in Syria (The New York Times)
Julia M. Klein on Antonia Fraser's "Must You Go?" (Obit Magazine)
Anne Midgette reviews conductor Xian Zhang and the NSO (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews the Dresden Staatskapelle (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers interviews Earth, Wind & Fire's Philip Bailey (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers reviews Elton John and Leon Russell live (Los Angeles Times)
Craig Seligman reviews Stacy Schiff's "Cleopatra: A Life" (Bloomberg News)
Laura Sydell on Google TV (NPR)
Laura Sydell on the technology behind video games minus the controller (NPR)

Just now wrote a review to be published later if all goes as planned of an eponymous album called Eskmo. (Sticklers claim that this is an imprecise usage of "eponymous." Look it up, I'm not going to explain why, but strictly speaking they're right, only I think that this is a case of where a useless word has been refitted for modern needs. An eponymous album is now a self-titled album. Get used to it.) Eskmo is a DJ from San Francisco who makes a kind of semi-pop (really quarter-pop) musique concrete, no itals please. I know very little about the style so did my thing and looked at the Metacritic reviews, three of the mere five of which are negative. So just for the hell of it I wrote down the songs the three negatives excepted, either because they actually liked them or to create an illusion of "balance." Max Raymond at musicOMH: "We Got More" and "My Gears Are Starting to Tremble." Patrick Masterson at Dusted: "We Got More," "Cloudlight," and "Siblings." Brian Howe at Pitchfork: "Moving Glowstream," ""Starships" (qualified), and "Cloudlight."

That makes six songs on a 13-track album, two named twice, admired by people who don't even like the thing. Might be better than they think, eh?

Two of my most recent posts have been about rock critic Rob Sheffield and art critic Peter Schjeldahl. The Schjeldahl came about because the book group Rob and I are in decided to read his collection Let's See, and I couldn't resist quoting it before I'd even finished (which I now have, and it is VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED). Schjeldahl read the post and wrote to thank me, observing that he'd done some Googling and realized that although we were born a month apart, lived five blocks from each other, and had both worked as police reporters in New Jersey in the '60s (he didn't mention that we were both baseball fanatics and veterans of The Village Voice), we had never met and should. My response mentioned the book group, and he wrote me back volunteering to attend if we were interested. Which needless to say we were.

Come the day Schjeldahl showed up at nine sharp, learned that member Jon Dolan had grown up about 15 miles from his own Minnesota hometown, but failed to meet member Melissa Maerz, who got hit with a late deadline and was much missed, in part because she'd been so enthralled by Let's See that she'd spent the weekend boning up on artists she'd read about there. So after the meeting Melissa asked us what happened and Sheffield reminded me of why he makes the big bucks with this off-the-cuff response, which I certainly can attest to accuracy-wise, give or take a little telescoping, but wouldn't have remembered half of myself. I've edited it lightly with Rob's permission and Schjeldahl has made some accuracy changes.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Larry Blumenfeld on pianist Jesús "Chucho" Valdés (The Wall Street Journal)
Robert Christgau reviews No Age's "Everything in Between" (NPR)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Jed Bernstein producing in Wellfleet (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar on the 1977 Japanese horror film "House" (GreenCine Daily)
Steve Dollar on artist Joe Coleman and his self-portrait (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold on "Language Archive," "Driving Miss Daisy" (The Village Voice)
Matthew Gurewitsch profiles tenor Brandon Jovanovich (The New York Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on the L.A. Museum of the Holocaust (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on marketing a movie that's made viewers faint (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on making "The King's Speech" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews the documentary "Budrus" (The Washington Post)
Hillel Italie interviews Keith Richards about "Life" (The Associated Press)
Allan M. Jalon finds a name for his new blog: Arts Lust (The Huffington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on humor in Bulgaria (The New York Times)
Anne Midgette reviews Laurie Anderson's "Delusion" (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on the NEA's 2010 Opera Honors (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne interviews Garry Trudeau about "Doonesbury" at 40 (NPR)
Tom Moon reviews jazz pianist Vijay Iyer's "Solo" (NPR)
Laurie Muchnick reviews John Grisham's "The Confession" (Bloomberg News)
Ann Powers reviews Taylor Swift's
"Speak Now" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Powers profiles Josh Groban (Los Angeles Times)
Mark Rozzo on Jim Zivic's Jaguar Lounge chair (WSJ.)
Douglas Wolk names his fears for the future of comics (Techland)
Douglas Wolk reviews "X'ed Out" and other new releases (The New York Times)