Tony Scott (Emdashes rule of thumb: you only get to call them by their nickname if you can say it to their face) writes in the Times today, regarding Frank O’Hara, kids (in particular, his own lucky moviegoing snappers), and the moving pictures (link mine—think the Times would go around linking to a story in The New Yorker for easy reference?):

According to this vision, children are leading the slow exodus from the theaters. From an essay in the current issue of The New Yorker, for example [“Big Pictures“], one learns that, when it comes to visual entertainment, kids these days are “platform agnostic,” perfectly happy to consume moving pictures wherever they pop up — in the living room, on the laptop, in the car, on the cellphone — without assigning priority among the various forms. David Denby, the author of the article and one of The New Yorker’s film critics, is an unapologetic adherent to the old-time religion, as am I, and his survey of the current technological landscape is colored by nostalgia for the old downtown movie palaces and the studio system that fed them.
 
Of course, as Mr. Denby acknowledges, children have hardly disappeared from the movie audience. On the contrary, adolescents and their younger siblings are the most sought-after segments of the demographically segmented universe of potential viewers. The movies that make the most money, and therefore those on which the most production and advertising money is spent, are the ones that simultaneously reach down into the primary grades and up into the ranks of young adults. Cont’d.

Here’s O’Hara’s poem “Ave Maria” (from Plagiarist.com), should you want to read it, which you do.

I’ve been going to as many of the Woody Allen movies at Film Forum as I can, which isn’t nearly enough; David Rakoff has been seeing all of them, from the looks of his posts at Nextbook (thanks, MUG!). These are tender reviews, thoughtful and personal, as Allen fans’ relationships to the movies tend to be. Here’s a sample, from the entry for Wild Man Blues:

But it is when he is playing that I am overwhelmed by a rush of what can accurately be described as love for Woody Allen. To see the effort and concentration of his playing, the pulsing of his jaw and temples as if there were umbrella staves pushing up from under his skin, or the attentive humility with which he sits and listens to banjo player Eddie Davis play “Rock of Ages.” As he himself says, there is no cerebral element to it, it’s sheer feeling and the reverence he displays is so real and so touching.

Really good stuff, throughout, and well worth reading.