• I want to link to Jeremy Denk’s article about recording Charles Ives’s “Concord” Sonata—a fascinating exploration of a truly original American composer, a remarkable piano work, and the trials of the recording process—but The New Yorker placed the thing behind its pay wall, so I’m settling for the magazine’s audio interview with Denk, which is also interesting, especially since it includes musical clips.
• The weekly lists at The AV Club are always fun, and this week’s is particularly great, with the various writers each offering up a bit of stand-up comedy that strikes them as particularly profound or insightful.
• A more frivolous—but fun!—list can be found at The Awl, where people confess the movies they can’t help stopping to watch whenever they turn up on TV. The funny thing is that the movies aren’t necessarily good, by anyone’s estimation, which is my experience, too. I’m unable to resist The Devil’s Advocate (so insanely over-the-top!) or the Keira Knightley Pride and Prejudice (so hilariously un-Austen!), and I don’t actually have much respect for either of them.
• Anna and Elena Balbusso’s illustrations for a new Folio Society edition of Margaret Atwood’s modern classic The Handmaid’s Tale are a perfect blend of beautiful and unsettling.
• The band OK Go made its name with dazzlingly creative, buzzy music videos, so it’s sweet that the guys have now made one for Sesame Street, teaching kids about primary and secondary colors with all their usual charm.

No one slums with so much style as director Steven Soderbergh. The Ocean’s movies, for example, are far more aesthetically polished than any star-studded trifle really needs to be, but that, of course, is part of what makes them so charming. In fact, I secretly prefer frivolous Soderbergh to serious Soderbergh. His sleek manner can come across as cold when he’s dealing with some substance, but it’s just cool everywhere else.

Haywire, his latest, isn’t comedic like Ocean’s or sexy like Out of Sight (my personal favorite)—and it’s not on their level—but it’s fun all the same and just as impeccably put together as the man’s films always are. Plus, the conceit is great: Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs set out to make a vehicle for mixed martial arts fighter Gina Carano by catering to her strengths (looking tough, kicking the snot out of people) and underplaying her weaknesses (emoting, delivering extensive dialogue, maybe acting in general). Transcendent it’s not, but as tight, hard-boiled B-movies go, it’s terrific.

Carano plays Mallory Kane, a former marine turned private black ops agent. Betrayed during a mission—by her colleagues? her boss?—she has to extricate herself from one dangerous predicament after another, find out who’s responsible for the treachery, and, of course, seek her revenge.

That’s it. After all, it’s just an excuse for expertly rendered fight scenes and an old-fashioned, strong-and-silent-type hero, and Carano is well suited for the endeavor. Dobbs wisely gives her a taciturn, no-nonsense character, emotions tightly in check, and she effectively embodies that with flat delivery and a stony gaze. And, of course, she knows her way around Mallory’s potent use of her body as a weapon. In a funny way, Haywire is like an old Fred Astaire movie, with fight scenes instead of dance numbers. It would have been criminal to obscure Astaire’s grace with choppy cuts or close-ups, and Soderbergh clearly has a similar philosophy when it comes to Carano’s own physical prowess. Haywire shows every movement, even cutting all music and extraneous noise from the soundtrack in those key scenes, the better to highlight its star’s greatest strength.

The whole movie is like that: taut and trim, with Soderbergh’s trademark slippery timeline and a typically deep cast: here including Ewan McGregor as Mallory’s craven boss, Channing Tatum as her none-too-bright colleague, Bill Paxton as her devoted father, Michael Douglas as a cunning government bureaucrat, Antonio Banderas as a shady contact, and—best of all—Michael Fassbender as a British agent with the skills to match Mallory. To some extent, the experienced actors help Carano sketch her character. Paxton fills in a close father-daughter relationship, grounded in deep mutual respect, and subtly suggests that while Mr. Kane doesn’t worry overmuch about his girl’s survival skills, her mental health and happiness may be of some concern. McGregor delivers a hilariously weaselly performance, making Mallory look all the more like a straight shooter by contrast. And Fassbender—well, he shows us not to underestimate Mallory, no matter what she might look like in a slinky black dress and heels.

The best sequence comes about a third of the way through the movie—a premature climax, all things considered—but even after that memorable brawl, Soderbergh keeps the energy up, staging a desperate foot pursuit, an off-kilter car chase, and a creepy calling-from-inside-the-house scenario with perfectly modulated tension. If he weren’t so busy being a serious, acclaimed director who’s always threatening to retire, Soderbergh would have a real future in this kind of pulp.

• I’m really looking forward to seeing Ralph Fiennes’s new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. I can’t imagine that the play will be as brilliant as T.S. Eliot claimed, but Slate‘s article on his assessment of it and Hamlet is fascinating.
• The Public Theater just announced that they’re doing Sondheim’s Into the Woods this summer! I’m so excited. My brother’s going to come visit, and we’re going to camp out in Central Park before dawn to get tickets, and then I’m going to sing “I Know Things Now” and “A Very Nice Prince” and “Moments in the Woods” and “Last Midnight” for weeks! I can’t wait! Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point!
• Star Wars Uncut, a full-length re-creation of the movie assembled from hundreds of amateur filmmakers’ fifteen-second contributions, is wildly inventive and endearing—and surprisingly timely, as Matt Zoller Seitz explains, using the project as a way to examine the problems with current copyright law.
• A few studies and plenty of anecdotal data suggest that animal shelters can improve the likelihood that a dog or cat will be adopted by posting a flattering photo of it rather than a dim, depressing snapshot, so some professional photographers have begun volunteering their services. I’ve seen a few stories about their efforts—here’s a new one—but the pictures are always incredibly touching, especially when an animal is clearly not pet show material but so cute and lively and affectionate-looking nonetheless. (Via Jezebel.)

The complicating issue is that we have a very diverse music collection, so I have to create a System to address all of it. I eventually decided that different genres should have different parameters for what fields should be filled out and how they should be filled out, and then I had to determine what the genres should be, which took lots of list-making and -remaking, and then I had to hammer our exactly what the parameters should be, and so on, and so forth. I was happily explaining all this to Sean (who nodded along, because he knows enough not to challenge the crazy), and he sensibly pointed out that if the System is so complex, I should create a style guide for it, like I do at work.

So that put an exciting new spin on the whole project. Style guides, for the uninitiated, lay out rules for how different stylistic questions should be answered (serial comma, yea or nay?—that sort of thing). A style guide was exactly what I needed to organize my project—and, of course, to kick it into utterly insane, OCD overdrive in which I spend hours agonizing over where conductors should be listed and how to handle featured artists on R&B albums and what constitutes a compilation. My heavily revised style guide is now eight pages long and far from complete.

But the dorkiest thing is that I’m actually enjoying the project a lot, despite the fact that I’ve started to have cataloging dreams. It’s oddly satisfying to make my way through one of our massive binders of CDs—scanning all but the most embarrassingly ’90s among them—and know that all that music is now at my fingertips in a way that it hasn’t been for years. I’m discovering music I’d forgotten, and I’m ridiculously excited about the prospect of reloading my iPod with all my old-but-new, tidily organized files. It might me take weeks, it might even take me months, but as crazy and overkill as it is, this is a project worth finishing.

The clarinet is often described as the instrument closest, in timbre and range, to the human voice. I never gave the idea much thought before this concert, but the juxtaposition put forth by the Metropolitan Opera’s exquisite orchestra turned out to be lovely. Alternating between supporting a clarinet soloist and accompanying soprano Renée Fleming highlighted the voice-like qualities of the wind instrument, the agility and virtuosity of Fleming’s voice, and the fine musicianship of both. The program itself was a bit quirky, starting with Mozart and ending with several hyper-romantic arias from twentieth-century American operas, but it pulled together beautifully behind its talented soloists.

Different clarinetists soloed on the two concertos—Stephen Williamson played the Mozart and Anthony McGill the Copland—and each found the heart of his piece. Sean pointed out that it would have been fun to hear the same person perform both works—they’re so different that excelling at both would demonstrate extraordinary versatility—but that’s more a proposal of an alternate universe than a true quibble. Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto is a favorite of both of ours, and Williamson made it sing with great warmth and smoothly spooling lines. His expressivity on the radiant Adagio was so perfect that I felt tears in my eyes.

Copland’s concerto, composed for Benny Goodman, has a completely different quality, less elegant and more jazzy (not surprising given who it was intended for), and McGill brought that to spirited life. The dreamy opening section probably could stagnate with a lesser soloist (or a less farsighted conductor than Fabio Luisi), but McGill found the coherence in the haze. Later, when the music turned to spiky syncopations, he pulled of the neat trick of making each note sound freshly improvised. The cadenza, in particular, sounded like a charmed explorer setting foot on virgin soil.

As for Fleming’s half of the program, she’s always a fun soloist, not least because she bears herself like a queen, gliding out onto stage in an exuberant jewel-toned gown and glittering diamonds and nodding with extravagant graciousness at the applause. (Seriously, she’s fabulous. I love her.) The gloriously depressive Mahler wasn’t the obvious choice for her—I, at least, associate Fleming with joy and effervescence, not Mahler’s proto-goth darkness (I’m being flip)—but Fleming is more versatile and Mahler far less monotonous that they are often caricatured, and she acquitted the lieder with eloquence.

The real treat, though, was hearing the seldom-performed arias by Samuel Barber and Bernard Herrmann of Psycho fame, plus the encore from André Previn’s Streetcar Named Desire. I know Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra is a notorious bomb, but the aria “Give me some music” is vivid and deliciously agitated, with shimmering (if sometimes overwhelming) orchestration and an electrically hushed conclusion. I was a bit less enamored of the histrionics of “Do not utter a word” from Barber’s Vanessa, but the richly romantic “I have dreamt” from Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights is impossible not to love. And “I can smell the sea air” from Streetcar (for which Fleming created the role of Blanche in the 1990s) ends on one of those whispery soft high notes that Fleming floats with magical effortlessness, like a dandelion wisp caught on the wind. If the audience hadn’t been so eager to shout its bravos, I could have sat for an eternity in the perfect stillness of that al niente note.

• In anticipation of the new season of Justified (which premiered this past Tuesday and looks as terrific as ever), the New York Times profiles star and executive producer Timothy Olyphant. It truly is gratifying to see Olyphant succeed with material he clearly loves after getting stuck in dreck for so long, even after Deadwood made it abundantly clear what he’s capable of. (Via Sean, who knows what I like.)
• Lili Loofbourow discovers a small volume of pro-suffragette satire from 1915 in the vast library of Project Gutenberg and reprints selected verses for our contemporary pleasure.
• Hendrik Hertzberg’s explication of just how badly the new Martin Luther King memorial misquotes the civil rights leader is a beautiful argument for how much context matters and how pithiness can do violence to true eloquence.
• The new preview of Moonrise Kingdom—recognizable as a Wes Anderson movie long before his name appears—prompts Slate to break down what makes the idiosyncratic director so distinctive. Of course, it’s all rather obvious—Anderson is so distinctive that pointing out how seems unnecessary—but the slideshow makes it fun.
• I didn’t watch the Golden Globes and didn’t miss it either, but Tom and Lorenzo’s coverage of the red carpet is always entertaining.

Jazz is never going to be my thing. I have tried (and tried and tried and tried), but I always feel at sea to some extent. Sometimes I get something out of it, and sometimes I simply don’t, but the music never truly speaks to me the way other genres do. I feel bad about that (I feel bad about lots of things), but there it is.

That said, the surest way to pull me out a little bit is to feature a good pianist, and McCoy Tyner happens to be a great one. His résumé—pianist for the John Coltrane Quartet as well as sideman on numerous albums for Blue Note Records and eventual bandleader—is obviously pretty striking (it’s generally a good sign if even I recognize the names), but it wasn’t just Tyner’s credentials that impressed me. He’s an incredible pianist, in a way that transcends genre altogether.

Besides the obvious sense of line (which is sort of a prerequisite), Tyner has a great flair for texture, playing with inner voices and romping bass lines and lushly intriguing harmonic progressions. Other jazz pianists I’ve heard achieve that sort of thing by riffing on Rachmaninoff, for example, but Tyner doesn’t need to borrow. Those characteristics are already his, whether he’s backgrounding behind one of the others in the band or taking the foreground himself. His playing sets the instrument at its best, highlighting its versatility, ranging from raw percussiveness to liquid melodies.

Tyner was generous in giving featured saxophonist Gary Bartz, as well as the bassist and drummer, their moments in the spotlight—and each is quite talented—but I think I enjoyed his solo best, simply because I so appreciated his expressive virtuosity at the piano. Okay, so the music itself still lives me a bit cool. Tyner’s performance was definitely hot enough to compensate.

• Scott Eric Kaufman teaches a course on visual rhetoric and occasionally posts an illustrated essay clearly drawn from one of his lectures. This one on Fight Club is particularly interesting.
• I can’t believe I missed all the drama at the Philharmonic this week when someone’s iPhone rang for more than five minutes during Mahler’s Ninth Symphony and conductor Alan Gilbert finally stopped and waited for the guy to shut the thing off. The New York Times interviewed the perpetrator, whose identity is being withheld, and honestly, I sort of feel sorry for the guy, who sounds like he may have a breakdown over the incident. May we all learn from this! Triple check your phone before concerts!
• I’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite character on Community, but Amanda Marcotte makes a good case for Britta, who truly has become a remarkably well-rounded character, an endearingly awkward mess of contradictions in the best possible way.
• I wish I didn’t find this essay on the sausage-making of blind gossip items quite so fascinating.
• A few months ago, some site or another introduced the Internet to the cuteness of baby sloths, and now baby sloth videos turn up all the time, and they are invariably awesome. Who knew baby sloths were so damn cute? In this video, the baby sloths take baths and squeak! Adorable! Yay, baby sloths!

The most intractable disagreements are those in which each party believes himself to be the true victim, the one most deserving of an apology. A Separation dramatizes that essential truth as well as any film I’ve ever seen, and it does so by playing fair. The four adults at odds in Asghar Farhadi’s moving domestic drama all have legitimate grievances, even as they also have all contributed to the destructive mire in which they find themselves.

It’s a lose-lose mess, but although A Separation is poignant and sad, it’s not depressing. Farhadi’s careful unspooling of his tale keeps the movie from wallowing. In fact, the movie is outright suspenseful, perfectly paced, both tense and thoughtful, and the actors are so talented and quietly expressive that watching them is a joy, even in an unhappy context.

As A Separation opens, Simin (Leila Hatami) is being denied a divorce from her husband, Nader (Peyman Moadi). Simin wants to leave Iran for the sake of their prepubescent daughter, Termeh (Sarina Farhadi), but Nader refuses, not because he is unsympathetic to her feelings but because he cannot bear to leave his father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi), who is in the late stages of Alzheimer’s. Trapped, Simin retreats to her parents’ house—Termeh refuses to leave the family home—and Nader is forced to hire Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a poor young mother, to watch his father while he is at work. Overwhelmed by the job, Razieh leaves the old man at home while she runs a personal errand, precipitating a confrontation between Nader and Razieh that soon involves Simin too, as well as Razieh’s unstable husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini), while Termeh—and Razieh and Hodjat’s own small daughter—look on with increasingly disillusioned eyes.

The conflicts here are myriad, going far beyond the estrangement of husband and wife. The comfortably middle-class Simin and Nader sometimes seem to live in a different world from the struggling Razieh and Hodjat—a chasm widened by the clash between the former couple’s secularism and the latter’s religiosity. Worse, the mercilessly grinding gears of the legal system cannot deal properly with Simin and Nader’s crumbling yet loving marriage or the storm of accusations that fly between them and Razieh and Hodjat, and the sticky question of honor gums up the works even more.

Thematically, A Separation is dense and meticulously composed, so it’s a wonder that Farhadi finds a way to populate it with people rather than chess pieces. The tidy diagrammed contrasts between sexes, classes, and religious beliefs invite us to make assumptions, but then the movie challenges those assumptions—not through melodramatic contradiction (she’s not A, she’s Z!) but rather through compassionate complication (she is A, but she’s also B and C and D). The actors meet the delicacies of Farhadi’s screenplay beautifully, both in the loud, uncomfortable talking-over-one-another scenes and in the hushed, almost wordless scenes when what is left unspoken sounds loudest of all.

The plot plays with assumptions too, generating suspense not only from the question of what will happen next but also from the question of what has already happened. At first, we think we know—we see most of it—but it’s all too easy to fill in the seemingly insignificant gaps with the wrong notions. The slipperiness of truth is powerfully apparent in the ambiguity on screen, and even more disconcertingly, “truth” eventually seems to be beside the point.

But perhaps the most powerful element of A Separation is its universality. Hijabs notwithstanding, the conflicts here are immediately recognizable, not exotic. Nader’s loneliness in caring for a loved one who can no longer recognize him; Simin’s struggle to build a life for herself and her child in a society that too often feels hostile to her values; Razieh’s exhausted efforts to shoulder far too much responsibility for the sake of those she loves; Hodjat’s desperate demands for respect from others when he’s already lost his self-respect—these trials aren’t exclusive to Iran; they are truly universal. Gentle and humane, A Separation begins by challenging our assumptions about its characters and ends by challenging our assumptions about ourselves.

• First, the depressing: The stubborn insistence of singer Chris Brown’s young female fans on defending his abuse of Rihanna is depressing as hell but, as Amanda Marcotte explains, not all that surprising. I wish people were better at taking her conclusion to heart: it is possible to separate art from the artist, so even if you can’t bear to give up the former, you shouldn’t feel compelled to justify the latter.
• This New York Times profile of provocateur Stephen Colbert and his new super PAC is fascinating. I still feel uncomfortable with some of his exploits, but that is, of course, the point.
• The website Small Demons is still in beta, so I can’t explore its maps of common reference points throughout literature for myself, but this article about it in The Guardian has me very intrigued. It looks like a great spot to waste a few hours. (Via The New Yorker‘s Book Bench.)
• Michelle Collins’s rambling, self-conscious rant about some questionable casting decisions for the Les Misérables movie is kind of insane but absolutely hilarious if you, too, spent a few years obsessed with the musical and still know pretty much all the lyrics by heart. (Ahem.)
• This four-year-old dinosaur aficionado cannot be fooled by your scientifically inaccurate toy! She’s my new hero.