Monthly Archives: June 2005

Summer movie roundup spectacular

There’s a lot of air conditioning in town, but which dark chilly room to choose for two hours of blissful coolness? It’s easy. Before you do anything else, including lunch, dinner, sleeping, work, or lemonade (you can bring the lemonade into the theater), immediately go to:

1. Crash. (Or why America needs Valium in its drinking water and a lot fewer guns. Not to mention that Don Cheadle and Matt Dillon [!] are big, craft-focused actors plus hot movie stars who make you say “And why does Brat Pitt matter again?” And Sandra Bullock will surprise you.) Link: Review by David Denby, New Yorker.

2. Mad Hot Ballroom. (Or how the foxtrot of fifth-graders will make you laugh till you cry, the kids in Tribeca are like tiny psychiatrists, and the teachers in Bensonhurst and Tribeca know how to get things done.) Link: Review by Sarah Kaufman, Washington Post.

3. Howl’s Moving Castle. (Or why Disney has become the Gaston of American animation—all vanity, no wild beastlike beauty. Lucky them that they could ride Hayao Miyazaki’s magnificent house into town.) Link: Review by Gene Seymour, Newsday.

It’s easy! See you in six hours, and you’ll have forgotten all about this steamy carnival of smells. When you get out, perhaps after a waffle at Petite Abeille to get into the spirit of Belgium, which according to Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer is an “industrious, honest” country unfortunately damned by idol-worship, it’ll be time for Clumsiest People in the World author Todd Pruzan, at the Chelsea B&N at 7. That’s air-conditioned, too.

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He and Ray bought it when they retired

From the Harper’s Weekly Review:

TO: Harper’s Weekly
FROM: Jerry Aulenbach

Thanks for yet another informative and entertaining WR. I would like to comment on the following line: “and a grizzly bear killed a woman near a golf course in Canada.” Do you know if that golf course in Canada was owned by Bob from Canada? I live in Edmonton, Alberta, and I would just like to encourage perhaps a little more detail when referring to our country. We know your 50 states, but do you know our 12 provinces?

Update: Emdashes reader Joe Clark helpfully points out that, contrary to the figure in the above Canadian’s characteristically restrained yet witty letter, “Canada has 10 provinces and three territories.” True enough, but I figure crafty ol’ Jerry put in a ringer just to further show up dumb Americans, of which I am half a one. The other half of me totally knew that, though.

Toobin sez: Jackson Damaged

Special gossip edition!

“His image as a freak unhealthily obsessed with children is a permanent one,” says Jeffrey Toobin, legal analyst for CNN and a writer for The New Yorker. “There’s nothing he can do to get rid of that.”
—USA Today

To the whole entire world, agitated about what will happen to Michael Jackson now that he has a weird reputation—oh, wait, he had that already—I say, Remember, people, this is the land where fresh P.R. makes it all better, and Time Inc. hails all the wounded. Did you see The Aviator last year? Do you remember what it was about? Yes, the handsome Leo version of a reclusive weirdo who had formerly caused the world to sorrow over his irreparably strange reputation. We won’t be waiting any kind of decades for some pretty young thing to give Jackson the Oscar treatment, because we’re too impatient. Next year seems likely. Toobin again:

“I went into this trial thinking that Michael Jackson was a largely forgotten, irrelevant public figure,” Toobin concedes. “But I soon learned that there’s still a huge amount of interest in him—some in the United States, but especially abroad. It was shocking to me how many people came from outside the country to give him support. And I’ve never had as much interest from CNN International as I did here.”

He might want to consider refreshing the page on Gawker occsionally. Anyway, I don’t have to tell you there are only about a billion examples of people who went crazy, did stuff, got away with it, and are magically more famous than ever. Besides, with E.T. (the extraterrestrial and Liz Taylor) on your side, who the heck are critics? Michael Jackson is America—scarified (like all the men in Hollywood don’t have surgery too), racially and sexually confused, wheedled by the ad world to love child-flesh and told by the law he can’t have it, a slave to his own image, desperate for attention, perpetually 5, love-starved and worshipped, etc., etc. We just can’t, ah, face the man in the mirror.

In other freak-obsessed-with-children news, my sister writes to say she just saw a Freudian typo on E! Online: “Last month, Cruise sent eyebrows skyrocketing with his now infamous appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, during which he bounded around the stage, springing on and off furniture, before sinking to the floor to declare his rapturous admiration for Cruise.” So even if he’s not gay, he does love one man very, very much. ‘Course, if he’s seen All the Right Moves too, I can’t blame him.

Heavens to Benchley

How do I love thee, Criterion Collection? Let me count the ways. Today they’re releasing the newly spangled and bedecked Heaven Can Wait (that’s 1943, Warren Beatty fans). Features include:

—New video conversation between film critics Molly Haskell and Andrew Sarris
—Creativity with Bill Moyers: A Portrait of Samson Raphaelson (1982), a 30-minute program exploring the screenwriter’s life and career
—Audio seminar with Raphaelson and film critic Richard Corliss recorded at the Museum of Modern Art in 1977
—Lubitsche home piano recordings
—Original theatrical trailer
—A new essay by film scholar William Paul

And, says Digitally Obsessed:

A surprising amount of supplemental material rounds out this release. In typical Criterion fashion, an insert containing information about the DVD’s transfers and credits starts things off. Featuring an essay by William Paul, the insert is a welcomed addition as the essay gives a good introduction to the film for those who may not be familiar with Ernst Lubitsch’s work. On the disc itself, there are a variety of features showcasing 20th Century Fox’s publicity campaign for the movie. The theatrical trailer is presented with its original narration by Robert Benchley, who delivers some very clever taglines for the film.

I’m excited to see Sarris and Haskell, who were my undergraduate film teachers (along with the aforementioned superscholar and overall mensch Tim Clinton). It might also interest you that the special features on Warner’s Night at the Opera DVD include one “How to Sleep,” one of Benchley’s fun instructional shorts. On the other hand, if you just you put a few of his essay titles in a list, you get a pretty good idea of how a typical bout of Benchley insomnia might have progressed: How to Get Things Done, Picking French Pastry; a Harder Game Than Chess, The Tortures of Week-End Visiting, A Word About Hay Fever, Imagination in the Bathroom, Malignant Mirrors, Uncle Edith’s Ghost Story, The Mystery of the Poisoned Kipper, The Mysteries of Radio, Tiptoeing Down Memory Lane, Browsing Through the Passport, The Dying Thesaurus, How I Create, The Sunday Menace, Looking Shakespeare Over, The Questionnaire Craze, First—Catch Your Criminal, The Wreck of the Sunday Paper, The Correspondent-School Linguist, Naming Our Flowers, Isn’t It Remarkable?, Do Dreams Go By Opposites?, Back to Mozart, Cocktail Hour, Weather Records, Word Torture, My Five- (Or Maybe Six-) Year Plan, My Subconscious, The Menace of Buttered Toast.

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The trouble with a gentleman poet/Is if he writes an inspired couplet those who giggle but think verse should be bleak may be unwilling to show it

A snappy review of the new Nash bio, from Carl Schoettler in the Baltimore Sun:

Ogden Nash: The Life and Works of America’s Laureate of Light Verse

By Douglas M. Parker. Ivan R. Dee, Publisher. 316 pages. $27.50.

Ogden Nash certainly remains our most-read purveyor of light verse. Who doesn’t know Candy is Dandy/But liquor is quicker?

But he was also a literary gentleman of the old school, a species that, if not extinct, is as rarely seen as the ivory-billed woodpecker. Douglas Parker, a lawyer writing with the “encouragement” of the family, depicts Nash as man of polished civility—witty, sophisticated, and perhaps above all, kind and gentle. He could trace his ancestry to Welsh nobility, wore extremely well-tailored suits and lunched at the Algonquin with ancient literary types such as Christopher Morley (Parnassus on Wheels, et al), Franklin P. Adams (The Conning Tower) and Dorothy Parker, although she was no gentleman.

He wooed Frances Leonard with adoring love letters, which he continued to write until the end of his life. (His dying words, after 40 years of marriage, were “I love you, Frances.”) After they married, he continued to call his in-laws “Mr. and Mrs. Leonard.” The Nash family lived with the Leonards for years in their rambling manse on Rugby Road in Guilford, where everyone seemed to dress for dinner.

Endlessly inventive in English, he could make puns in Latin and French as well, although he had completed only one year at Harvard when his father’s business collapsed and he ran out of money. He had had three years at St. George’s School, in Newport, R.I., which may have been the equivalent of today’s diluted college eduction.

The New Yorker published 353 of his poems: the first in 1930, the last ten days after his death in May 1971. He seemed to embody the smart, insouciant, urbane style of the magazine in the 1930s and 1940s.

And he rarely expressed anger or even irritation, except when The New Yorker rejected a poem, or his publishers mishandled his publicity. He did, after all, basically support his family with his poetry. He tried Hollywood unsuccessfully. He hoped for triumph on Broadway and had one splendid success, One Touch of Venus, a musical for which he wrote the lyrics, including one great song, Speak Low, a standard for cabaret singers to this day.

Hard life of Billie Holiday; smart verse of Ogden Nash; kicking the war habit [Baltimore Sun]
Poems by Ogden Nash [Plagiarist.com]

The internet is for…purchasing tickets

If you were a bad person, this would be your enemies list: the known celebrities who’ve seen Avenue Q (including lots of the Sesame St. principals, like Elmo, Bob, Maria, and Snuffy). Also, this disclaimer:

Adults love AVENUE Q, but they seem a little, er, fuzzy on whether it’s appropriate for kids. We’ll try to clear that up. AVENUE Q is great for teenagers because it’s about real life. It may not be appropriate for young children because AVENUE Q addresses issues like sex, drinking, and surfing the web for porn. It’s hard to say what exact age is right to see AVENUE Q—parents should use their discretion based on the maturity level of their children. But we promise you this—if you DO bring your teenagers to AVENUE Q, they’ll think you’re really cool.

There were lots of excited but confused little kids in the theater both times I saw the show, along with their freaked parents. Sometimes it’s not obvious how one’s neighbors in row W got there, unless they checked off a box somewhere that said “Yes, I like Broadway shows! I’ll show up for anything regardless of content.” Actually, that pretty well describes me (though Broadway tickets aren’t, as everyone knows, for ordinary theater fans anymore, which is offensive), but it wasn’t at all the case for the pissed couple next to me who couldn’t understand what everyone thought was so funny. They didn’t laugh once. That was a shame for everyone.

In other arts news, there’s a new Flux Factory show afoot, this time of cartoonists, on the heels of the big novel-writing installation/experiment. The stylishly drawn website explains the plans of each of the participating artists: Ian Burns, Daupo, Brian Dewan, Andrea Dezso, Michelle Higa & Leah Beeferman, Aya Kakeda, J. Keen, Yunmee Kyong, Jason Little,“Pirate” Brian Matthews, and Doug Skinner. All of them are making machines that suggest “the antique entertainment devices of the 19th century,” like kinetoscopes, a motorized funhouse ride, an “interactive console for creating enigmatic rubber stamp comic strips,” a multilayered rotating mechanical theater, a phenakistiscope (looking forward to seeing what that is), etc. Cool! If all of life were like the Boston Children’s Museum circa 1979, you wouldn’t hear me complaining. The Comix Ex Machina reception is this Friday the 18th, 7 p.m. at the Flux Factory.

Yunmee Kyong’s hand-cranked scroll for the exhibition reminds me of the ingenious book-roll machine invented by big-thinking novelist Allen Kurzweil, which I got to see in action. Kurzweil’s entrancing story of watches, obsessives, and blocked NYPL librarians, The Grand Complication, came out in September 2001, so if you missed it it’s definitely worth looking into now. He also just wrote a kids’ book, I’m happy to see: Leon and the Spitting Image, and the first chapter is here. Leon is a fourth grader at the Ethical School who magically outwits the school bully—could that be in the Randyland School District of The Ethicist‘s dreams?

Monday salad: Everything means everything

Is it random or link-dumpy? Not a bit! The theme is varieties of appreciation. Here’s what I mean:

In The Baltimore Sun, the whole story of the cartoon caption contest, by Rob Hiaasen; I know you’re eager to snack on that one. More about that later. Meanwhile, breaking news! Was last week’s contest winner channeling The Far Side, and if so, was that bad? The Times finally acknowledges the caption-contest beat and even provides a graphic comparing the two cartoons. “The winning entry, for an illustration showing two monster-movie dinosaurs speaking while devouring a city, was ‘Remember that time you made me laugh and people came out of my nose?’ The punch line bore a marked similarity to a ‘Far Side’ quip from 1985, although in the original, it was lions with antlers coming out of their noses.” Read all about it: Mankoff reacts! Larsen legions rumble!

Although the Times still hasn’t made the switch to the more modern “punchline,” the piece is a fine demonstration of the paper’s groovitude on the popular culture: “The incident does bear strong resemblance to a 1998 episode of ‘Seinfeld’ in which Elaine submits a caption to The New Yorker only to learn to her great horror that she had cribbed it from ‘Ziggy.’ The episode was written by Bruce Eric Kaplan, a New Yorker cartoonist and executive producer of the HBO drama ‘Six Feet Under.'”

Prince Charles Simic reviews the magnificent coffee-table book Steinberg at the New Yorker. Plus a slide show of Steinberg drawings with the ad-bizzy announcement “Interactive will begin shortly.” Get me rewrite, please.

I just happened on this engaging “brief autobiography in the third person” by Harrison Kinney, who wrote James Thurber: His Life & Times, the massive and definitive 1992 biography that I covered for The Nation in my book-review debut. I was positive but, I fear, sort of presumptuous; the big finish was a clever-ish, super-stretched metaphor. Ah, the follies of youth. Anyway, to make up for all that, here’s Kinney’s first chapter, “Those Clocks of Columbus.” Kinney also edited, with Rosemary Thurber, the fabulous collection The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom and Surprising Life of James Thurber, which everybody ought to own. Surprising is absolutely right.

Finally (last bite for now), U.S. News interviews Todd Pruzan, deft author of The Clumsiest People in Europe. The Globe and Mail reviews it. Critic Martin Levin—who had me at “I have always scorned the manufactured distinction between summer reading and reading per se, a division that allows you to read Dan Brown in July, but Norman O. Brown in January”—calls Clumsiest People “my favourite summer read this year.” Pruzan’s reading and signing in NYC this Wednesday the 15th, at 7 p.m. at the Chelsea Barnes & Noble.

Back to our regularly scheduled considerations, not necessarily about iPods.

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Daily Wilsey: New review; Wilseys go a-decoratin’

Review of Oh the Glory by John Freeman in the Houston Chronicle:

Like Dave Eggers’ memoir, which it resembles without being derivative, Oh the Glory of It All is a triumph of tone over tribulation. Other young men have perhaps suffered more, but what this book does—and does brilliantly—is give us the illusion of being inside Wilsey’s head as he experiences this family turmoil. His prose is headlong and rich without betraying the age he is supposed to be at the time…. More.

Surely one of the SF papers, who are covering every toenail of this story, has been here before, but I couldn’t resist: a Wilsey cameo on the website of the late California interior decorator Michael Taylor, “Media” section. Taylor’s signature touches, according to Papercity, included:

* Boldly overscaled furniture with plump, geometric cushions
* Rusticity played against glamour
* Concrete, wicker, timber, geodes—all used indoors
* Large, sculptural plants
* Mirrors everywhere
* Slate floors, twig scultpures, river rocks
* Juxtaposition: an 18th-century French chair played against a table made from the stone mill wheel

And that’s just the guest bathroom! It’s logical that Dede Wilsey might, given all accounts, be attracted to such overscaled juxtapositions. From a 1991 feature on Taylor in House & Garden by Dorothea Walker:

More than two decades later Michael was still working in traditional styles as well as his own—and often combining the two with refreshing results, as in the house he decorated for Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Wilsey in San Francisco. At her first meeting with Michael, Dede Wilsey told him, “I want to work with you, but I don’t want a typical Michael Taylor house.” Michael’s back immediately went up. “And what exactly,” he demanded, “is a typical Michael Taylor house?” “Oh, you know,” explained Dede Wilsey. “White on white, wicker everywhere, huge over-stuffed chairs. My feet wouldn’t touch the floor. I’d feel like a pygmy.” Fortunately, Michael thought that was very funny, and he and his clients became great friends. And he gave her beautiful rooms, all in Dede Wilsey’s favorite colors. He was disconcerted to hear that she wanted a pink living room, but he followed her lead, draping the room’s three sets of French doors and two windows in striped pink taffeta. To keep it from looking too sweet, he added two stone cocktail tables shaped like elephants. A sofa from a Syrie Maugham design was covered in green hand-cut velvet.

At a party in the Wilsey’s garden room, which Michael had decorated in his characteristic palette of whites, another of his clients spotted a terrazzo table and rushed up to him, almost weeping. “That’s my table,” she said. “Exactly the same as mine. How could you do this to me?” Michael always laughed when he told this story. “These ladies think nothing of wearing the same dress to a party, and they have their pictures taken in it for Women’s Wear Daily. The dress looks different on each of them. Why wouldn’t this table look different in different rooms?”

Now you’ve got to see the room; click on the House & Garden story. I’m actually starting to love this style. If only Taylor were here to join the fray!

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Oh the Alliterative Synopsis of It All

The SF Examiner, bless its heart, puts the “literary” in “hot literary gossip.” P.J. Cokery writes:

Jerry Matters, who lives in his own Pacific Heights down in Costa Rica, has just completed reading all of Sean Wilsey’s “Oh the Glory of it All.” He has now, with the aid of James Joyce, produced a one-sentence summary of the 496-page memoir of life in the local heights: “They lived, they laughed, they loathed and they left.” Voracious reader Jerry is quick to credit Joyce for the original version of his précis, which occurs in Finnegans Wake, with one telling, deliciously obscure Joycean twist. Joyce—and isn’t Bloomsday, June 16, just around the bend? All hail the master!—wrote, “they lived und laughed ant loved end left. Forsin.” “Forsin” is an ancient word meaning, “burdened by sin.” But of course there is no sin in San Francisco.

The audio version, unabridged, of Wilsey’s book is out, with the narration done by a 38-year-old Shakespearean actor and one-time skateboarding kid out of Southern California, the solid Scott Brick. Brick has narrated more than 200 audio books. His specialty had been science fiction.

You’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t check out Brick’s smokin’ photo. Which reminds me that you ravenous alligators keep searching for “Sean Wilsey photo,” to put up in your locker next to Ricky Schroder, no doubt, so here! Here it is! Little Sean, Al, and Pat Montandon, from the Chronicle‘s nifty gallery. Sean with the Pope (scroll down), from, yes, Children as the Peacemakers Foundation. And not at all least, contemporary Wilsey from Newsday, in a photo taken by my former colleague Ari “Junior” Mintz, one of the sweetest guys around. An adjective also frequently applied to Wilsey, which must have made Ari’s sometimes trying job much easier.

Here’s a question: Is Oh the Glory of It All a bad Father’s Day gift, or not?

Almost completely Lost in the Fog [SF Examiner]

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