More on the best thing that ever was from the L.A. Times, in which Mimi Avins asks the silly question, “Why keep old magazines at all?”

Categories: NYer, Archive, Magazines

is, this minute, WNYC. Brian Lehrer is taking it all the way with freedom of speech, defense of civil rights, intelligent provocation of guests and callers, and personal ethics. The topic in this summer dialogue series: whether homosexuality can be “cured.” Electric.

MediaChannel reminds us of the early moments of the love that dare speak its name:

But Rove developed an increasingly close relationship with the president’s son George—a relationship that began on a spring day in 1973, when the elder Bush asked Rove to pick up his son at Washington’s Union Station to give the visiting Harvard Business School student the keys to the family car. By Rove’s own description, young Karl Rove was awed at first sight.

“He was exuding more charisma than any one individual should be allowed to have,” Rove told a writer for the New Yorker magazine in 2003.

Statements like this prompt curiosity about just how many interesting people Rove could have met at that point, to find Bush so soaked in charm. Would he say the same today? Perhaps he needs to see more movies?

Uproar Has Roots in Rove’s Vast Reach [MediaChannel]

I haven’t been spending much time with They Might Be Giants lately, but I’m always happy to hear songs like this old Dial-a-Song. “It’s the feel-good sublet of the summer/The leaseholder left their cigars in the drawer/This place will hold us for one whole summer/Don’t use the stove, refrigerator, or door.”

My old friend Charlie McAteer fills in a crucial gap in Scott McClellan’s recent remarks:

Q: Are we to believe the President didn’t know all this time that his closest advisor was a source of this leak?

MCCLELLAN: That’s an interesting question. I appreciate it. It’s a question that I will avoid at all cost. I’ll deftly talk around it, take up as much time as I can, and then get off stage, maybe go get a Frappuccino. Perhaps I’ll mention an investigation several times. People respect ongoing investigations. Can’t meddle in them, right? Investigation. Investigation. There, said it twice. Investigation. Bammo! Here’s some other stuff we practiced backstage. Loyalty. Nothing improper. President’s word. Frappuccino. Whoops, that one slipped out. Ongoing grand jury investigation. Ohh, nice finish Scott. Next question.

Press Batters McClellan on Rove/Plame Link [Editor and Publisher]

…would have to be this:

Pat Honda, a customer service manager, said it is not unusual for Mr. Charney to be seen in his underwear in his office because he tries out products before they are introduced. “We’re a manufacturer,” she said. “We make underwear.”

On a related note, please tell me it’s not Charney’s finger in the mouth of the girl in one of the newer ads. Please?

His Way Meets a Highway Called Court [NYT]
Another Freaking American Apparel Item [Gawker]
Dov Charney, Jane Magazine and Google [Jewlicious]

Categories: NYT, Ads

From the BBC website’s page for accounts of and opinions on the London bombing, mostly from Londoners:

Yesterday, we were annoyed with Londoners and English people. London won the [Olympic 2012] games and Paris lost them. And today we wake up. We realise that these little fights between old friends are for spoilt children. We are all facing a huge challenge. We have all to fight terrorism. We are all Londoners today. We all feel sad and share the pain of the one who are suffering today. Do not worry my friends, we will be with you in this fight and we will win it.
Julien, Paris, France
…
Our hearts are with you today London. Please know that those responsible do not represent us in the Arab/Islamic world.
Sufyan, Doha, Qatar

From the début issue of the Criterion Collection’s handsome e-newsletter, Criterion News:

Criterion producer Johanna Schiller recently received a very kind note from François Truffaut’s daughter, Laura Truffaut, on the occasion of the release of our DVD edition of Jules and Jim. “I really couldn’t be more pleased … I kept thinking of how much my father would have enjoyed watching films on DVD. The extras remind me of the newspaper clippings I still find, to this day, tucked in the pages of favorite books of his, which I now own.”

The full text is on the Criterion site. Very moving.

Categories: Movies

The big surge of indignation, and perhaps a few tacit nods, today are from the U.K. and related Elton John allies. Paul Carey in the Western Mail via ICWales:

US critic pans British musical

LONDON’S new hit musical Billy Elliot has been panned by a less-than-impressed New York critic who concludes that the British just can’t do musicals.

Despite rave reviews from almost every other quarter, the New Yorker magazine cuts to the chase, claiming that the show may as well be called Coal Diggers of 1984.

Noting how the adverts are emblazoned with a quote from the Daily Telegraph, “The greatest British musical I have ever seen,” critic John Lahr wonders aloud what on earth constitutes a great British musical.

Salad Days perhaps? The Boy Friend? Cats?

“The British love musicals,” he writes. “They just don’t do them very well.

“The jazz of American optimism … is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit.”

I haven’t witnessed a surfeit of American optimism lately among the artist class, but it certainly is essential to the classic musical comedies I live by, one of the many indications that I was thrown into the population much too late in some kind of celestial mix-up. From the New Zealand Herald:

‘Camp’ Billy Elliot musical hits wrong note in America

By Genevieve Roberts

It has been hailed as the best musical ever, and had British critics raving over the “exhilarating” and “terrific” performances.

But Billy Elliot the Musical has failed to make such a positive impact on the other side of the Atlantic. The New Yorker magazine has launched a scathing attack on the Elton John show, describing it as “mawkish”, “repetitive” and “camp”.

The verdict of John Lahr, the senior theatre critic for New York’s most influential magazine, could damage the musical’s chances of a transfer to Broadway.

In a two-page denunciation of the show, Lahr, who has written 17 books on theatre, dismisses Billy Elliot as being riddled with “narrative vulgarities”, “thematic bankruptcy” and general “sloppiness”.

His verdict clashes not only with critics’ praise for the £5m production based on the British film, but also the iconic status the show has gained among gay theatre-goers, who love the chorus line of coal miners dressed in tutus.

Lahr, on the other hand, says that the cross-dressing number that Billy performs with a young, gay friend is no more than “homophobic fun”.

He writes that Stephen Daldry, the director, Lee Hall, the writer, and Peter Darling, the choreographer, are “novices”, but instead of the expected recipe for disaster, he finds the performance a “recipe for a muddle masquerading as a major event”.

Lahr, the son of the actor Bert Lahr, is bemused by ads for the musical carrying a quote from Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph describing Billy Elliot as: “The greatest British musical I have ever seen.”

He wonders aloud what on earth constitutes a great British musical. “Salad Days? The Boy Friend? Cats?” he asks. “The British love musicals,” he writes. “They just don’t do them very well. The jazz of American optimism … is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit.”

Whereas the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty, England is a land of scarcity – “the Land of No”. The “narrative vulgarities” have been overlooked, he says, in favour of capturing the audience’s imagination.

“This, it seems to me, explains how a show with a mawkish, melodramatic book, and without a single memorable melody or lyric, could have worked its way so deeply into the public imagination.”

Daldry’s “narrative desperation” forces him to borrow from a “tattered grab bag of avant-garde tricks”, Lahr writes, in order to cover up the “lacklustre book and music”.

While he does not take offence to the show being branded a commercial hit, the critic wants his readers to know that it should not be perceived as excellent.

“When the most delightful part of a show is the curtain call – a 10-minute knees-up, with the entire cast, including the miners, now thankfully liberated from their earnestness, dressed in tutus – you know you’re in trouble,” he concludes.

Lahr’s downcast view was not shared by all Americans. Ray Bennett, of The Hollywood Reporter, described it as “the most irresistible show in ages”.

Elton John’s public relations representative, Gary Farrow, shrugged off criticism from The New Yorker.

He said: “Mr Lahr is entitled to his opinion, but he is the only one so we do not care. It is not representative of the reviews we have had which have described it as the greatest musical ever.”

I love Roberts’ equation of Lahr and The New Yorker with the entire American critical apparatus, which would be a nice world to live in. Now this is what I call an old-fashioned drama debate! It makes me feel right at home in the past. Choose your typewriter, Mr. Lahr, and Elton, your cigarette holder. At the count of ten, fire!

On Your Toes: “Billy Elliot” leaps from screen to stage [John Lahr review, New Yorker]

Categories: Lahr, NYer, Plays

Beastly facts! I don’t think Cook need worry—Wilsey may have had an extra-crappy childhood, but he’s a happy man these days (and it probably didn’t take him seventeen years to write Oh the Glory, good as it is). Oh well, she has decent taste. And she’s from the Midwest, so she has at least one get-out-of-jail-free card, as far as I’m concerned. From Lloyd Grove in the Daily News:

Unlike most celebs, “Into the West” star Rachael Leigh Cook doesn’t mind admitting an error.

The 25-year-old Cook recently raved to Us Weekly about Sean Wilsey’s new memoir, “Oh the Glory of It All.”

But after she mistakenly said the book was about “growing up in upper class society [in] New York,” she phoned Lowdown and owned up.

“I’ve totally botched it, and I just feel stupid,” Cook sighed, noting that the book actually describes life in San Francisco and Italy, not New York. “It’s about socialites, and when I think socialites, I think New York. I feel badly for the writer, who puts himself out there, and spent half his life working on it. It’s monstrous!”

She went on: “At press junkets, they always ask what the movie is about, and I’ll start somewhere in the middle and then try to communicate the moral. And then it turns into a complete mess.”

Maybe Cook’s refreshing candor comes from growing up in Minneapolis. And it turns out that she has some interesting summer reading suggestions.

“I like stories about people who are messed up or have messed-up lives,” she said. “People like Augusten Burroughs and David Sedaris. I just started ‘Diary,’ by Chuck Palahniuk. He wrote ‘Fight Club.’ His narrative is really interesting – he’ll really comment on things around a situation as a way of commenting on a person’s character.

“I read a heartbreaking book called ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ [by Audrey Niffenegger]. You wouldn’t think you could blend a love story with a seemingly accurate portrayal of time travel. It makes you want to sit back and appreciate your life.”

Categories: Wilsey, Sedaris