Martin Schneider writes:
This week in events, we have a conversation, a lecture, and a play.
The Conversation. The Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea, dedicated to the art of the Himalayas, hosted a weekly series called “Talks about Nothing”; it started last October. By a stroke of luck, I happened to catch the very last one (there were 26 events in all) this past Saturday evening. The series has attracted luminaries of all sorts to the sedate stage of the Rubin, and the one I happened to see featured Raj Patel, a young economist of renown, and Peter Sellars, a less young stage and opera director of renown. Patel has recently written a book called The Value of Nothing, which made him a perfect guest for this series.
Patel is young, sharp, and gentle, and speaks with a cultivated English accent. The theory presented in his book seems to be a jab against materialism and a celebration of the ineffable skills of nurturing, community organizing, household maintenance, and so forth, which Western economics generally valuates as “nothing.” The chat proceeded along such hyper-idealistic lines. In some ways it was a talk ideally suited to the Rubin, whose Buddhist calm (and evident money, somewhere) seems to attract well-meaning, educated, and affluent New Yorkers even more than 92Y does.
I think my favorite bit was when Patel said, “Taxation is a better way of redistributing wealth than letting some wealthy men on boats decide what they want to spend money on.” Amen to that. (The line drew applause.) I wish the talk had been a little more structured than it was—Sellars in particular is prone to meandering run-on sentences that do hit a lot of good points but are still, well, very long. However, it would be churlish to suggest that the discussion was not stimulating and intelligent. It was, and I wish I’d seen more of these “Talks about Nothing.” This was the first event at the Rubin I’ve ever seen, and I will be on the lookout for more.
The Lecture. On Tuesday night I had the pleasure of seeing V.S. Ramachandran at 92Y. It’s funny, I see a lot of illustrious people stand on stages and speak, but it’s rare that I see someone deliver an actual lecture. The one that Ramachandran delivered was top-notch. Ramachandran has become renowned for a kind of investigative neurology—the most mentioned example is his work on phantom limbs—wherein he exploits a given patient’s lesion-induced lack of a specific ability—for example, a patient’s inability to recognize his own mother—to wheedle out truths about the human brain and the evolution that created it.
Ramachandran spoke in the unfussy patter of the scientist, intermittently sprinkled with witty and caustic asides on his unimaginative colleagues (or critics). In addition to a brief bit on the already well publicized phantom limbs story, Ramachandran spoke vividly about the potentially immense importance of “mirror neurons,” recently discovered to exist in the brain. Mirror neurons allow humans (and other primates) to analogize from the actions of other creatures, and this wondrous mental gift may have allowed humans to adapt at a rate faster than the glacial speed of Darwinian evolution. He also spoke evocatively about the importance of synesthesia in allowing us to understand the importance of metaphor to human thought. Stirring, ambitious stuff!
All in all, I had the impression, watching Ramachandran, that I was watching an unusually exceptional person. I’m grateful for 92Y for presenting him to the audiences of New York (although, as he has a new book to sell, he won’t be hard to find).
The Play. On Thursday I went to Playwright Horizons on 42nd Street to see A Small Fire, by Adam Bock. The run of the play is now over, alas—it was an intuitive gem. A specific thing happens to one of the characters over the course of the play, which I won’t reveal, but A Small Fire is about the way family and friends adjust to new frailty in one among them. Not everyone reacts well, but some do.
Bock makes some unusual decisions, but for me they all paid off handsomely. One example was a speech towards the end that was threatening to become mawkish—at that precise moment the character, distracted by the all-important arrival of his racing pigeon, starts shouting and pointing and thus the scene ends. Canny self-awareness there on the part of Bock. Furthermore, the nuances and speech patterns of people who know each other very well are excellently captured, and the emotional payoff at play’s end—nearly wordless—is superficially shocking but entirely apt and earned. Bravo.
That’s all for this week. Be sure and see some events of your own! You know I’ll do my part.

Martin Schneider writes:
Look to this space every Wednesday for my thoughts on politics and/or events. Early 2011 is a relatively unengaging time for a diehard Democrat, what with the White House occupied by one of our own and recent Republican victories, but that will change in the near future. So I’ll be writing more about events for the time being, I suspect.
By events I mainly mean plays, author events, rock concerts, and standup comedy gigs.
January has been busy. I saw an absolutely spectacular production of Craig Wright’s play Mistakes Were Made at the Barrow Street Theater. The flabbergastingly good Michael Shannon, familiar from Revolutionary Road and Boardwalk Empire and a longtime favorite of mine, gives one of the greatest stage performances I’ve ever seen. He plays a theater producer trying to pull together a big Broadway production about the French Revolution entirely on the phone, as he berates, flatters, etc. a couple of big-name actors, the playwright, an agent or two, and a few others into getting what he wants. He laughs, he cries, he breaks down. It’s not the freshest premise for a play, but the writing is rich and pungent, as is Shannon’s utterly impressive performance (nearly solo, and mostly into a phone). It’s playing for one more month, so I urge you to see it if you can. (The night I was there, Ethan Coen was seated in front of me. He seemed to enjoy it.)
I’m also a huge Daniel Kitson fan, and I was very happy to see him twice last week, once at the UCB Theater’s outstanding standup showcase Whiplash (every Monday night at 11pm, free), and once in his one-man show The Interminable Suicide Of Gregory Church at St. Ann’s Warehouse. I see a great deal of standup comedy, but Kitson remains entirely sui generis. He’s a scruffy chap from Yorkshire with perhaps the widest onstage vocabulary I’ve ever witnessed, he has an occasional stutter, and it all adds up to a tremendously charming package. Gregory Church is a delightful flight of fancy in which Kitson (or “Kitson”) stumbles upon 30,000 letters by a man he doesn’t know, and pieces together what he can about the man’s life. As terrific as that was (it’s closing very soon), I prefer Kitson in the tiny black box of the UCBT, in which he is likelier to extemporize, letting his dazzling wit flow even more. (John Leguizamo was in attendance that night, but he didn’t sit near me. Don’t know what he thought of it.)
I received a modest amount of renown in December for my writeups of a certain event at 92nd Street Y, and I’ll be back again for two events very soon. More on that as they happen.

Martin Schneider writes:
The Colbert Report, always eager to seize on a smaller story it can imprint itself on, last night dedicated the entire episode to Steve Martin and the art world.
Colbert delivered a report on the 92Y affair that was close to the original reporting of events, which is to say a bit hard on the audience purportedly demanding to hear Martin discuss his movies, a characterization I have already debunked. Colbert also included footage of a Fox News report I had not seen before, in which the 92Y audience is described as “irate” (again, certainly not true).
Colbert’s account, while inaccurate and unfair, was certainly very funny and about what one would expect the show to do—that’s where all the jokes are, and Steve Martin is there in person as a guest.
Martin appeared in the guise of an expert on art, art collector, and author of a book about the art world. He refused to entertain offers to purchase a vainglorious multi-portrait of Colbert. Also appearing were artists Frank Stella, Shepard Fairey, Andres Serrano.
One lesson of the 92Y affair is that Steve Martin has a lot more power than all the other players involved. Since the event, Steve Martin has had an op-ed published in the New York Times and appeared on Later on Sunday Morning and The Colbert Report. Nobody else involved with the story has the clout to do that.
Now that Steve Martin’s version of events has assumed center stage since Saturday or so, we have seen an equal diminution of the role of Deborah Solomon in the 92Y affair. Solomon’s name was not mentioned on The Colbert Report, and I think it was not mentioned in the Later on Sunday Morning appearance.
It’s wise to remember that Steve Martin has been pushing this story vigorously and that his motives for doing so are obvious: he would like to make himself appear modest and affable, and he has a new novel to sell. Meanwhile the unjust portrayal of an intolerant 92Y and 92Y audience continues to be pushed by the media outlets willing to propagate Steve Martin’s account. Such is the power of stardom.

Martin Schneider writes:
I’ve gotten a couple of requests to provide sources for the ongoing Steve Martin/92Y saga, which will be stale in a week—but useful today!
The New York Times story that started the ball rolling (Felicia R. Lee)
Steve Martin’s first Twitter post on 92Y
Overwrought NPR blog post (Linda Holmes)
Useful and informative MetaFilter thread
Steve Martin Op-Ed, New York Times
Steve Martin appearance on Later on Sunday Morning, CBS
Other coverage:
The Comic’s Comic
Awl I
Awl II
Gothamist
BoingBoing
Slate
Hollywood Reporter
New York Observer
Huffington Post
Gawker
And, of course, our posts (by me):
Steve Martin and Deborah Solomon Bring Down the House, Sort Of
More on Martin and Solomon and 92Y (this is the long, “comprehensive” one)

Martin Schneider writes:
Saturday’s edition of the New York Times included an op-ed piece by Steve Martin (“The Art of Interruption”) in which he addressed his attention-getting appearance at 92Y last Monday. (See my earlier posts on this event here and here.)
Additionally, the CBS morning program Sunday Morning featured an interview conducted by Rita Braver in which Steve Martin discussed the event.
For what it’s worth, Martin’s thoughts on this seem pretty reasonable to me. More to come in a future post.

Martin Schneider writes:
Two days ago I posted an account of the inadequate 92Y event of November 29 featuring Steve Martin and Deborah Solomon. Since then, the event has astonishingly spun off into a counter-narrative in which Martin and Solomon are the good guys and 92Y and the 92Y audience the villains.
The premise of this counter-narrative is that Solomon and Martin were off having a high-minded discussion about art, but the 92Y audience, and the 92Y itself, would not be appeased until Solomon prodded Martin into spinning some anecdotes about the filming of The Jerk or It’s Complicated.
This counter-narrative is absurd, incorrect, and pernicious. I was there, and in the words to follow, I intend to set the record straight.
Three things happened to bring about this counter-narrative. First, the New York Times ran an article covering the fiasco, an article that quoted Solomon liberally and tended to put 92Y in a bad light.
Second, Martin posted a tweet that was critical of 92Y. The content of that tweet is as follows: “So the 92nd St. Y has determined that the course of its interviews should be dictated in real time by its audience’s emails. Artists beware.”
Third, a blogger who works for NPR named Linda Holmes decided to dedicate 1,100 words to an extremely ill-considered rant taking 92Y and its audience to task for their philistinism. In the post Holmes states that she did not see the interview.
Folks, this is unjust. A more accurate picture of events, as I reported earlier, would be that Deborah Solomon made a fool of herself in front of several hundred people, Steve Martin and 92Y handled themselves with aplomb, and 92Y generously offered to refund any dissatisfied ticketholders ($50).
There is a passage in the Times article that goes like this:

“Frankly, you would think that an audience in New York, at the 92nd Street Y, would be interested in hearing about art and artists,” Ms. Solomon added in an e-mail. “I had no idea that the Y programmers wanted me to talk to Steve instead on what it’s like to host the Oscars or appear in ‘It’s Complicated’ with Alec Baldwin. I think the Y, which is supposedly a champion of the arts, has behaved very crassly and is reinforcing the most philistine aspects of a culture that values celebrity and award shows over art.”

What’s happening there is that Solomon, seeking to put herself in the best light, interpreted something that actually happened—a request from 92Y to change the terms of a transparently unfruitful line of questioning—not as a reaction to her own ineptitude but rather as a demand to adhere to 92Y’s rigid conception of how the event should go.
Let me provide here a detailed account of the pivotal first section of the interview, and then offer some additional observations. (I usually take notes at events like this, but on this particular day I happened not to have a notepad with me. Still, I remember the events pretty well. I am not aware of any video of the event, but I am confident that any video would largely confirm my account.)
A woman took to the podium and introduced Martin and Solomon; at some point, referring to Martin’s impressive variety of accomplishments, she called him a “Renaissance man.” Solomon and Martin came out, and Solomon immediately expressed her opinion that, as he lacks any accomplishments in the sciences, designating Martin a “Renaissance man” was perhaps a bit much. Martin agreed and said something to the effect that Leonardo da Vinci set the standard of a Renaissance man to a degree that has hardly been met since. Fair enough, all this is sensible and interesting.
Solomon began discussing Martin’s novel An Object of Beauty, which is about the NYC art world of the 1990s or so. Solomon made an observation that they didn’t really have art dealers when Rembrandt and Michelangelo were active; she said something quite specific about Rembrandt acting as his own art dealer, which fact I am prepared to believe. Martin spoke at some length about the lack of the “art dealer” role in Rembrandt’s time (I’m not so sure about this claim) but then immediately undercut that claim by stating “I know nothing about this” or some such. This was a laugh line, delivered in the assured tones of an expert who does know what he’s talking about; Letterman uses this sort of tone during every telecast. So, you know, funny, but not really informative in any real sense.
For the next twenty or so minutes, Solomon doggedly quizzed Martin about details in the novel, a novel that was first made available to consumers about a week earlier. At one point Martin murmured that the number of people watching who had read the book was likely to be “zero,” his gentle way of suggesting that perhaps a close reading of the book would not result in highly riveting conversation. But that didn’t stop Solomon.
Solomon and Martin briefly discussed the protagonist, a woman named Lacey Yeager. The two spoke at some length about two pairs of married characters in the book, art dealers all. One couple is called the Nathansons, and the other couple are named Boggs. Solomon mentioned that in his satire he had poked a lot of fun at the Nathansons. Martin disagreed, saying that while they were at the center of a funny scene or two, he was rather kind to them; the portrayal was more true-to-life. Solomon seemed to accept this and switched gears, saying that he was much more savagely satirical towards the Boggses.
At this point Solomon said a rather shocking thing, something like “It’s a good thing you were nice to the Nathansons and were harder on the Boggs couple.” The implication was clear: Martin had not made fun of the Jews but rather had made fun of gentiles. I’m still trying to suss out the logic of this offensive “warning.” Would the pro-Israel lobby come down harder on Martin if he dared to make Jews the object of his satire? I’m not sure why exactly Martin should feel that he had dodged a bullet here, but that was not Solomon’s opinion.
After that there was some discussion of tax law in the District of Columbia and New York City as pertains to the delivery of artworks, facts that are relevant to a particular scene in which the Nathansons are made fun of.
At two points Solomon decided to read aloud a passage from the book, over Martin’s mild objections. She didn’t even really get anywhere in the second passage, trailing off after a line or two. Solomon’s next idea was to relate the substance of a funny scene in the book (all of which takes place well after page 200 of a novel that does not reach page 300) involving the 1970 artwork Felt Suit by Joseph Beuys.
It is essential to note at this point that the audience had not yet made a peep about anything. There were no groans, no boos, no hisses, no expressions of displeasure whatsoever. And yet the interview was palpably not going well.
A woman strode onto the stage and handed Solomon a card. Solomon read it aloud. The message was, “Ask him about his interesting career,” or words to that effect. The audience erupted into lusty applause. This was the first true expression of audience displeasure that I noticed.
After that there was a modicum of chitchat about Martin’s various movie projects and Oscar hosting duties. Then the same woman presented Solomon with some audience questions on cards. (The “audience” here included those present in the auditorium as well as those watching live via simulcast in a large number of “synagogues.”) Solomon sort of bluffed her way through those questions, and then the event was at an end.
Okay. Narrative over. Herewith, some thoughts.
1. Solomon’s claim is that she wanted to discuss art. I do not think that “discussing art” is a fair representation of the conversation she and Martin had. What she really did was discuss Martin’s novel. Pretty big difference there.
2. Steve Martin was visibly uncomfortable during many parts of Solomon’s interview. There’s no disputing that he found Solomon’s line of questioning highly curious, and the best word for his reaction to most of Solomon’s queries would be “bumfuzzled.”
3. Nevertheless, Martin handled it well. He’s a professional entertainer, and he knows instinctively when the audience isn’t enjoying a performance. He made several comments/jokes making light of the fact that the audience had become hostile to Solomon. Some of these jokes were quite funny and appropriate.
4. 92Y’s decision to interrupt Solomon, unusual but not inappropriate, was clearly a reaction to Solomon’s clueless interviewing style and clearly not a reaction to Solomon’s insistence on discussing art.
5. The claim makes little sense on its face. 92Y hosts all sorts of events about all sorts of things, religion, politics, literature, science. The idea that either 92Y or its audience was made impatient by discussion about art is patently absurd. Nothing of the sort happened.
6. The New York Times allotted space in its newspaper to allow Solomon to express her self-serving opinion that Solomon had somehow been hoodwinked and that 92Y is somehow hostile to discussions about art or the life of the mind. It is wise to remember that Solomon is an employee of the New York Times.
7. Steve Martin and Deborah Solomon are friendly, as evidenced by a couple of comments made during the session. Martin’s tweet was most likely made in the name of friendship to Solomon, which is somewhat understandable. In the long term, his loyalties are to his friend Solomon and not the faceless organization known as 92Y. However, notwithstanding that, Martin’s a bit of a jerk (yes, pun intended) for posting such a harsh tweet about 92Y, which didn’t really do anything wrong.
8. It’s unwise for a blogger to spend more than 1,000 words berating an organization like 92Y for events he or she did not witness and has only scant misinformation about. Holmes owes 92Y an apology and a retraction of some sort.
9. 92Y did, after all, refund the money. That decision may reflect an impatience on the part of the audience members (it would never have occurred to me to complain, but then my ticket was free). Faced with somewhat justified annoyance on the part of ticketholders, they offered to supply vouchers with alacrity. For this move they are being criticized for being intolerant and rigid.
And that’s the end of my report. Solomon was incompetent on the stage of 92Y and mendacious in the press afterward. I’m not fond of Martin, and while I thought he handled the event itself quite well, the nasty tweet about 92Y confirms my distaste for him. And meanwhile any 92Y catalog you could care to peruse confirms 92Y’s commitment to a certain kind of expansive and (yes) upper-middlebrow discourse about politics, the arts, the sciences, and the life of the mind.
A counter-narrative has arisen that is in complete conflict with this picture of events, a narrative that serves Solomon and Martin’s agenda. It would be a disgrace to let that counter-narrative become the final word on this fiasco. Do not believe it.

Martin Schneider writes:
On Monday, November 15, one of the season’s most anticipated literary events will take place at 92nd Street Y. Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections and Freedom, and Lorrie Moore, author of A Gate at the Stairs and several other widely adored novels and story collections, appear together for a reading of their most recent works.
The event is at 8pm. Not surprisingly, spacious Kaufmann Concert Hall is already sold out. However, fans of Franzen and Moore can watch the proceedings live on the Internet by clicking on the above link.
I am fortunate to have a ticket—expect a report from me after the event.