Dilettante Critic

DC, Version 2.0

2006-09-28T17:58:00.000-04:00

I needed a little break. I'd lost focus. I was trying to be all things to all people. (And by "all people" I mean, obviously, may seven loyal readers.)

But I just read a collection of Nick Hornby's "Stuff I've Been Reading" columns for the great literary magazine The Believer which has inspired me to say a few words about a few books.

So y'all have that to look forward to...

Sentence of the Day 1/29

2006-01-29T23:05:00.000-05:00

In the meantime Nikolai Petrovich succeeded, even in the lifetime of his parents and to their no small distress, in falling in love with the daughter of an official called Prepolovensky, the previous owner of his apartment, an attractive and, as they say, well-developed girl who used to read serious articles in the "science" section of journals.

- Ivan Turgenev
Fathers and Sons, 1863

Topsy Turvy

2006-01-29T18:43:00.001-05:00

I finally saw this excellent 1999 Mike Leigh movie about Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. It was the costumes that won the Oscar, but there's nothing about this movie that isn't wonderful, from Leigh's scintilating dialogue to the first rate work of dozens of fine British actors, led by Jim Broadbent, who is masterful as William Gilbert, brilliant, inept, domineering and supercillious by turns. Shirley Henderson (aka Moaning Myrtle) is fascinating and deeply moving as the tippling soprano who first creates Yum-Yum.

That might not be anyone more qualified than Leigh to have made this love letter to the theater. He's not only a great filmmaker, but he's a genuine man of the theater, having written, I don't know, a gazillion plays (including Abigail's Party, now playing on Broadway). He is famous as a filmmaker for his rigorous improvization-based rehearsal process.

And, of course, The Mikado, of which we get generous, sumptuous helpings, kicks all kinds of ass, and the successful opening night (glimpses of which are dispersed throughout the movie) is genuinely thrilling. David Edelstein, formerly of Slate, says the movie takes solong to get going that "only a lunatic would call it a masterpiece." Even so, he conceeds, "As Leigh's camera pulls back over the orchestra and the audience, this movie feels like one of the saddest and loveliest tributes to the lives of artists ever made." What could possibly be better than that?

Best cast ever?

2006-01-28T19:45:00.000-05:00

Murder on the Orient Express:

Albert Finney as Poirot (amazing in a pinched, freaky way; better than David Suchet in the A&E series, much more daring than the great Peter Ustinov in Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun), Lauren Becall (already old in 1974), Sean Connery (ditto), Ingrid Bergman (ditto, but also briliantly funny), John Gielgud (already really old), Vanessa Redgrave (eerily young-looking and glowing), Jacqueline Bisset (ditto, but also preposterously beautiful), Michael York (remember him?), Martin Balsam (dude has 166 entries on imbd.com, including Seven Days in May), Anthony Perkins (playing, for a change, a nervous, effeminate young man with mommy complex), Jean-Pierre Cassel (even more roles than Balsam, almost all of them in French films, often opposite Seberg, Bardot, Deneuve, etc.) and on and on.

It's not really a very good a movie though.

DC kills actor, frightens self...

2006-01-25T16:40:00.000-05:00

If I'd known this was coming, you better believe I never would have written this.

Sentence of the Day, 1/25 ("Republican Kleptocracy" Edition)

2006-01-25T11:26:00.000-05:00

Alas, when you steal from Americans, they just have less money for their families and they'll gladly vote you back in. When you steal from Iraqi reconstruction, you get thousands of Iraqis killed.

- Juan Cole, in Informed Comment, one of the most important blogs on all things Middle East, referring to a new audit of American finacial practices in Iraq that, according to this New York Times story, details the skimming of tens of millions of dollars meant for the country's reconstruction.

A taste:

Agents from the inspector general's office found that the living and working quarters of American occupation officials were awash in shrink-wrapped stacks of $100 bills, colloquially known as bricks.

One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials certified the work as completed.

I didn't intend, when I started this little vanity project, to make political posts. Believe me, I'd much rather sit around and watch TV. But the people running this country are so callous and clueless and inept and absurd, that sometimes you just have to say so.

Uh-oh...

2006-01-24T12:38:00.000-05:00

Turns out Google's got meticulously detailed records of every Internet search you've ever done. To the shock and surprise of absolutely no one, the Bush administration wants them. In case you can't work out for yourself why this is a BAD THING, Tim Wu explains it in Slate.

Sentence of the Day, 1/24

2006-01-24T10:02:00.000-05:00

There is hardly a political question in the United States which does not sooner or later turn into a judicial one.

- Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America, 1835

I haven't read Democracy in America, which, according to Kurt Vonnegut, makes me a "nincompoop." I'm pretty much okay with that.

Two things that are ruinning my life

2006-01-23T14:09:00.000-05:00

1) Entourage. There are only so many episodes of this show available for viewing (surprisingly few) and only so many times each one can be enjoyed (surprisingly many), so it wouldn't seem possible that it could be so much of a distraction. And yet here we are. Because even when I'm not watching Entourage, I'm thinking about Entourage. I'm singing the Jane's Addiction theme song at work. ("I wanna be your superhero/Even if I tumble fall..." Tumble fall? What's that? Who cares?). I'm wondering how I'll make it to February 16 when HBO on Demand -- Fraudulent Name of the Day! -- releases the next batch of Season Two episodes (I still haven't seen them all!). Never mind trying to figure out how I'll make it til June when Season Three starts. The last time I was like this about was... Who I am I kidding. I've never been like this about a TV show.

It's not that this shallow, insider, Hollywood lifestyle porn is really all that good. (In a lot of ways, it's embarrassing, cynical, hypocritical dreck. I'm comfortable with this.) It's just that it's so unbelievably awesome. That it takes superficiality to new (and mostly knowing) levels just makes it a product of the times. Watching Vinnie Chase and his boys cruise through their blissfully blessed lives ("You're like a triple lotto winner, Turtle," Eric, the resident grown-up, reminds the ultimate hanger-on when he gets uppity) is the next best thing to being them.

2) Su doku. Can't... stop... filling... in... numbers...

Sentence of the Day, 1/23

2006-01-23T09:28:00.000-05:00

You say you're supposed to be nice to the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians and the Methodists and this, that, and the other thing. Nonsense. I don't have to be nice to the spirit of the Antichrist.

- Pat Robertson
quoted by Garry Wills in The New York Review of Books, Feb. 9, 2006
"Jimmy Carter & the Culture of Death" (Which makes this article the DC Title of the Day)

Boast of the Day

2006-01-20T14:46:00.000-05:00

Just did today's (that would be Friday's) NYT crossword. In pen. It's not that I've never done a Friday before, but it's rare enough for me to give myself a shout out. DC in the House!

Official DC NYT crossword irritations:

- Monday and Tuesday are easy enough so that there's little sense of accomplishment when I finish them and a high sense of failure when I don't.

- Thursday and Friday are hard enough so that I seldom I finish them, which, though it decreases the magnitude of the failure, increases its frequency.

- Saturday is for sick people. Only masochists and Rain Man types do Saturday.

- Sunday is a whole other thing. It's another game entirely, and one I don't play. Someone once told me it's difficulty level was approximately that of Thursday, but it's tone and mood and everything are just off. I don't like it. I don't even like talking about it. Let's move on...

...to Wednesday -- the sweet spot, the Goldilocks/Baby Bear "just right" day. Wednesday is hard enough so that I feel like you've done something, but sane enough so that I can often do it. This is where I like to live.

Except for those rare, glorious Fridays when I kick Will Shortz's sadistic weasel ass. Boo-yah!

The opposite of television

2006-01-20T00:50:00.000-05:00

If you can't feel shit, you can't do shit. I think Confucius said that.

- Michael Aronov in Manigma, his ballsy, inspiring one-man show.

Aronov is a great actor who completely transforms here again and again -- from a hard-edged drag torch singer to a just-off-the-boat iron-pumping traditionalist (and Aronov has to guns for it), to an ecstactic prison visionary to an autistic man tearing up napkins while sitting on the toilet missing his mom. And on and on.

The six characters represent, Aronov says, exagerations of facets of his own personality, but the real point is life is amazing and needs be seized, not only with both hands, but with feet and mouths and butts and whatever else you've got.

If this sounds like a recipe for self-indulgence, do not fear; Aronov the writer is as artfully provocative as Aronov the actor is artlessly mesmorizing. When he moves, you find yourself saying, "Oh. So that's what bodies are supposed to do. I get it now." And he's somehow just as good when he's still. Best of all is when he's piercing the audience's comfort zone -- taunting, teasing, flirting, scolding, challenging and exhorting.

But mostly sharing, in the best sense of the word, his soaring electric thrill at being alive with you, on this night, in this room, in this moment. This is what theater should be and so rarely is. This is the opposite of television.

Disclosure: OK, yes, I know the guy. Even did a show with him once. (He was better than me.) But still. This is the most exhilarating piece of theater I've seen in long long time. Too long.

Invitation of the Day

2006-01-19T16:52:00.000-05:00

This is a 100% real thing I was sent an actual person [all proper names redacted]:

A beverage company is doing a study on a new hangover remedy. They've rented out my private party rooms on Thursday, January 19th and are looking for subjects willing to drink for free, in the name of science. It will be fun, but it's also serious. First of all, don't sign up if you don't really drink, or if you never get hangovers. You need to be on time, fill out some forms (a non-disclosure agreement, a waiver, and a survey). You can't drink any alcohol that night before or after the study (only during), and you'll need to fax or email back the final part of the survey the next day. You also can't be allergic to vitamins, amino acids or herbal supplements. Obviously, you also must be at least 21 years old! You'll be asked to drink samples of the product during or after drinking. There's also a chance you might be in the placebo group, so it is important to accept that you might have a hangover the day after.

Why didn't I get invitations like this before I was a grown-up with a job?

Sentence of the Day, 1/19 (Deep Throat Edition)

2006-01-19T14:49:00.000-05:00

The most compelling ideology in the world is not communism, capitalism or nationalism -- it's success.

- Somebody impressive who I'm not allowed to quote said this today at an off-the-record seminar on Israel After Sharon at the Council on Foreign Relations. What I was doing there in the midst of so many serious and/or wealthy people I'm not sure, but I'm probably allowed to say that the food was excellent.

Match Point verdict

2006-01-18T09:12:00.000-05:00

I liked this movie a lot. But then some time went by, and now I'm less sure.

Sentence of the Day, 1/18

2006-01-18T09:06:00.000-05:00

Though some may accuse me of neglect, I have been consistent with the advice I always gave my children: never finish anything that bores you. Unfortunately, some of my children bored me.

- Adam Haslett
Notes to My Biographer (from the book You Are Not a Stranger Here, 2002)

Greg Behrendt is cool

2006-01-17T00:10:00.000-05:00

What I learned from watching Comedy Central tonight:

1) Stephen Colbert has officially passed Jon Stewart

2) Some buffed middle age guy named Greg Behrendt, a stand-up comic I've never heard of, is hilarious. OK, fine, not, in and of itself, blog-worthy (like anything on this particular blog is). But, too, there's this: This guy wrote a book called He's Just Not That Into You. You've heard of this book. Oprah pimped for this book before she moved on to James "Weasel" Frey. Or maybe after- whatever - the point is, how much would I have liked to hate the guy who wrote a book with a title like that? Answer: a lot. But, unfortunately, he's unhatable. He's hilarious and awesome. I hate that.

Sentence of the Day, 1/16

2006-01-16T21:56:00.001-05:00

"I saw it but I haven't blogged it yet?" Can you say that? You can't say that. That is not a legitimate sentence.

- My friend Dominic, the other night at Dive Bar

I know Dominic from a writing class I took three or four years ago. Best. Class. Ever.

Most overrated show on TV -- correction

2006-01-15T22:14:00.001-05:00

A while back, I said it was Curb Your Enthusiasm. I was so wrong. It's not that I'm saying CYE isn't overrated; I'm not and it is. It's just not the most overrated. Not when ethe whole country is so bananas over 24.

I finally forced myself to sit through most of an episode of that humorless, hysterical, reactionary, vigilante porn. It took three Entourage reruns before I felt whole.

24 is so popular and so bad that it may yet pass The X-Files as the most overrated TV show since Lawrence Whelk.

Dunk/Condiment of the Day

2006-01-14T17:49:00.001-05:00

Cleveland came up short against the Lakers the other night in spite of this sick LeBron James throw-down.

Also good is D.L. Jardine's Special Edition Texas Champagne Cayenne Pepper Sauce (not pictured), which I've been putting all over everything.

Pieces of Crap

2006-01-14T16:47:00.000-05:00

This is the last time I'm mentioning James "Pants-on-Fire" Frey and his slow dance with hucksterism, A Million Little Pieces. I wouldn't mention it at all, but I have to link to this article by Seth Mnookin on Slate. Mnookin -- tough name there, buddy -- is also a former addict who used to lie about how bad he was to make himself feel better (though not to sell books). He demolishes what's left of Frey's credibility, making a strong case that Frey's shallow, cliche-ridden nonsense, even more than his Pinocchioesque realationship with the truth, may have caused a lot of real harm.

On the other hand, he said it...

2006-01-14T12:15:00.000-05:00

Last night I mentioned, without explaining, that the best-known nugget from The Long Goodbye is usually misquoted. It was late, though, and I was too busy not writing about Match Point (very good, more TK) to get into it. But that won't do, so here we go:

'Alcohol is like love,' he said. 'The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.'

If you do a google search for Chandler quotes, this one will come up wrong. It's even misquoted on the back on the book (at least on the 1979 British paperback edition I bought on the street near St. Mark's for three dollars). What these misquoters do is, they drop the he said. They want to clean the thing up, make it an aphorism or a frtune cookie. But they're (wrong, bad people, and I am here to tell you why: They fucking up both the rhythm and the integrity of the lines. And stripping Raymond Chandler of rhythm and integrity is like stripping the Pope of his religion and his funny hat -- there may be some stuff left, but not a whole hell of a lot.

Bear with:

That he said provides a necessary punctuation at the end of the first short setup sentence. Without it, Alcohol is like love is phrased so like The first kiss is magic, that the period isn't enough to keep it from sliding into the next sentence, from effectively becoming the first part of a four-part build (1 alcohol, 2 first kiss, 3 second kiss, 4 third kiss) followed by a punch line (clothes off). It's hardly awful, but the rhythm is strained. He said forces a pause, a reassessment. He's said something. Then he says something else (the three-part kiss thing, which moves from bliss to indifference, the opposite direction, incidentally, from the way sex is supposed to go), and it sounds like he might be finished. But then comes the kicker. So, rather than an out-of-ballance two-part statement (the first part of which is in four parts), we have a more euphoneous three-part statement (the middle part of which is in a rhthmically satifying three-parts). Clear?

So. Is any of that really true? Or is it just bullshit I made up? I don't know. But it seemed brilliant a few minutes ago in the tub when I thought of it. It's certainly truer than James Frey's memoirs.

Anyway, it doesn't matter, because the primary violence done by this hack quotation manipulation is a violence to integrity, and this they have done on purpose, to suit their ends. By removing the words he said, they bleach these sentences of context, of a speaker and a listener, of a setting and a story. Want they want is an aphorism, a pithy little thing to put in a box, or at the end of an anecdote, or inside a fortune cookie. They don't want the complications of particularity in which both art and life actually take place.

Most irksome of all, they imply that this clever-yet-sunredeemed view is Chandler's, or -- worse still -- Philip Marlowe's. Now they both had their bad days. Chandler dabbled in both alcoholism and misogyny, and Marlowe, to someone wthout a soul, might seem to trade in a perverse, noiry nihilism. I have neither the time nor the critical acuity to explain all the things that Marlowe does, in fact, stand for. Suffice it to say that he is not smugly satisfied with reducing human frailty (in this case, alcoholism and metaphorical castration anxiety) into bite-sized cocktail party niblets. And while he's more than a little suspiscious of and frightened by feminie wiles and female sexuality (If your idea of Marlowe is Humphrey Bogart - god forbid - Robert Mitchum, you probably don't know what I'm talking about.), he does know, like Jimmy Buffet and DC and other lostish boys everywhere, that, ultimately, it's his own damn fault.

I think I may have used that line before...

Anyway, the he said in the story is Terry Lennox. When we meet him (in the first paragraph), he's "plastered to the hairline" and falling out of a Rolls Royce.

Movie trivia: In Robert Altman's 1973 film version, Lennox is played by former New Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton, best-known for writing the baseball expose Ball Four. It's Bouton's only film appearance. Elliot Gould is surprisingly good as Marlowe, but the awesomely deranged Sterling Hayden walks away with the movie. Altman takes wild liberties with the story, but since I hadn't read the book back when I saw the movie (in a double feature at San Francisco's Castro Theater), I didn't care. And Howard Hawks was just as unfaithful to the Big Sleep, conspiring with William Faulkner an Humphrey Bogart to turn Marlowe into a smirking lothario.

Sentence of the Day, 1/13

2006-01-13T23:18:00.000-05:00

Ten minutes later I was sorry. But ten minutes later I was somewhere else.

- Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye, 1953

I'm just a few pages into this late Chandler novel, and I'm spoiled with SotD options. I love this one not only because it's aesthetically perfect, but because it pinpoints that icky feeling/situation I know -- that we all know -- so well.

I felt sorry ten minutes after I left would give us the same information, but it wouldn't tell the same story.

Then there's this, which is kind of famous (though often misquoted):

'Alcohol is like love,' he said. 'The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.'

Sentence of the Day, 1/12

2006-01-12T23:54:00.000-05:00

I will hit you right in your left eye.

- Charles Barkley, to Ernie Johnson, just now
TNT halftime show of the Lakers-Cavaliers game.

How was the weather, James?

2006-01-12T21:46:00.000-05:00

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

- Ernest Hemingway

Yes, everybody knows this quotation, but I've been thinking about it lately (although I still don't know where it comes from) in relation to a couple of books, one of which I recently read, the other one of which has sold a gazillion copies and made a bagillion dollars and has an author who gets more famous the more he's exposed as a liar.

The Woman Who Walked Into Doors is an original, honest, chilling, weirdly life-affirming 225-page monlogue spoken by a woman who survives nearly two decades of viscious physical abuse. Roddy Doyle creates a character who, although she never actualy existed, is at least as true, in the Hemmingwy sense, as if she had. But he does more than that - Paula Spencer doesn't just tell her story, she agonizes over the telling of it. And not because she's talking about painful things. She agonizes because she feels a pressing moral obligation to tell it all exactly as at happened, to "nothing extenuate/ Nor set down aught in malice," though the uneducated Paula likely wouldn't know Othello from, um, from some other thing she wouldn't know.

After recalling an especially savage beating, Paula asks (us? herself?):

Do I actually remember that? Is that exactly how it happened? Did my hair rip? Did my back scream? Did he call me a cunt? Yes, often; all the time. Right then? I don't know. Which time was that anyway? I don't know. How can I separate one time from the lot and describe it? I want to be honest. How can I be sure? It went on for seventeen years. Seventeen years of being hit and kicked. How can I tell? How many times did he kick me in the back? How many times did I curl up on the floor? How can I remember one time? When did it happen? Wht date? What day? I don't know. What age was I? I don't know. It will be me but not yet. What is that supposed to mean? That I was nearly unconscious; that the pain was unbearable? I'm messing around here. Making things up; a story. I'm beginning to enjoy it. Hair rips. Why don't I just say He pulled my hair? Someone is crying. Someone is vomiting. I cried, I fuckin' well vomited. I choose one word and end up telling a different story. I end up making it up instead of just telling it. The sting and the shock, the noise, the smack. I don't want to make it up, I don't want to add to it. I don't want to lie. I don't have to; there's no need. I want to tell the truth. Like it happened. Plain and simple. My husband is beating me up. A horrible fact. Did any of this actually happen? Yes. Am I sure? Yes. Absolutely sure, Paula?

She goes on. And on and eloquently on, searching for the words to use to tell the truth to make it be as true as it can possibly be, which includes questioning her ability to do that. (Again, yes, I understand that Paula is herself made up, a character, a fiction,. Doesn't matter. Someone [Roddy Doyle, actually] is talking honestly about the problems and the necessity of talking honestly about things that demand honesty.)

So there's that. And now here's the point, which I'm already close to beating to death. (Pause to cringe at my inapropriate choice of metaphor...) Here's James Frey, whose A Million Little Pieces, a memoir of recovery from addiction and crime, made its author a million little dollars by marketing itself as a true story. By most accounts, the book (which I'll read as soon as I see Match Point) is gripping, moving and inspiring, and it has inspired almost cultish devotion among its readers. The thing is, a good-sized chunk of it is just straight-up bullshit.

And that matters. Dave Eggers, Chuck Klausterman and others have written memoirs in the last few years where they came out and said - in advance - that parts of their stories were fictionalized, but that the essences were true. That is fine. No problem. They're telling the truth about the degree to which they're going to be telling the truth.

But when you say, "Here is my totally true, brave, inspiring, uplifting story, that I will share with you for just $24.95 (or whatever)," you really ought not to be lying. (Especially after a bunch of publishers turned the book down as fiction) And if you do lie, and you get caught, and you go on Larry King with your mother to whine some more and try to justify your fraud and admit, "When Nan Talese purchased the book, I'm not sure if they knew what they were going to publish it as. We talked about what to publish it as. And they thought the best thing to do was publish it as a memoir," and you get Oprah to call in to give you a free pass, to throw her reputation behind your tainted cause like Powell at Turtle Bay, then you, James Frey, are a pathetic little bitch and you ought to stand up and say so and then you ought to shut up and then you ought to go away.

When the Paula Spencers of the world tell you the sky is blue, you know damn well that the sky is blue. When the James Frey's of the world tell you the same thing, you might want to think about bringing an umbrella.

Who are you and what have you done with my mother?

2006-01-12T21:03:00.000-05:00

"You don't realize how complex the brain is until you see all the amazing ways it can be broken."

Or so says Dr. Paul Mancini, a neurologist working in Europe (Geneva, actually) who just happens to be good friends with a working-class New York couple whose older son, Vincent, gets a bonk on the head and wakes up convinced that his parents have been abducted and replaced with replicas.

I should probably mention that what I'm talking about happens in a play -- Imposters, now playing at NEUROfest, a Village Voice-sponsored festival of plays about bizarre diseases of the mind. I should also probably mention that what Vincent has is Capgras Syndrome, a very real, albeit very rare, condition in which the visual and emotional processing centers of the brain can no longer communicate, causing patients to believe that the people who look just like their families are, in fact, just familiar-looking strangers.

Which in this case, as it happens, they are.

OK, not really. But playwright Justin Warner uses this literal mental disconection as the inciting incident that sets off a series of events and revelations that blah blah blah the peeling off of various blah blah blah to reveal that perhaps everyone isn't quite blah blah blah after all. Unless, after after all, he really is. Blah blah.

There's the kernal of a good play here, but Warner is trying way too hard. The actors, a couple of whom have impressive Broadway credits, are over-emoting and under-rehearsed, and it looks like they're all in different plays that happen to be going an at the same time in the same place.

Imposters is the kind of show that, when I hear about it, makes me go, "Hey, there's so much stuff out there that sounds so cool; I gotta get out and see it," then, when I go see it, makes me think, "Hey, so much of that cool-sounding stuff is pretty half-baked and indulgent; I gotta stay home more often drinking cheap Beaujolais and filling out sudokus in the bathtub."

Blog of the Day, 1/12

2006-01-12T12:11:00.000-05:00

"Woody Allen Is Like Having Sex With Jessica Alba While Watching The BCS National Championship Game And Passing Undetectable Gas"

- The Assimilated Negro, discussing Match Point.

(Dilettante Critic is also partial to discussing Match Point, but TAN seems actually to have seen it. Although I'm not sure he's actually had sex with Jessica Alba while doing all that other cool stuff. Or at all, even.)

In addition to writing about actual things, TAN sometimes comes down to DC's level, where he still crushes.

If SONN is DC but smarter, then TAN is DC but smarter and blacker.

- True that.
- D O U B L E T R U E !

Into the Frey

2006-01-11T12:10:00.000-05:00

Had dinner last night with a fan of James Frey's "memoir" A Million Little Pieces, who insisted that recent allegations that much of the story is made up make absolutely no difference. Apparently, Doubleday agrees. Though its corporate parent, Random House, is offering refunds. [This just in -- reports of Random House offering refunds have been greatly exagerated.]

An op-ed in the NYT by a Daily Show writer goes to town, proving just how much fun schadenfreud can be.

DC remains the only person in America who hasn't read the book.

Anyway, Frey will try to spin this mess tonight on Larry King.

Oh, also -- Same dinner companion announced that Entourage is "so boring." DC almost choked on his spinach pizza.

Sentence of the Day, 1/11 (Existential Paradox Edition)

2006-01-11T11:43:00.000-05:00

Pavel: Anyway, the victims who died can never tell THEIR side of the story, so maybe it's better not to have any more stories.
Art: Uh-huh. Samuel Beckett once said: "Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness."
Pavel: Yes.
(Pause.)
Art: On the other hand, he SAID it.
Pavel: He was right. Maybe you can include it in your book.

- Art Spiegelman, MAUS, 1980-91

Blog of the Day, 1/11

2006-01-10T17:03:00.000-05:00

Something Old, Nothing New

Like DC, but smarter

Sentence of the day, 1/10

2006-01-10T15:44:00.000-05:00

So it’s easier for boys not to lose sight of the important facts of life: that bathroom humor is hilarious (if you don’t believe me, call an ancient Greek playwright), and that “butt” really is the funniest word in the world.

- Nancy Franklin, reviewing The Family Guy in this week's New Yorker

Entourage Guest Star of the Day

2006-01-10T12:12:00.000-05:00

<-- Bai Ling, blistering praying mantis. Because Christopher Penn left a bad taste in my mouth.

(Wait... That didn't come out right...)

Special Entourage guest bonus feature: Note the poster in the background featuring Vince's Head On co-star (and recent Sentence of the Day cameo-maker) Jessica Alba.

Sentence of the Day 1/9 (DC Manifesto Edition)

2006-01-09T23:20:00.000-05:00

I'm in complete agreement with all those people who say, regarding movies, "I just want to be entertained." This populist position is much derided by my academic colleagues as simpleminded and unsophisticated, evidence of questionable analytical and critical acuity. But I agree with the premise, and I too just want to be entertained. That I am almost never entertained by other people who just want to be entertained doesn't make us philosophically incompatible. It just means we shouldn't go to movies together.

Richard Russo
Straight Man, 1997

This novel, which I recently read for the third (or maybe fourth...) time, is so much better than Empire Falls, which netted Russo a Pulitzer a few years ago. It's not as ambitious, or as deep or as touching, but it's more successfully realized. Less pretentious. Less cheezy. Less Oprahfied. And funnier than a fart in church.

I'm totally loose!

2006-01-09T22:52:00.000-05:00

If this can happen to "The Boy" we we were supposed to "Hear It For" (Nope, the song wasn't about Kevin Bacon; it was Chris Penn, the dumb friend Bacon had to teach to dance so he could take Sarah Jessica Parker to the dance in the barn across the tracks without embarrassing himself. Don't believe me? Want to watch it again? I thought not.), what chance do the rest of us have?

Sean's bro is almost completely redeemed, though, by playing his girthilicious self in season two of Entourage, in which he gives fellow loser star-sibling Johnny Drama a well-deserved beat-down. (Although he loses points by delivering the worst line of the entire series -- "I'm gonna lose this weight, but you'll still be an idiot." -- a line so jarringly unoriginal, I have to believe he insisted on putting it in there himself.)

Kevin Dillon (Matt's brother, a running in-joke) is freakin' hillarious as Johnny Drama. In season two, he gets his ass kicked not only by Sta-Puft Penn, but also by the blistering praying mantis Bai Ling (scroll up).

Starshine

2006-01-09T16:00:00.000-05:00

Out and about on the Lower East Side, DC stumbled into the back room of Rififi Cinema Classics (where Dilettante Critic and Official DC Younger Brother SevenWarlocks once spent part of the hottest night in the history of human civilization [July 4, 2002] listening to sweaty comedians try to be funny while performing inside a pizza oven) and into the middle of a Starshine Burlesque show. Starshine - produced by a couple of inspired exhibitionists named Little Brooklyn and Creamy Stevens - is genuine LES vaudeville, complete with comics, magicians, a pornographic drinking contest, goth strippers (including one who got naked while keeping about thirty-seven hula-hoops going) and a Chiquita Banana-inspired MC who kept reminding us that we there to "drink beer and look at titties," and that if we talked about the show a lot at work the next day, we'd probably all get raises.

Good times.

Oh, and ODCYB's cat's name is also Starshine. How freaky is that?

A million Little Lies

2006-01-09T14:11:00.000-05:00

Those saucy muckrakers at The Smoking Gun report that James Frey's much-loved and much-derided mega-bestselling, Oprahfied memoir A Million Little Pieces is, at least in part, a tissue of lies. Gawker has the succinct version.

Sentence of the Day, 1/8

2006-01-08T21:43:00.000-05:00

If that were a real wish bowl it would be in the Ferrari of a 600-year-old Incan on the way to his job as Jessica Alba's g-string.

- Karl, the talking German goldfish on American Dad

We're not entirely sure what that means, but we know we like it.

This isn't a dream. This is really happening.

2006-01-08T17:53:00.000-05:00

There are plots against people, aren't there?

- Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, 1968 (Screenplay by Roman Polanski based on the Ira Levin novel)

There's a feeling I sometimes get when I finally see or read an important classic film, novel or play. (Sometimes it can come from a painting or a piece of music, but this happens less often.) It's as if a special light has gone on and I can see a frequency that's always been there, visible to everybody else, but never to me until right now.

It happened when I saw The Godfather and Psycho, when I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and again, years later, when I read Middlemarch. It happened when I first heard Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and it happened instantly and powerfully when I walked into the Van Gough room at the Musee D'Orsay in Paris. And I got it again today when I saw Rosemary's Baby. I'm not sure if it's a great film or not. It certainly isn't as scary or jarring as it must have been when it was released. But I do know that I understand just about every movie I've ever seen that was made since 1968 a little bit better, and a lot of other things too.

It's more than just the enitre Catholic/Satanist subgenre of horror movies that the film unleashed. It's more than Polanski's straightforward, utterly, unhysterical building of of claustrophobia, or the way that Mia Farrow's performance seems to have entered the collective pop culture consciousness, so that I felt like I was watching something I knew even though I had never seen it before.

I don't know what it is, but it has less to do with the movie itself than with the low-level hum of references to it I've been hearing my whole life.

I do know, though, that this feeling I'm talking about has given rise to another feeling, a less pleasant one -- the feeling that there are so many necessary things out there that I haven't seen, read, heard, processed or even begun to comprehend, that I'm falling further and further behind, that I'm never going understand the culture I live in until I catch up, and that I'm never going to catch up.

A Touch of the Poet -- Two Views

2006-01-08T14:15:00.000-05:00

Went with my cousin – whom a chatty old lady in the row behind us cheerfully referred to as my "partner" – to see Gabriel Byrne star as Con Melody in Eugene O'Neil's A Touch of the Poet. If my cousin were female and not, you know, my cousin, this mistake would probably have been flattering, because he's a hell of a lot younger than I am, in much better shape and generally more fun to be around. I, however, know a lot more about Eugene O'Neil. So I got that going for me. That and ten dollars will get me a crappy glass of wine at intermission.

The Roundabout production of this almost-masterpiece, featuring the last of O'Neil's celebrated portrayals of charismatic, alcoholic self-deceivers, is in previews for a limited run at Studio 54, a great place to see a play, in spite of the occasional subway-rumbling through the orchestra. My cousin had never actually heard of O'Neil, but he thought it was pretty fly to see a play at Studio 54, and he knew Byrne from The Usual Suspects. Byrne was last seen on Broadway in O'Neil's Moon for the Misbegotten, for which he received overwhelmingly good reviews and a 2000 Tony nomination.

As Major Cornelius Melody – the preposterous braggart who achieves a perverse sort of glory only by shattering the self-mythology he's spent a lifetime crafting – Byrne has more than a touch of the poet in him. From his first scene – in which he conveys the excruciating strain of a magisterial sot struggling to mask both the depth of his yearning for liquor and the DTs that make simply lifting his glass an ordeal to watch – to his almost magical transformation in the final act into a gleefully wretched, jig-dancing, bog-trotting yokel, Byrne's performance is a tour de force. It is a master class on a certain kind of – sadly, vanishing – Romantic acting.

-- What do you mean, 'Romantic'? (Asked cuz at intermission.)
-- Well, sort of larger than life. Proud. Grand. Heathcliff-on-the-moors sort of thing.
-- Heathcliff? You mean the cat?
-- OK, forget Heathcliff. Um -- Han Solo, with gravias. Peter O'Toole. Richard Burton. Cocky, deep and bigger than life.
-- Ah yes. I get it. Gordon Gecko in a puffy shirt. I thought you meant girly and cheesy. I was gonna have to call bullshit, because this dude is awesome. Unlike this wine, which sucks ass.

When Byrne's Melody recites Byron to his admiring reflection in the mirror – center stage and pointing squarely at the audience – we see, along with his daughter, who walks in on him, that he is ridiculous. But unlike the headstrong Sara Melody, who is full of righteous scorn at her father's noble preening while she and her mother work live servants, we also see that he is magnificent.

Too bad the rest of the cast isn't up to anywhere near Byrne's level. His daughter is especially irritating and easy to tune out in a role that ought to let a young actress soar.

Appologies to my cousin, who didn't actually say any of that.

Sentence of the Day, 1/7

2006-01-07T22:51:00.000-05:00

You are a gut maggot. With no guts.

Gary Busey (playing Gary Busey) to Jeremy Piven (playing Ari Gold) in episode 6 of Entourage, which is DC's favorite TV show BY FAR, easily outdistancing The Family Guy, Sleeper Cell and Sports Center. (The Sopranos is temporarily off the list until they start showing me some new episodes. The original British version of the Office doesn't count, because it went off the air [It killed itself] after just two seasons, cementing its place, James Dean-like, as possibly the best TV show in all of recorded human history.)

On the seventh day, God created HBO on Demand. One each day since, Dilettante Critic has sat on his bottom eating apples and wtching Entourage.

I'd say let's hug it out, but you'd probably draw wood.

- Ari (the gut maggot), to Vince and E.

Cox redux

2006-01-06T18:13:00.000-05:00

Seems the NYT is taking back its smackdown of Ana Marie Cox's Dog Days, or at least hedging its bets.

Old film critic manqué Janet Maslin hated the book, but the Paper of Record lets comic novelist Christopher Buckley give Cox a do-over. Buckley calls Dog Days "a brisk, smart, smutty, knowing very well-written first novel."

So why am I again writing about this when I still haven't even read the book? Because Ana Marie Wonkette Cox is hilarious, and I have a big fat crush on her -- a crush that was only slightly dampened by sitting behind her husband at her bizarre and unsatisfying book reading at the Astor Place Barnes and Noble last night -- and I want excuses to post her picture on my blog, that's why.

I've been a devoted Wonkette reader for years. When I lived in China with no access to Jon Stewart, Wonkette was my primary source for US political news. (I certainly wasn't getting it from the Chinese news agency I worked for, where I was once given an article to edit entitled, "Bush or Kerry: What's the difference?" In a rare burst of integrity, I killed that one.)

Even so, I didn't enjoy the reading. I didn't buy the book. I didn't even talk to the author.

What made the blog so addictively wonderful -- besides the surprisingly witty barrage of alcohol and penis jokes -- was the way Cox made her readers feel smart and loved while depicting the nation's politicians as incompetent egomaniacal asshole douche bags. Whether devising (and describing herself playing) the Presidential Debate Drinking Game, obsessing about Dick Cheney's genitals or breathlessly chronicling the Washingtonienne sex scandal, Cox made us all feel like one big happy, snarky family.

In person the vibe was totally different. Cox is strikingly beautiful in a sort of brittle-looking way. But she's also more than a little brittle-acting. Either very nervous or high-functioning wasted -- or possibly both -- she tried too hard while reading unfunny, Sex-in-the-District style yadda yadda yadda. Worse she was snippy and sarcastic with those that asked questions. (Of whom I, coward that I am, was not one.)

Anyway, I found it a little depressing, and I dismissed the book. Only to read Buckley today and think, dammit, I may have to read the thing after all. Which would mean another entry. And another picture.

Nina Subin took the picture.

Meanwhile, more cowbell!

2006-01-06T12:45:00.000-05:00

The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, has a column full of doozies written while watching the Rose Bowl. A few of the best have pop-cultural relevance:

4) Keith Jackson on Vince Young: "As an old defensive coach once said, 'He ain't got no handles,' but he led the country in passing this year." (Um, does anyone on this plane speak jive? What just happened there?)

3) Highlight of the game so far: LeAnn Rimes belting out the National Anthem, followed by a cut to Matt Leinart with a pensive, "Have I had her yet?" look on his face.

2) Has anyone morphed into his most famous character more beautifully than McConaughey's glacier-like transformation into David Wooderson over the past 10 years? All he's missing is a thin mustache and a TransAm at this point.

1) On Reggie Bush: He's so close to Gale Sayers in so many ways, I would almost be afraid to be a white fullback on his NFL team next year.

So far behind...

2006-01-06T12:27:00.000-05:00

How do people keep up their blogs, their real jobs and their lives? I give myself a tenuous C minus or so on the first two, maybe a B on the third. (Because, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it...")

Anyway, DC has fallen far behind schedule. More actual content coming this weekend. (Insofar as any of this is "actual content.")

Sentence of the Day, 1/6 (Suicide/Irony Edition)

2006-01-06T10:45:00.000-05:00

I didn't think there'd be another monologue and I'm still not sure there is.

The first sentence of Spaulding Gray's final -- unfinished -- monologue. Gray is believed to have jumped off the Staten Island Ferry in January, 2004. His body was found two months later.

Sentence of the day, 1/5 (Rose Bowl Edition)

2006-01-05T12:30:00.000-05:00

I couldn't help but feel a twinge of sympathy. Then I remembered his sickeningly charmed life and snapped out of it.

Robert Weintraub, writing in Slate about Trojan quarterback (and future multi-millionaire) Matt Leinart at the end of USC's 41-38 loss to Texas in last night's college football national championship. Leinart and fellow USC-Heisman-winning-charmed-lifer Reggie Bush (another future multi-millionaire) were thoroughly outplayed by the insane-o-rific Texas QB Vince Young (ditto).

Dilittante Exegete

2006-01-05T09:42:00.000-05:00

DC learns a new word for his particular brand of dillettantery.

Of the South Burlington Berkmans?

2006-01-04T18:08:00.000-05:00

There are days when DC totally knows how this guy feels.

Sentence of the day, 1/4

2006-01-04T17:39:00.000-05:00

As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are.

Louis Menand
The New Yorker

Sometimes DC wants to be Louis Menand, that learned, urbane master of learned, urbane New Yorker prose. (Although this may just be a holdover from his [DC's, not Loius's] recent musings on being an old writer.

Why so many movies are so crappy

2006-01-04T09:55:00.000-05:00

Edward Jay Epstein has the answer: It's the popcorn, Stupid!

Gratuitous Bruce Willis Bashing of the Day

2006-01-03T21:41:00.000-05:00

From The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle:

-- All men are not bastards, I said.
-- Name one that isn't, said Carmel.
-- Okay.
-- Off you go; come on.
-- Okay, I said. -- Jesus, I think I'm drunk.
-- Don't start, said Carmel. -- Name one. Go on.
-- Nicola's fella; Tony.
-- He's lovely, said Denise.
-- He's only a kid, said Carmel. -- He'll learn.
-- He's lovely, I said. -- Isn't he, Denise?
-- Yeah.
-- Robert Redford, I said.
-- Him! said Carmel. -- Did you see him in that last one? It was on the Movie Channel. He bought your woman for a million dollars.
-- Indecent Proposal, said Denise.
-- He was a right fuckin' creep in it anyway.
-- That wasn't him, I said. -- He was only acting.
-- I wouldn't pay a tenner for that bitch. Who's that she's married to again?
-- Bruce Willis.
-- Now there's a bastard.
-- Charlo liked him.
-- Jesus.

Charlo being a vicious, drunken, wife-beating murderer.

Read DC's thoughts on the former Mrs. Willis here.

Chekhov Character of the Day

2006-01-03T21:20:00.000-05:00

And the winner is... Trigorin!

Woo-hoo!

This is how I know I'm no longer, um, young: I've reread The Seagull twice in the last few days, and Kostya -- whom I (and every other youngish actor with literary-intellectual pretensions) used to fairly yearn to play -- just seemed sort of, well, silly. To be completely frank, he seemed like a whiney little bitch.

But Trigorin -- He's a celebrity, which impresses everybody but him. He knows that it doesn't mean squat, because he feels like a fraud, and all he wants to do is fish and sleep with the yummy little actress, both of which, of course, he does, though neither makes him happy. Sure, he whines a lot too (Waddaya want? It's Chekhov!), but he's a lot less pathetic about it. Trigorin reminds all us anonymous drones who aren't (necessarily) sleeping with yummy little actresses that we'd be just as miserable if we were. (Jude Law is also a reminder of this.)

The coolest cat in the play is actually Dorn, the doctor, but I'm not centered enough to really relate to him. And doesn't remind me of anything.

Sentence of the day, 1/3

2006-01-03T16:55:00.000-05:00

Oh, she was hardly a novice.

I hope it was Tom Stoppard who wrote that line -- he reportedly worked on the script uncreditted -- from Casanova, which DC went to see last night because Match Point remains irritatingly sold out at the Upper West Side theater where those SNL cats saw The Chronic(What?)cles of Narnia. (Though probably nowhere else in the world.)

Anyway, Casanova was funnier that had a right to be, with wonderful gratuitous use of Oliver Platt's fat and Sienna Miller's beauty. (Which begs the question, What the hell was Jude Law thinking?)

Sienna Miller photo copywrited by somebody, no doubt, somewhere.

NEUROfest

2006-01-03T11:23:00.000-05:00

The Village Voice is sponsoring a theater festival devoted entirely to diseases of the mind. According to the festival's website, "theater artists from around the country will present work inspired by various neurological conditions, including:

Amnesia (Korsakov's Syndrome),
Aphasia,
Autism,
Capgras Syndrome,
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD),
Dementia,
Meniere’s Disease,
Synesthesia, and
Tourette’s Syndrome"

The mind boggles. Or something. Anyway, I'm so there.

Just don't put "Dog" in your title

2006-01-03T10:40:00.000-05:00

Janet Maslin trashes Dog Days, the debut novel by Ana Marie Cox (aka blog-goddess, Wonkette), in the NYT today. Because Cox is funny and beautiful -- and Maslin is neither -- I'm tempted to ignore the review and run right out to the Borders two blocks away and by the thing anyway. (DC says: Support independent bookstores, kids!)

If only it didn't sound like such a tedious piece of crap.

Cox is almost entirely retired from Wonkette, as she's too busy promoting her crappy novel. Photo copywrited by somebody at the NYT

...or Measure

2006-01-02T13:41:00.000-05:00

Went to Brooklyn to try to get in the Shakespeare's Globe production of Measure for Measure on artistic director Mark Rylance's (playing the Duke) final day with the company. Tickets had been sold out forever for this very limited run, and the box office guy said people started lining up early for waiting list tickets. Even so, when I got there at 3:00 for a 7:00 show, I didn't expect there to be people in front of me. But there were. So I felt pretty lucky when an old lady left at intermission and nobody in front of me wanted her ticket stub.

Most of what I've always thought of as the really good stuff in Measure for Measure -- the Angelo/Isabel scenes, Claudio's "Sweet sister, let me live," the brothel scenes -- comes in the first half, and I'm afraid I missed all that this time.

But what made it so valuable -- besides the pizza at Grimaldi's around the corner from St. Ann's Warehouse -- was that Rylance made the Duke believable for the first time in my experience with the play. Because, really, the Duke's behavior makes no damn sense at almost any point, either in the play or in any of the (three) productions of it I'd seen before.

This time it does, though. Rylance's Duke is an adorable little wuss -- a total basket case overwhelmed first by the corruption in his city (you don't have to see act one to get this) and then by the increasingly retarded plot he sets in motion and keeps advancing just one step ahead of -- whatever. Everything. He's dancing as fast as he can, and even he seems barely able to keep track of it all. That it all works out is a small miracle.

Sentence of the Day, 1/2

2006-01-02T13:00:00.000-05:00

I thought that Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought so right up to the moment that I cut his throat.

Perry Smith
according to Truman Capote
In Cold Blood, 1965

Best movies of 2005

2006-01-02T12:42:00.000-05:00

DC top 3:

1 - The Squid and the Whale
2 - Capote
3 - Junebug

Sentence of the Day, 12/31

2005-12-31T13:52:00.000-05:00

Panic, like some higher forms of grief and joy, is such an exquisite emotion that nature denies its casual recollection to all except psychotics, a few artists, and an occasional, pre-existential hero like Yossarian, the mad bombardier of Joseph Heller's World War II novel, Catch-22.

Vincent Camby
New York Times review of Mike Nichols's film adaptation of the novel, 1970

Probably the best and funniest indictment of war ever written (I was going to say "since Lysisstrata," but Aristophanes isn't really all that funny or indicting), the wild, shattering Catch-22 is, of course, unadaptable. Nichols, screenwriter Buck Henry and the convincingly anguished Alan Arkin as Yossarian do a better job than I would have guessed possible, but, as Camby wrote 35 years ago, it's hard to imagine that anyone who hasn't read the novel would really understand what the hell is going on.

Seven Days in May

2005-12-31T11:32:00.000-05:00

President Jordan Lyman (Frederick March): You got something against the English language, Colonel?
Colonel Martin "Jiggs" Casey (Kirk Douglas): No, sir.
Lyman: Then speak it plainly, if you will.
Casey: I'm suggesting, Mr. President, there's a military plot to take over the government. This may occur some time this coming Sunday.

I woke up this morning, a Saturday, to snow flurries, which made it easy to decide not to go out and run. Flipping around on my new gazillion-channel TV, I stumbled onto John Frankenheimer's excellent 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, which I hadn't seen, just beginning on a channel called @MAX. To get HBO and Showtime on demand from Time Warner, you've got to get channels with names like "@MAX." According to the Cinemax website, "Cutting-edge and connected viewers will find that @MAX has what it takes to keep them interested. @MAX offers contemporary movies, movies with attitude and movies with new ideas for entertainment." Fill in your own mockery of the marketing idiots at Cinemax.

What is so staggering about this movie is the strength of the arguments Frankenheimer and screenwriter Rod Serling (yes, that Rod Serling) give to the right-wing junta that threatens take over the government of the United States. Burt Lancaster brings the full weight of his almost supernatural charisma and moral righteousness to the power-mad Joint Chiefs Chairman General James Scott, who leads a coût d'état against the equally excellent Frederick March's pacifist President Jordan Lyman (whose physical resemblance here to Lyndon Johnson is eerie). Compare this with the weirdly sinister, wooden Bruce Willis in the similarly themed (and otherwise provocative and prescient) 1998 film The Seige, who comes off as a mere nut-job.

Ava Gardner, Lancaster's tragic, boozy, broken-hearted ex-mistress, is heart-breakingingly sexy/beautiful/talented/vulnerable. OK, not a news flash. Her best line in this movie, "I'll make you two promises: a very good steak, medium rare, and the truth, which is very rare," is delivered to Kirk Douglas, who is in the process of manipulating her to get personally compromising information that could bring down Lancaster, his boss. (This is 1964, when an affair still meant something. Ultimately, March's President Jordan doesn't use the information, taking the high road instead.) Douglas is terrific as the career marine forced to choose between his loyalty to his superior officer and to democracy.

Another priceless line, delivered by the great Edmund O'Brien (as "a dipso senator from Georgia"): "I'm going to phone the White House. Tell you what, friend, when this is over you can take off your girdle and have yourself a real good cry. Say, uh, you got a dime to stop a revolution with?"

The movie also features an uncredited John Houseman as a flip-flopping admiral (It would nine years before Houseman's next movie role, in The Paper Chase, brought him fame as an actor to match his already legendary status as a theater producer) and a slimy cabinet secretary named Christopher Todd, which happens to be the name of one of my best friends and roommates from college. (The real Christopher Todd is decidedly unslimy -- a goofy, perpetually grinning, chess-and-basketball-playing special education teacher in rural South Carolina.)

This entry brought to you by too much time on imbd.com

Sentence of the Day, 12/30

2005-12-30T16:14:00.000-05:00

Worse still if you belong -- willingly or unwillingly -- to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the book you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perferations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient streched out on the operating table with his guts exposed.

Italo Calvino (tr. William Weaver)
If on a winter's night a traveler, 1979

Calvino is one of those writers who, great as he is, has somehow managed to influence my writing for the worse. He pulls off things that a mortal such as myself has no business attempting. And yet I attempt them. Poorly. Get back in your corner, Bitsy.

Crimes and Nihilism

2005-12-30T13:55:00.000-05:00

DC still hasn't seen Match Point,Woody Allen's supposed return to greatness, but the good reviews are poring in from everybody (with the notable exception of David Edelstein, whose departure from Slate marks a sad day for everyone who cares about sanity in criticism).

DC did, however, watch Crimes and Misdemeanors the other night for the first time in years, and while some of the performances (Angelica Houston, ALan Alda, Jerry Orbach, Allen) and dialogue are less than perfectly credible, it remains a powerful indictment of the idea that there is any essential goodness or order in the universe. Martin Landau's tortured Raskalnikoffian optometrist (along with his Boris Karloff in Ed Wood, the crowning acheivement in that talented actor's career) and Alda's soulless TV producer get the happy-ever-afters, while Allen's struggling filmaker spirals into misery, Sam Waterson's good and moral rabbi goes blind and the wise intellectual, Professor Levy, the one who speaks from reel after reel of documentary footage about human beings' capacity to find joy and love in a fundementally indifferent universe, commits suicide, leaving a note that says, simply, "I've gone out the window."

Good stuff.

Lizards on the sand grand

2005-12-30T09:19:00.000-05:00

Edward Albee's Seascape opens with an old couple on a beach -- they've just had a picnic -- arguing affectionately about what to do with the rest of their lives for 40 minutes or so, until the giant talking lizards show up. The very attractive set in Mark Lamos's pleasant broadway revival (the grass on the dunes looks pleasantly like grass on dunes, the wispy clouds in the clear blue sky look pleasantly like wispy clouds in a clear blue sky), and the mostly engaging, deepish dialogue -- especially the section when Nancy tells Charlie about the long-ago week that she spent "rereading Proust" and contemplating divorce and the bit where George relives a treasured childhood memory of settling on the bottom of the sea and trying to blend in with the fish -- but after 40 minutes, we're getting antsy for a little action.

George Grizzard and Frances Sternhagen are consummate, much-beloved pros, and it isn't like they do a bad job, exacly. It's just that Grizzard's George is often too cute, too sentimental. He makes it work, but there's a little too much syrup. And as the plucky, matter-of-fact, irritatingly optimistic Nancy, Sternhagen just seems -- can I say this? -- old. One thinks, "Well, good for her." And good for her indeed. But less good for us. It is ungenerous of me to say so, but there you are.

Anyway, I was pretty glad to see the lizards.

Consensus in the critical round-up at broadway.com (where everybody's a lot nicer to the old humans than I'm being) is that the marvelous Elizabeth Marvel and the rising hotshot Frederick Weller are "droll" as Sarah and Leslie, the giant talking lizards. (Two different critics, Howard Kissel of The New York Daily News and Elysa Gardner of USA Today, use that strange and inappropriate word, making DC raise his eyebrows and wonder who copied.) It's an oddly tone deaf word to choose. They are funny, yes, very funny even, especially Weller, who is often hillarious. But, once you get past the fact that the actors are adults dressed in elaborate green lizard suits, there is nothing whimsical about these characters, or the ways in which they are portrayed. The humor is secondary to the boldness and vitality they bring to these confused, yearning creatures. What is striking is their unappologetic, disconcerting earnestness. Weller's baffled, macho desperation and Marvel's childlike wonder and openness are what bring this production to life.

Ultimately, Albee's 1974 play is about evolution, both in the literal sense of organisms mutating over time into different organisms filling different ecological niches (the sense being scoffed at so fiercely these days by the knuckle-dragging yokels in the hinterlands), and in the more new agey sense of growing, learning, adapting during the course of an individual lifetime. Nancy's dissatisfaction with her life is juxtaposed with the lizards' need -- which they are affectingly ill-equipped to comprehend -- to come out of the ocean because they felt they "didn't fit in down there" anymore. The unknown beckoned, and they were drawn to it. They meet some yacking weirdos, who bully, cajole, confuse and upset them, and they conclude, understandably, that they want to go home. But they choose to stay anyway.

I can't tell you exactly why that decision matters, only that it very much does.

Appologies to Gertrude Stein for the title of this post.

Sentence of the day, 12/29

2005-12-29T16:10:00.000-05:00

The only immorality is not to do what one has to do when one has to do it.

Jean Anouilh
Becket, 1959

This is a bit more aphoristic than usual for a SOTD, but DC is making an exception in honor of Thomas à Becket, the character to whom Anouilh gives this famous line.

Today is the 836th anniversary of Becket's murder on the orders of his friend, King Henry II. The principle for which Becket was killed -- he refused to un-excommunicate (recummunicate?) a couple of priests who had sided with the king in his bid to establish state jurisdiction over the era's notoriously lax ecclesiastical courts -- has been deemed by history to be less important than his heroic willingness to die for it.

Movie trivia: Peter O'Toole plays Henry II both in the 1964 movie adaptation of Anouilh's play (Richard Burton is Becket) and again in the 1968 film of James Goldman's The Lion in Winter, in which Katherine Hepburn taunts him for Becket's murder.

Runner up:

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.

T.S. Eliot
Murder in the Cathedral (Another play about Becket's murder), 1935

Best novels for getting inside the heads of artists

2005-12-28T13:24:00.000-05:00

1) My Name Is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
An absolute masterpiece. The child-prodigy Asher Lev navigates between the Scylla of his troubled Hassidic homelife and the Charybdis of the harrowing, unmanageable gift that causes everyone around him so much pain. If this novel doesn't transform the way you look at paintings, then you are already one very advanced cat.

2) The Gift of Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
If this sequel isn't as good as its predecessor, it's only because that would be impossible. The adult Lev is again in crisis, uncertain about his place in his community, where both he and his work are largely despised, and in the world of art, where has lost his way. Spectral Picasso cameos and intruding memories of the dead add to the novel's haunted mood.

3) Bluebeard, Kurt Vonnegut
To the degree that I care about abstract art it's because of this novel, about one old man's liberation by accepting, in the final chapter of his life, who he really is -- which is sharply at odds with who he's spent his adulthood pretending to be. Vonnegut is a prophet who reveals deep truths about the 20th Century soul in deceptively folksy parables. Cameo by Jackson Pollock.

4) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
A stretch perhaps, but the intensity of the scenes depicting Kavalier's work on his graphic novel The Gollum is thrilling, as the tortured illustrator invents a new way of story-telling. Cameos by Stan Lee and Salvador Dali.

With appologies to Irving Stone, whose prose is not to DC's taste.

DC stands corrected

2005-12-28T12:00:00.000-05:00

It has been pointed out that the reference to getting "your $10.75 worth" in DC's King Kong rant, is a little misleading, as DC did not, in fact, purchase his own ticket. Needless to say, it was the saucy young person who bought the ticket who pointed this out. In his defense, DC notes that he never said "my $10.75 worth."

Sentence of the Day, 12/28

2005-12-28T10:44:00.000-05:00

It was the perfect song, sweet and fast, corny but mean, high-pitched but definitely masculine. Charlo's theme song and he didn't know it.

Roddy Doyle, 1996
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors

Roddy Doyle is one of DC's favorite living writers. No one, living or dead, writes music like he does. Technically, I mean "writes about music," because it's literature I'm talking about, not songs. But to say "writes about music" would not do justice to the scorching immediacy with which the man writes music.

People think they know The Committments because they've seen the Alan Parker movie, or because their roommate or their parents used to play the soundtrack a lot. But if you haven't read that slim, exuberant, joyful novel, go read it and be delighted. Then read A Star Called Henry -- a fabulist revisionist epic of 20th Century Irish history -- and be amazed.

Woody's back?

2005-12-28T09:36:00.000-05:00

When an important (albeit popular) critic makes a bold pronouncement about an important (albeit popular) artist, you've got to pay attention. Or not.

Though most of us stopped making excuses for Woody Allen's increasingly feeble movies long ago, every one of them is gets called his "best in years" by somebody who, for whatever reason, needs to believe that Small Time Crooks or a Deconstructing Harry has something important to say. These people are usually fools or liars or just willfully deluded.

Then along comes A.O. Scott, the big film cheese at the New York Times, and one who has notably not been taken in by Allen's recent films. Scott calls Allen's Match Point the director's "most satisfying film in more than a decade." As Scott describes it, Match Point is kind of like Crimes and Misdemeanors as written by Theodore Dreiser, only better. That would indeed be something.

Scott's reviews of Allen's films over the last few years have become sadder and sadder, as he is forced to acknowledge the schlockmeister his former idol has become. So does that mean we should trust Scott more than others on the subject because he has proven his credibility? Probably. Even so, I have my doubts.

The review starts like this:

Because Woody Allen's early films are about as funny as any ever made, it is often assumed that his temperament is essentially comic, which leads to all manner of disappointment and misunderstanding. Now and then, Mr. Allen tries to clear up the confusion, insisting, sometimes elegantly and sometimes a little too baldly, that his view of the world is essentially nihilistic. He has announced, in movie after movie, an absolute lack of faith in any ordering moral principle in the universe - and still, people think he's joking.

This is clear, clever, insightful and satisfying to read, but it sounds more like a reexamination of a body of work than the opening lines of a rave. If this movie were really a true return to form from the maker of some of the best films in American history (Annie Hall and Manhattan, at least, have ot be on anybody's list), wouldn't you expect more excitement about this particular film, rather than a mini-essay (however clever) on what people misunderstand about Allen's other films? While Scott goes on to celebrate Allen's emergence from a "long creative malaise," he does so in such a dispassionate way that it feels like he's trying to convince himself.

There's obviously one way to find out. Wait for DC to see the movie. He'll tell you the truth.

Slate's Movie Club

2005-12-27T16:16:00.000-05:00

Slate's annual movie club is must-read stuff for movie fans and dillitantes of all stripes. (A.O. Scott calls it "the high point of [his] working life.")

My favorite quote so far is from Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader: "In the case of Munich, what obviously represents a large step for Spielberg doesn't necessarily mean a new form of understanding for anyone else."

Gay cowboys make Baby Jesus cry

2005-12-27T12:28:00.000-05:00

The NYT says Christians are getting critical as an alternative to those silly protests that didn't work and just sold more tickets to over-rated movies like The Last Temptation of Christ that everybody only liked because Pat Robertson hated it.

New Christian right movie review sites weigh in with comments like: Brokeback Mountain is a well-made, well-acted film, that just happens to be "abhorrent."

Jets fans suck less than Giants fans

2005-12-27T09:58:00.000-05:00

The results of DC's scientific study, "Whose Fans Suck More, Jets' or Giants'?" have been released, and they are overwhelming. Based on two trips this year to Giants Stadium (where both teams play), DC maintains that Giant fans are far more obnoxious than Jet fans.

Even though the Giants were trouncing the hapless -- not to mention homeless -- New Orleans Saints earlier this season, the fans in my area complained bitterly (and ignorantly) about every call, jeered at Saints fans and let fly a non-stop spew of illiterate vitriol from their frothing mouths. They were like the rampaging visogoths in those "What's in your wallet?" commercials, only less pleasant.

Maybe it's just because their team is so bad, but against the Patriots last night the Jets fans mostly just sat there and took their beating like philosophers.

Show DC a good loser, and he'll show you somebody he'd rather sit next to at a football game.

(DC, for the record, likes the Giants. On TV.)

"Lazy Sunday" more popular than the Beatles

2005-12-27T09:54:00.000-05:00

SNL's Chronic(what?)cles of Narnia rap video is not only the funniest thing ever, it's apparently also the most popular thing ever.

Sentence of the day, 12/26

2005-12-26T17:24:00.000-05:00

Time's march is a web of causes and effects, and asking for any gift of mercy, however tiny it might be, is to ask that a link be broken in that web of iron, is to ask that it already be broken. No one deserves such a miracle.

Jorge Luis Borges (tr. Andrew Hurley)
A Prayer

Reason of the day not to write a memoir

2005-12-26T16:30:00.000-05:00

About four years ago I went to a panel discussion event at the New Yorker Festival where four successful writers of successful memoirs sat on a stage and answered the pompous questions of Bill Buford, an insufferable twit who insisted on pronouncing the word "mem-wah." Dave Eggers was humble and mumbly, Frank McCourt was jovial and glib and Martin Amis, eyebrows raised and mouth squinched, was doing his best to put up with the whole undignified thing. Mary Karr, though, was extremely sensible. She said:

"People always tell me they really want to write their own memoir, but they can't really remember all those details. And I say, 'If you don't know what happened, why the hell would you want to write about it? Why the hell do you think you could?'"

DC Exposed

2005-12-26T15:38:00.000-05:00

Seems whole days go by when DC doesn't read a book, see a movie or have a thought. Why read books when it's so much more fun to buy new books that you can also not read? Why see movies when you can spend the day in Hoboken playing Boggle, Password, charades and a confusng, made up game that's sort of a cross between the $20,000 Pyramid and Suzuki, a Japanese performance technique much admired by avant-garde theater priestess Anne Bogart. Since DC's going to the Jets-Patriots game tonight, Mary Karr's Cherry (purchased at the W. 79th St. Goodwill for exactly half what DC had just paid for a Gatorade in Central Park) will probably remain largely unread.

So here's a review of an already-forgotten film I wrote six months ago for a Chinese magazine:

The Interpreter clearly wants to be an important movie, and Sydney Pollock's high-minded thriller does traffic in important themes. One of the great tragedies of post-colonial Africa is that a generation of leaders lost its way, transforming from liberators into mass-murderers and tyrants. The Interpreter doubtless deserves some credit for saying so and for purporting to show us the face of contemporary, war-ravaged Africa. But what are we supposed to make of the fact that this face apparently belongs to Nicole Kidman?

The plot gets going when Kidman’s character, a United Nations interpreter, accidentally overhears what may be part of plot to assassinate the genocidal leader of the fictional African country of Matobo, where, as it happens, she was born. Sean Penn is the tragically flawed, nobly suffering Secret Service agent assigned to investigate.

Pollock gives his stars plenty of room to show off their considerable acting chops. While it might be refreshing to see Penn play someone not trying to hold it together after tragically losing a loved one (in this case, his wife), it is nevertheless something he is terrifically good at it. He looks much older and more battered here than he ever has – picture a squirrellier Robert Mitchum with an emotional range. Kidman’s idealistic and professional veneer cracks convincingly as her own tragic and unlikely history is revealed. Until the movie’s silly, over-reaching climax – the product, reportedly, of rewrites Kidman insisted on – she is just about perfect.

The film’s high-adrenaline, paranoia-soaked idiom is reminiscent of 1970’s political thrillers such as Pollack’s own Three Days of the Condor. Unfortunately, most of its politics – genocide is bad, Africa is complicated, etc. – feel like just one more overwrought back-story in a movie already full of them. The film’s only reference to AIDS, for example, comes near the end when a minor character is gratuitously revealed to have the disease; practically the only reference to economics is when someone calls two opposition political leaders “the socialist and the capitalist”– just in case we gotten it; and the only real reference to race relations is when Kidman reveals that she was dumped by her powerful lover when her whiteness became a political liability.

Pollack’s unabashed adoration of the UN, given the organization's current problems, may be the movie’s boldest position. Both its ideals – Kidman delivers a powerful speech advocating the supposedly African idea that forgiving one’s enemies is the only path to freedom from otherwise crippling grief – and its physical space are glorified. Every shot the organization’s grounds, from the building itself to its sculpture garden and blooming cherry trees to the Queensborough Bridge looming in the background, evoke a palpable reverence for the place.

While The Interpreter is an entertaining thriller with some grade-A acting and a conscience, with a little more attention to the continent whose tragedies the film cloaks itself in, it could have been something more. It could have been important.

Sentence of the day, 12/25

2005-12-26T00:59:00.000-05:00

I would it were bedtime, Hal, and all well.

1 Henry IV

Pass the Chronic Whatcles

2005-12-26T00:41:00.000-05:00

OK, yes, this may be the funniest thing ever. But can it really save rap music?

Get Cheney a Blog

2005-12-24T17:27:00.000-05:00

McCarthy: They all wanted to be writers. Every maniac in the world that ever brought about the murder of people through war started out in an attic or a basement writing poetry. It stank. So they got even by becoming important heels. And it's still going on.
Krupp: Is it really, Joe?
Joe: Look at today's paper.
McCarthy: Right now on Telegraph Hill is some punk who is trying to be Shakespeare. Ten years from now he'll be a senator. Or a communist.
Krupp: Somebody ought to do something about it.
McCarthy: The thing to do is have more magazines. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Print everything they write, so they'll believe they're immortal. That way keep them from going haywire.
Krupp: Mac, you ought to be a writer yourself.
McCarthy: I hate the tribe. They're mischief-makers. Right?
Joe: Everything's right. Right and wrong.
Krupp: Then why do you read?
McCarthy: It's relaxing. It's soothing. (Pause.) The lousiest people born into the world are writers. Language is all right. It's the people who use language that are lousy.

William Saroyan
The Time of Your Life, 1939

Sentence of the Day, 12/24

2005-12-24T12:01:00.000-05:00

It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.

Raymond Chandler
Farewell My Lovely, 1940

All in the Timing

2005-12-23T16:48:00.000-05:00

The LA Times has just declared that mass culture is dead. Friedrich Nietzsche could not be reached for comment.

More Fun with Ian and Jane

2005-12-23T15:37:00.000-05:00

I don't feel like I really finished my rant about Ian McEwan and Jane Austen and the marketing dweebs who love them.

What I'm saying is that the bozos at Doubleday who slapped a blurb calling IM the new JA on the back of Saturday, IM's most recent book, did so not because they thought that the fool at Esquire who wrote the blurb was making a valid literary point, but because they thought it would help the book sell better. (Doubleday hardly had to scrounge to find good reviews... Saturday was on a lot of critics' best books of year lists.) And I'm also saying that it's a sad commentary on the state of the critical faculties of the American book-buying public (I can't imagine they'd try to pass this over on the Brits) that comparing a well-known, contemporary, demonstrably un-Austen-like writer's rather Virginia Woolf-like novel to Jane Austen just because the latter's popular stock is soaring right now -- she's the Google of dead white females -- actually works, and that cynical marketing trumps reason and taste even on Reason & Taste's purported home turf: literary literature.

Consider:

The blue shorts are bleached by patches of sweat that won’t wash out. Over a gray T-shirt, he puts on an old cashmere jumper with moth holes across the chest. Over the shorts, tracksuit pants, fastened with old cord at the waist. The white socks of prickly stretch towelling with yellow and pink bands at the top have something of the nursery about them. Unboxing them releases a homely aroma of the laundry. The squash shoes have a sharp smell, blending the synthetic with the animal, that reminds him of the court, the clean white walls and red lines, the unarguable rules of gladiatorial combat, and the score. It’s pointless pretending not to care about the score.

And then:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence, and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

It's like selling apples by saying that they're like oranges, or salt by saying it's like sugar. There are indeed ways that apples are like oranges and salt is like sugar, but none of those ways are particularly interesting, specific or insightful.

Actually it's worse than that, because it's more cynical. (No one's going to be more likely to buy apples because somebody says they're like oranges.) It's more like somebody selling apples by saying they're like magic, golden candy apples.

But that's not right either, because magic golden candy apples are, obviously, better than regular old bruised and wormy apples. So it isn't actually as bad as that, because Ian McEwan is nobody's wormy apple.

So I guess I don't know what it's like, really. But it pisses me off.

Who needs to jump with a stroke like that?

2005-12-23T14:17:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: This blog is not normally about sports. It's also -- I hope -- not normally quite so sanctimonious. But here we are...

The two most unstoppable offensive forces in major college basketball are both white American guys.

[I have done no research, by the way; I have no actual facts (Hey, this is the internet, baby!); so for the purposes of this entry I'm going to go ahead and go with the evidence of my eyes that most of the players -- and more than most of the really dominant ones -- in NCAA men's basketball are black. I don't why.]

ESPN basketball writer Andy Katz does a big compare-and-contrast piece on Duke's J.J. Redick and Gonzaga's Adam Morrison in the which the word "race" appears twice: "the player of the year race" and "the race for the national title."

The guiding principle behind this ommission seems to be that race doesn't matter, that both writer and readers are above noticing such things. Is it just me, or does this seem a little disingenuous? I mean, I respect and admire the impulse behind such a principle, but it just feels so phony.

Especially when you consider that a) the schools these guys play for are Duke and Gonzaga, academically elite private universities well known for having more than their statistically fair share of white players, b) the NBA is now full of black teen-agers and white Europeans (and other non-North Americans) who never played at US colleges, presumably diluting the level of competition significantly from what it might otherwise be, c) the difference between traditional notions of "white" and "black" styles of basketball is -- rightly or wrongly -- the dominant paradigm through which most discussion of basketball style takes place (See: White Men Can't Jump, Hoosiers, Fastbreak, The White Shadow, the upcoming Glory Road, et. al.) and d) the article goes on and on making superficial comparisons between these guys and their games (Morrison looks like a porn star and has a well-rounded game; Riddick looks like a jarhead and is learning to move better without the ball) to that point that lack of acknowledgement of their race feels incredibly strained.

The fact that these points of mine don't add up to anything, but rather head of in different directions, helps make my bigger point. Which is that there are a lot of possibilities that got ignored here.

Anyway, at the risk of wandering completely out of my depth...: While there is increasing DNA evidence showing that race is largely a social construct -- that, as a biological phenomenon, it might not actually exist -- it is indisputably a cultural reality. So, it's an issue. Why pretend it's not? Or else it isn't. In which case, why strain so hard to avoid mentioning it?

Sentence of the Day, 12/23

2005-12-23T00:54:00.000-05:00

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.

Earnest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises, 1957

DC assumes you've read The Sun Also Rises. If you haven't, he urges you to get off the damn Internet and go read it. He knows you probably won't. He's OK with this. It's your life.

"Stand-up Existentialism"

2005-12-22T23:51:00.000-05:00

Thom Pain (based on nothing) is the odd name of an odd (and brilliant) play by Will Eno, an odd (and brilliant) cat whom I know slightly. When the play opened in February, critics, even went berserk. Charles Isherwood (no pushover) wrote in the New York Times, "It's one of those treasured nights in the theater -- treasured nights anywhere, for that matter -- that can leave you both breathless with exhilaration and, depending on your sensitivity to meditations on the bleak and beautiful mysteries of human experience, in a puddle of tears," and said that Eno is the "Samuel Beckett of the Jon Stewart generation," a sobriquet I wouldn't mind having on my tombstone.

When I read the play this summer I thought the same thing. "Damn," I said to myself. "My good friend Will..." (If you know a guy slightly, and you suddenly discover that he's written a god damned masterpiece, you'll call him your "good friend" too. Unfortunately, when I ran into Mr. Eno on the street a couple months ago, he had no idea who I was. Well. Just wait til I write my masterpiece, Will Eno. Then you'll be sorry. Then you'll all be sorry!) Anyway: "My good friend Will has written a god damned masterpiece," says I to myself. "I can't wait to move back to New York and run into him on the street; he'll be so happy to see me!"

I finally went to see the play last night (I was in China in February), thinking I was in for one of those nights, you know, like Isherwood said I was in for. I consider myself more than averagely sensitive to "meditations on the bleak and beautiful mysteries of human experience," and I was eager to be gob-smacked by the awesome existential anguish of the thing.

Alas. Although I think the play itself is just as brilliant as I thought it was back when I still thought Will Eno liked me, this production, directed by an actual friend of mine, doesn't come close to realizing the beauty or the pain inherent in the writing.

"Before going farther it's only fair to include the evening's director, Hal Brooks, among the triumphant; his work, too, is witty, sensitive and close to perfection," writes Isherwood. I couldn't disagree more.

Hal directed me once, way back in grad school, in Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle. (I had a small role, but I was dedicated. I shaved my head and took off my pants and took up huge amounts of valuable rehearsal time arguing about trivial things.) Hal's career has taken off, and I couldn't be happier for him. He's a smart, talented guy. And it's only fair to acknowledge, as perhaps I should have earlier, that the actor I saw play the role -- Thom Pain is a one-man show, a monologue, a guy on a stage talking to an audience -- had replace James Urbaniak, the actor who created the role and who Isherwood and the other critics saw. So this whole post is kind of unfair.

But listen: I wish I wish I wish, O God, I wish I could write like Will Eno. And I never, ever will be able to. And, whoever you are, I'm pretty sure that neither will you. But in a play like this, in a role like this, with a director who was focused on the right things -- bringing out the truth of the character's world -- I could act circles around that nameless guy. And, whoever you are, you probably could to.

Because he wasn't, most of the time anyway, really there. He had some moments, sure. With writing this smart and raw, you have to. But his primary relationship wasn't with us -- it was with his "character." And the whole point of the play is that someone -- a damaged someone, a someone with "not enough skin." -- is trying (in both senses of the word) to make a real connection. And also to avoid it, too, because a real connection would be too painful.

But this dude really wasn't on that edge, and I have to lay that, at least partially, on the director. (I don't know how much time Hal got to work with this guy, who, again, was a replacement, so this criticism is, again, largely unfair. But so is life, baby.) I kept imagining what the play would be like with a charismatic, odd, emotionally available, quirky regular guy who fell through a wormhole into a Lenny Bruce routine written by Albert Camus. Mark Ruffalo or somebody. Phillip Seymour Hoffman. But that production only exists in my head. Or yours, if you go read the play.

"It's sad, isn't it? The dead horse of a life we beat, all the wilder, all the harder the deader it gets. On the other hand, there are some nice shops in the area."

Will Eno
Thom Pain (based on nothing), 2005

Sentence of the Day, 12/22

2005-12-22T14:08:00.000-05:00

The War on Christmas is a little like Santa Claus, in that it (a) comes to us from the sky, beamed down by the satellites of cable news, and (b) does not, in the boringly empirical sense, exist.

Hendrick Hertzberg
The New Yorker, this week

Dog Sees London, Dog Sees France...

2005-12-22T13:29:00.000-05:00

Rumor has it that the scathing reviews of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead -- that smart, funny play about the Peanuts gang gone wild -- have not hurt the show's ticket sales one little biscuit.

After all, what are a couple of bad reviews set against Eliza Dushku’s shaved vagina?

Seems Ms. Dushku, whose DSG character is based on long-time Charlie Brown nemesis Lucy Van Pelt (because life is so much better than anything you could ever make up!), wore a very un-Charles-Shultz-approved dress to the show's opening party.

(Please insert your own "Buffy," "Bring It On" and "Opening Party" jokes here.)

Oi! Oi! Oi!

2005-12-22T10:59:00.000-05:00

DC now has readers in Melbourne, Australia. One reader, really, but he's extremely tall, so we're counting him as two. Our tall reader is currently writing a novel based on a year he spent expatting in China, where he and DC had various nefarious adventures. DC is hoping to make an appearance as a thinly disguised character in the novel, because he thinks that would be so cool! He hopes his character is a little like Bill, the American writer who goes fishing and carousing with Jake in The Sun Also Rises, all the while blathering cleverly on about pity and irony. (DC is already, actually, a thinly disguised character in at least one other unpublished novel set in China. This one is written in Spanish, and each of its characters is based on one of the Seven Deadly Sins. [DC leaves it to the reader's imagination to guess which sin he is.])

Anyway, everything that in happens Melbourne (a city in whose airport DC has eaten a slice of pizza, but of which he is otherwise almost wholly ignorant) is within the bounds of this blog, because the city is home to the dedicated and inspiring theater director Kate Cherry, DC's favorite director from his previous incarnation as an actor. By showing him a glimpse of the artistic and personally fulfilling heights to which the experience of acting can ascend, Ms. Cherry set our hero up for the Icarus-like plunge into the watery depths of crushing disappointment of everything that was to follow. (He refers here only to the crushing disappointment of the rest of his professional acting career. All other crushing disappoints he accepts, Jimmy Buffet-like, as his own damn fault.)

Stylistic Nonsense Alert: In this post, DC introduces the second person plural to refer to himself. I mean, ourselves. Then he goes back to third person singular. He can't explain this or justify it, and we're not gonna try.

Bill O'Reilly is Such an Asshole

2005-12-22T09:33:00.000-05:00

I've never been a big Christmas guy. The overwroughtness of the thing has always made me uneasy, and, since I haven't considered myself a Christian since I was about 12, the religiosity of it means nothing to me. I would cheerfully say "Merry Christmas" to anybody I thought wanted especially to hear it (wee goy bairnes, elderly southern relatives, elves, etc.), but "Happy Holidays" was my default setting for the minimally socially acceptable politeness that we're so often called upon to practice this time of year. As Jon Stewart said the other night, "New Year's is right there too. And it's a holiday. So that's more than one. In English, that means we use an 'S.' " He said it in a silly voice with his eyebrows raised, so it was a lot funnier. He could also have mentioned that the celebration of birth of Jesus, which no one but children and the Dover, PA school board actually believes was in December, was moved to it's current spot on the calendar in the 4th Century to ride the coattails of the much more popular pagan festival Saturnalia. (That's right -- Christmas was the 4th Century's Kwanzaa.)

So, anyway, fine. The orgy of shopping and tourists in Manhattan brings enough headaches without having to take a strong position on one of the Culture War's stupider fronts.

Then along comes Bill O'Reilly. I've tried, really I have, to watch that Idiot's Guide to Life as a Self-satisfied, Ignorant Jackass, but I can't do it again, not for free. I do not have the fortitude. Fortunately, the good people at Conde Nast have paid the indispensable Hendrick Hertzberg to do it for me. His report from the front lines:

"I am not going to let oppressive, totalitarian, anti-Christian forces in this country diminish and denigrate the holiday!” he said the other day. And, “I’m going to use all the power that I have on radio and television to bring horror into the world of people who are trying to do that!” And, “There is no reason on this earth that all of us cannot celebrate a public holiday devoted to generosity, peace, and love together!” And, “And anyone who tries to stop us from doing it is gonna face me!"

The man parodies himself.

The awesome (I mean that literally) Christopher Hitchens has this to say:

The Fox News campaign against Wal-Mart and other outlets — whose observance of the official feast-day is otherwise fanatical and punctilious to a degree, but a degree that falls short of unswerving orthodoxy — is one of the most sinister as well as one of the most laughable campaigns on record. If these dolts knew anything about the real Protestant tradition, they would know that it was exactly this paganism and corruption that led Oliver Cromwell — my own favorite Protestant fundamentalist — to ban the celebration of Christmas altogether.

Hitchens specifically takes issue with O'Reilly's buddy Joe Scarborough for inviting him (Hitch) onto his (Scarborough's) Fox show to talk about pagan symbolism in traditional Christmas decor, where he (Hitch again) "was greeted by a storm of abuse, as if I had broken into the studio instead of having been entreated to come by Scarborough's increasingly desperate staff."

O'Reilly has also been attacking people willy-nilly, including the aforementioned Mr. Stewart. Which is particularly odd, because Stewart has always been more or less on O'Reilly's side on this one. I heard Stewart's standup show a couple month's ago in Stamford, Connecticut (Long story, don't ask...), and he was very clear about his anti-pc position on this:

What's the deal with the one Jewish family in every small town protesting the town Christmas tree? Forcing them to put up a big menorah next to it? Listen: I'm Jewish. I know the story. "The oil burned for an extra couple of days! Hooray!" It's the birth of their savior. Can we not just give 'em this?

Hard to imagine Stewart, or any sensible person, saying this now, after O'Reilly and his cohorts have rallied the forces of jackassery to their loony extremism. Because, if we've learned anything from the disaster that is George W. Bush's little outreach project in Iraq, it's that willfully simplistic, hyped up, idiot rah rah breeds blowback. (I'm not, incidentally, taking the wing-nut Michael Moore position that extremism somehow arrived in Iraq along with US troops -- that would be disingenuous and, I believe, contemptible. I'm just saying...)

So count me part of O'Reilly's blowback. The "War on Christmas," remains a figment of his paranoid, puerile imagination. But if it were real, and Christmas meant drinking eggnog and singing and laughing merrily with people like him, I would totally sign up, and I would march (double time) over to a secure forward position on Sixth Avenue outside Fox News, and there I would crouch behind a big yellow Gotham Writers' Workshop catalogue bow and wait...

What, I wonder, is the position of torturer-in-chief Dick Cheney and Alberto Renfield Gonzales on sticking gravel in snowballs?

Readers! We Got Readers!

2005-12-21T16:13:00.000-05:00

DC is pleased to announce that he has had two (2) confirmed visitors to his blog, only one of whom is his mother. The other is Sally, Friedes, a woman of impeccable taste he met years ago in a writing class. (I had put in a little self-deprecating joke here: "Yes, difficult is it is to believe, DC once took a writing class," but given that fully half of my readership was sitting there beside me and the other half wrote the check that paid for the class, I don't think the joke makes a lot of sense. ) Sally has her own blog, about actual things (specifically, parenting), called Burning Apron.

For those who don't get the reference (Hi, Mom!), Burning Angel is a group of sexually empowered -- and slightly scary, if you want to know the truth -- young female... um, I guess you'd call them "performance artists" -- in the Bay Area, where Sally lives and works as a radio talk show host dispensing her sassy wisdom to the Northern California child-rearing masses. (Sally, if this is reference you did not intend, well, oops. Your consolation is that no one else reads this blog.)

Emerging theme note: DC is nice to his friends. Moral: Be his friend!

Emerging stylistic confusion note: You may have noticed that I sometimes call myself "Dilettante Critic," or "DC" and write in the third person, and that sometimes I don't. Dilettante Critic has noticed this too, and he's as confused about it as you are. I'll speak with him.

Sentence of the Day: A Primer

2005-12-21T15:39:00.000-05:00

It needn't be a sentence. It needn't be from today. What it must be is, reasonably short, delightfully pithy, surprisingly satisfying and of shimmering literary merit (as defined at the whim of DC alone).

The entry below, for example, is not a sentence, and it was written more than thirty years ago. I read it today, however, as I was walking through Central Park this morning on my four-mile slog to work, bundled up and beparkad like Kenny from Southpark. (Transit strike, you see.)

The book in question, Kyril Bonfiglioli's After You with the Pistol, is a wonderfully snobbish bit of misanthropy (and, of course, misogyny, as you'll soon see if you keep reading) about an amoral, drunken art dealer/criminal, written with brio and panache by a man who did his best to convince the world that he too was an amoral, drunken art dealer/criminal (and who very well may have been). It's like naughty P. G. Wodehouse dipped in Dashiell Hammett and sprinkled with malice. But also full of joy. You see that, don't you?

Sentence of the Day, 12/21

2005-12-21T15:02:00.000-05:00

"Glib," I thought bitterly. "Glib, glib." I often bitterly think words like "glib, glib" after listening to things which women have said; I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Kyril Bonfiglioli
After You with the Pistol, 1972

Dog Sees Hostility

2005-12-21T13:55:00.000-05:00

My friend Bert Royal (officially Bert V. Royal, thank you very much...) has written a smart, funny, subversive, entertaining, touching play called Dog Sees God: Confessions of a teenage blockhead, an (extremely) unauthorized parody of the Peanuts gang, which finds C.B. and company in high school, pretty much angst-ridden, horney, hateful, drunk, violent, gay, generally fucked up wretches, with a whisper of tragic existential wistfulness -- that most of the city's professional critics, especially the evil Jason Zinoman at The New York Times, have gone and pooped all over.

This irks me, for these reasons:

1) I am of the honest and -- as far as I'm able to judge (which is probably not very far) -- disinterested opinion that the critics, especially the evil Jason Zinoman at The New York Times, are wrong to be so dismissive of this play, which, in spite of not being perfect, is, as I said, smart, funny and satisfying.

2) Bert V. Royal is, as I said, a friend of mine, and these reviews to his play are not likely to make him happy.

3) Another friend is an investor in the show. The reviews are likely to make him nearly as unhappy as they make Bert.

4) Still another friend is the play's associate producer. (This friend happens to be a beautiful woman with whom I once had an epic, recrimination-filled love affair that ended rather wretchedly for all concerned. We're friends now. Even so, only I should be allowed to make her unhappy.)

5) Here I now am, winging half-considered libels into the ether about people who are all demonstrably more talented (except for maybe Demi), dedicated (except for that jackass at Esquire) and accomplished than I am, simply because it's gratifying. Should I, who, having once been an actor, know how hurtful it can be to read some know-nothing wanker bang on about my work, who knows that even reviews that are ostensibly positive reviews are often excruciating, permit myself this hypocrisy of near Cheneyan proportions? Should I not sit my conscience down and give it a talking-to about responsibility and doing on others and whatnot?

To quote the immortal John Belushi, "Naaaahh!" Dilettante Critic doesn't need to show you no stinkin' conscience. I'm gonna hurt Larry David's feelings? Or Jack Black's? As if. I don't have that kind of power. I have, in fact, no power. The evil Jason Zinoman at the New York Times has piles.

Of power, I mean. I make no claims to knowledge about the condition of his excretory system.

Full Disclosure: The EJZ at the NYT is so-dubbed because he once failed to hire me as a theater reviewer for Time Out New York. Never mind that I had no experience, that Time Out New York wasn't necessarily looking for a theater reviewer and that I spelled his name wrong in the unsolicited letter I sent him some years back, very possibly to the wrong address. DC is not one to let go of a potentially satisfying, one-sided feud with those who are wholly unaware of his existence.

King Kong Phooey

2005-12-21T11:33:00.000-05:00

Peter Jackson's new King Kong movie is so good in so many ways that's almost a shame I have to trash it.

But first, the good: The "love" story between Kong and the sexy blonde -- current iteration, Naomi Watts -- is believable, compelling and even touching. Watts is good, Kong is great. Anybody who saw the incredibly life-like computer-generated Gollum in Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (which, based on those movies' gross box office, is, roughly, everybody) won't be surprised that the pixilated primate is bursting with personality. The movie is three-hour adventure thrill ride that definitely gives you your $10.75 worth. Hell, the scene where, after rescuing the damsel from the extreme distress of being eaten by ravenous Skull Island T-Rexes, Kong sulks, feigning aloofness like spurned lover or a willful child (i.e. "I didn't want to play with you anyway, so there!") is worth $10.75 all by itself.

(Economic digression -- Why, in the US, do all movies at the same theater cost the same amount of money to see, regardless of what they cost to make and of what price they might command on the free market? Regardless, in other words, of their value? It's like charging the same price for every car on a given lot. In this, as in so much else, the Chinese, who charge more to see popular movies than they do to see duds, are far more capitalist than we are. [I'm not saying this is a good thing -- China would be a more pleasant place if it adopted some old-fashioned US socialism, such as free public education and a social safety net. This, though, is far beyond DC's meager bailiwick. If such things interest you, I suggest you find a Dilettante Economist of some sort.])

So, sure, it's got its good points. It's just that the problems are so problematical. Jack Black, a revelation in High Fidelity, an inspiration in Tenacious D, and a legit box office-delivering comedy superhero in School of Rock, practically ruins the movie all by himself with the kind of cringe-inducing performance that makes you fear for his career. It's a tedious, one-note performance with none of the impish anarchy you expect from the guy. He delivers the remake's famous closing line as though he were profoundly embarrassed to be there. (Back in the day, when I was a cocky young actor of dubious integrity [and with about a tenth of Black's natural talent], I was often embarrassed to be in the drek that paid my bills, and I no doubt occasionally allowed that to color my own work. All I can say in my defense is -- well... There's not really anything, is there? I have no defense. I should have done better. My bad.) Anyway, I haven't read any reviews of this movie -- which is kind of odd, because I enjoy reading reviews -- so I don't know what the real critics are saying. But if anybody glosses over the gifted Black's decision to phone this one in from far, far away, he's either not paying attention, kissing Jackson's ass or on the take from Universal. Or something.

An even bigger problem, though, is Jackson's relentlessness with those same special effects I was just praising. Which is so weird, since the studio (I've read) fought with him to make the movie shorter and cheaper, which he could so easily have done by leaving out a ten-minute brontasaurus stampede (I'm not kidding. OK, maybe it was five minutes.) of jaw-dropping irrelevance and stupidity. And what possible reason could he have for throwing in all those velociraptors -- a dinosaur that maybe thirteen people in the world had heard of before Jurassic Park --- other than to show that he could do them better than Spielberg? (Which, since the damn things at least had a point in Spielberg's bad dinosaur movie and they have none here, he totally fails to do.) There are so many of these high-octane showy scenes in a row that even the good ones lose the power they would otherwise have. At one point, when giant bugs threaten to eat Adrian Brody (which wound up being a great scene, by the way, even though Brody didn't get eaten), a guy sitting near me perfectly summed up the feelings of many in the audience when he said, "Oh, no, not again!"

Things that should be very good but that, for some stupid and obvious reason aren't, make me so much more upset than things that are just bad. Maybe I should work on that. But I probably won't.

He's irritating! Get it?

2005-12-21T00:52:00.000-05:00

The most over-rated show on television (and possibly the most over-rated anything anywhere) is Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Everybody just loves it. You probably do too. Even Michael Kinsley (Michael Kinsley!) took time out recently from his usual smart lefty opinion journalism to write a gobbledy-gook piece in Slate calling Larry David the new Jane Austen. (What the hell did poor Jane Austen do to deserve all this? See below.)

Here's the truth, and everyone who pretends otherwise (You've all got to be pretending, because no one could really believe what you're all saying) is wrong: Seinfeld was a much better show than Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Seinfeld was tight, while CYE is slack. Seinfeld was sharp, while CYE is flabby and self-indulgent. Seinfeld was smart, while CYE is, yes, dumb. Seinfeld was honed, polished and professional, while CYE's slapdash, pseudo-improvisational feel just looks amateurish (David is no Christopher Guest or Ricky Gervais --comedy verite geniuses).

Most importantly, Seinfeld was consistently funny, while Curb Your Enthusiasm is just irritating. Not funny-irritating, either, like Arrested Development or pre-Lost in Translation Bill Murray. I mean that the point of the show seems to be to produce irritation by showing an irritating guy get irritated by things that, while admittedly irritating, are consistently less irritating than he is.

Fun with Ian and Jane

2005-12-20T23:38:00.000-05:00

More on this later, but I gotta touch on it before I go to bed -- On the back of Ian McEwan's recent novel Saturday (universally praised an rightly so), some marketing goober from Doubleday (the Random House division that published the thing) put the following blurb:

"McEwan could be the most psychological astute writer working today, our era's Jane Austin."
-- Esquire

I've got no problem with the first clause; McEwan could be the most psychological astute writer working today. I'm not gonna argue that he isn't. I've only read two of his books (the obvious ones -- Saturday and Atonement), more than enough to know that he's about 45 thousand times more pychologically astute than writers who sell a lot more books and make a lot more money and are a lot more likely to read Esquire. He produces, in fact, page after page of startling, subtle, wonderful pychologically astute prose. He explains the incidents of daily life and thought in such fresh, simple, shockingly correct ways, that I have to stop reading every few pages just to go "wow." So: OK so far.

It's the straight-faced comparison with Jane Austen that makes me want to hit somebody.

Now, I haven't read the review, and maybe context makes this less stupid (though I don't see how it could). But even if it does, some jack-off name-dropper thought the book-reading public was stupid enough to swallow this.

Yes, Jane Austen, too, was pychologically astute. She was, too, from England, and, too, she wrote really excellent novels. How many other authors can you think of who fit that description? Dozens? Maybe hundreds? Well, pretty much whoever you come up with is likely to be more sililar to either Austen or McEwan than they are to each other. They are similar in almost no way.

Jane Austen was, first and foremost, a satirist. She was, second (and, um, secondmost, I guess), a miniaturist, focusing almost exclusively on the interactions of marriagable gentlemen and ladies in a artificial world with fixed rules and mores. McEwan, in his two most popular novels at least, is an expansive realist, more like George Elliot, or even, in the way his characters' consciencenesses roam freely around the entirety of their counceptual universes, taking in wars and terrorism and epochal change, Virginia Woolf. Sure, some of Austen's heroines learn lessons (others, somewhat surprisingly, don't), but they're the lessons the reader knows is coming. It's the heroine's delightful navigation of the social maze to the anticipated happy-ever-after-ness, told with sparkling wit and surprisingly cutting irony, that makes us love these books. McEwan's stories could not be more otherwise, and his 20th Century heros and heroines move with earnestness through much vaster, and more fundamentally uncertain, conceptual realities. The question is less, "Will I marry the yummy rich boy?" and more, "What have I done with my life?"

The point is: this is a widely well-reviewed major work by a gifted, major, writer, whose major publisher couldn't spend ten minutes finding a blurb for the back cover that doesn't make this member of literary book-buying public (not the biggest group going these days) want to vomit.

Sigh. Welcome to my world.

Demi not always awful?

2005-12-20T22:29:00.000-05:00

I stayed up late last night watching A Few Good Men. Again. What struck me this time was that, if it was the only one of her movies you ever saw, you would have no idea how bad Demi Moore sucks.

Seriously; she's absolutely adorable in this movie, like she hasn't been since Blame It on Rio. (Remember? She was Michael Caine's teenage daughter, pouting because her father was sleeping with her best friend. She had no implants and almost no lines, and she was too unknown to be icky yet. I digress.)

Anyway, how can this be? Anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing Mrs. Kutcher actually try to act knows that she's just terrible (nearly as unbelievable as her ex-husband, Bruce Willis, who somehow gets a free pass from everybody).

Some of it has to be Aaron Sorkin's super-snappy dialogue, which I figure can hold up pretty much anybody. But it's more than that. She's playing this uptight, rigid, sexless lawyer, and it's easily her sexiest, most charming performance. The question is, is this actually talent? Or is it an illusion? I mean, any actor can look good in the right role, yes? (Even Willis was almost good in Pulp Fiction.)

When the woman tries to be sexy or heroic or -- God forbid -- serious, she's a disaster. But pin up that hair, button up those mighty, man-made boobies, make her act nerdy and vaguely incompetent and cast her opposite a guy with absolutely no interest in her [insert your own Tom Cruise joke here] and, well, damn. I totally wanted to kiss her.

Which, fair enough, is not necessarily the ultimate barometer of whether a performance is any good.