September 2011 Archives

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Martin Bernheimer reviews the New York Philharmonic (Financial Times)
Larry Blumenfeld on singer Jen Shyu (The Wall Street Journal)
Robert Campbell reviews the MFA's Linde Family Wing (The Boston Globe)
Robert Christgau on Jay-Z (Barnes & Noble Review)
Robert Christgau on Teddybears at Irving Plaza (MSN Music)
Laura Collins-Hughes reviews "Lives Other Than My Own" (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Laurie Anderson, death and "Delusion" (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold reviews Itamar Moses' "Completeness" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "Play It Cool" at Theatre Row (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne on the L.A. cityscape in "Drive" (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on Gary Hustwit's documentary "Urbanized" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on George Clooney, "The Ides of March" and politics (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on two films hoping to woo religious moviegoers (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews Patricia Bosworth's Jane Fonda bio (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on Brad Pitt, actor, in "Moneyball" (The Washington Post)
Dennis Lim on Andrew Haigh's "Weekend" (The New York Times)
Glenn Lovell reviews Tom Tykwer's "3" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Drive" (CinemaDope.com)
Tom Moon on the demise of R.E.M. (Moonjawn)
Ann Powers on songs advocating for death row prisoner Troy Davis (NPR)
David Streitfeld on Amazon's tablet vs. the iPad and the Nook (The New York Times)
Laura Sydell on sharing movie, music, TV and news consumption via Facebook (NPR)
Laura Sydell on Netflix splitting in two (NPR)
Kenneth Turan reviews "The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975" (Los Angeles Times)
Kenneth Turan reviews "Moneyball" (NPR)

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

MJ Andersen on losing Borders, and why it matters (The Providence Journal)
Laura Bleiberg reviews Eiko and Koma (Los Angeles Times)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Leah Hager Cohen's "The Grief of Others" (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on updating I.M. Pei's wing of the MFA (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold reviews the Broadway revival of "Follies" (The Village Voice)
Alan Hess critiques Foster + Partners' Apple headquarters (San Jose Mercury News)
Ann Hornaday on the Toronto International Film Festival (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein on Roger Ebert's "Life Itself" (Obit Magazine)
Dennis Lim on Ryan Gosling (The New York Times)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Straw Dogs" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Forged" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on celebrating the amateur musician (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers on Tori Amos' "Night of Hunters" (NPR)
Ann Powers on Pearl Jam and Cameron Crowe's "Pearl Jam Twenty" (NPR)
Craig Seligman reviews Roger Ebert's "Life Itself" (Bloomberg News)
Craig Seligman reviews "That Used To Be Us" (Bloomberg News)
Kenneth Turan on making "Winter in the Blood" into a movie (Los Angeles Times)
Kenneth Turan on a tiny Montana town rebuilding its theater (Los Angeles Times) 

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Martin Bernheimer on the New York Philharmonic (Promenade Magazine)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Mary Zimmerman and her "Candide" (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Melanie Joseph, Kirk Lynn, and values (The Boston Globe)
Michael Feingold on Teresa Deevy's "Temporal Powers" (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Sept. 11, 2001 (The New Yorker)
Matthew Gurewitsch considers the true cost of a reviewer's free tickets (Opera News)
Christopher Hawthorne on Apple's new campus (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on filtering teddy bears at the WTC site (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on filmmakers' focus on land at Telluride (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on balancing science and drama in "Contagion" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Circumstance" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews the Sept. 11 documentary "Rebirth" (The Washington Post)
Dennis Lim on German director Tom Tykwer and "3" (The New York Times)
Glenn Lovell asks, "How Safe Are Our Theaters?" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews Soderbergh's "Contagion" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on the soprano Patricia Racette (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers on listening to live music right after the Sept. 11 attacks (NPR)
Mark Rozzo on auctioning Astrid Kirchherr's Beatles archive (The New York Times)
Laura Sydell on the Sept. 11 opera "Heart of a Soldier" (NPR) 

Christopher Small was a musicologist, and a few of his fellow musicologists swore by him. But musicology is an exceptionally hidebound and exclusionary academic discipline even now--especially in insecure and hence snobbish America, as Small, a New Zealander who taught in England, was the first to point out to me. As a result he had at least as much impact on journalists. Dave Marsh was the first to tell me about Music of the Common Tongue, and when I wrote the Times's Jon Caramanica to make sure he knew not just that Small had died but how important he was, he wrote back to let me know that the same book had had a major impact on him as a student.

In 2000 I met him in at his retirement home in Sitges, near Barcelona, for a Voice piece called "Thinking About Musicking," and eventually Perfect Sound Forever published a transcript of our conversation. Musicking was the title of the third and most theoretical of his books, my own favorite--a prolonged argument based on a concert performance that rather than an art concerned most fundamentally with time, the standard view, music is an art concerned most fundamentally with relationships, and also that music is more properly a verb than a noun. He did a brief lecture tour in the States a few years later and he and his then companion, later husband Neville Braithwaite came over for dinner along with PSF's Jason Gross. They were both extraordinarily kind and gracious men. Charles Keil wrote recently:

Somewhere in the early 1980s I remember finally reading the chapters of Chris's first book and feeling elated, healed, challenged, and most of all, surprised that points I was trying to make in anger, filled with righteous indignation, could be made concisely, clearly, elegantly, in a prose style for which I still can't find the precisely "right" adjective--the word that means non-polemical, even gentle, ways of proceeding that nevertheless inflict great and lasting damage on a powerful and opposing point of view.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Laura Collins-Hughes asks John Guare about "His Girl Friday" (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Brenda Withers and "The Ding Dongs" (The Boston Globe)
Christopher Hawthorne on skyscraper symbolism, post-Sept. 11 (Los Angeles Times)
Jan Herman on Ground Zero "visions" that never happened (Straight Up)
Jan Herman on empty ceremonies for 9/11 (Straight Up)
John Horn on George Clooney, Grant Heslov and "Ides of March" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on Steven Soderbergh and "Contagion" (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on the Palin documentary, "The Undefeated" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday on this summer's lessons for the movie biz (The Washington Post)
Glenn Lovell writes about Woody's Roma (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews "The Debt" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on the death of tenor Salvatore Licitra (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on Antonín Dvořák in America (The Washington Post)
Ann Powers on rock's ballads of abandonment (NPR)
Ann Powers on Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter IV" (NPR)
Laura Sydell on Hitchcock's "Vertigo" and San Francisco (NPR)
Douglas Wolk on Anders Brekhus Nilsen's "Big Questions" (The New York Times)

And in print:

Lily Tung Crystal on Symmetry Theatre Company and women in Bay Area theater (American Theatre)