Author: Mary Beth

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Quantum of Solace

In theaters.

In a 2007 Associated Press article that endeared him to me forever, Matt Damon was quoted derisively contrasting the classic James Bond with Jason Bourne, his own franchise character:

[Bond is] an imperialist and a misogynist. He kills people and laughs and sips martinis and wisecracks about it. Bourne is this paranoid guy. He’s on the run. He’s not the government; the government is after him. He’s a serial monogamist who’s in love with his dead girlfriend and can’t stop thinking about her. He’s the opposite of James Bond.

Paul Greengrass, director of the last two Bourne movies, agreed:

[Bond is] an insider. He likes being a secret agent. He worships at the altar of technology. He loves his gadgets. And he embodies this whole set of misogynistic values. He likes violence. That’s part of the appeal of the character. He has no guilt. He’s essentially an imperial adventurer of a particularly English sort. Personally, I spit on those values. I think we’ve moved on a little bit from all that, the martini shaken, not stirred.

I quote Damon and Greengrass at length partly because I love how cutting they are in their assessment of the Bond mythos (“I spit on those values”—wow!) but mainly because I think it’s striking how the Bond reboot, starring Daniel Craig, seems to reflect their critique. I’m not suggesting that the Bond crew is responding specifically to Damon’s and Greengrass’s opinions (the timing is off, for starters). Rather, they seem to have recognized independently just how dated—often offensively so—the character is.

The funny thing is that the new Bond looks a lot like Damon’s Bourne: less quippy and gadget-oriented, at odds with his government, and in love with his dead girlfriend. Personally, I appreciate the change—and I adore Craig’s performance—but is he even Bond anymore? I mean, I shed no tears for the loss of the classic Bond, whom I find tiresome, but for those who did love the old guy, it must be weird to see him so inverted.

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Doctor Atomic

The Metropolitan Opera on Thursday, November 15.

The Manhattan Project—specifically the final days at Los Alamos before the testing of the atomic bomb—makes for an odd subject for opera. The drama is there, but it’s an internal, bookish sort of drama with little in the way of action. In the first act, the characters argue about petitions and bad weather. In the second act, they just wait for the explosion.

Composer John Adams and librettist Peter Sellars, adapting a number of sources, attempt to get at the enormous ethical quandaries that Robert Oppenheimer and his team faced, but the music is poorly served by the tag-team philosophizing. Ultimately, opera is not an intellectual medium but an emotional one. When Adams tries to challenge that, the music often feels empty and scattered and the expressed ideas feel superficial. But when he embraces the emotion—setting aside the historical details and physics jargon and ethical debates in favor of meditating on raw fears about mortality and culpability—Doctor Atomic finally discovers its real power.

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Shiba Inu Puppy Cam

So I, like seemingly every other compulsive Internet user, have become semi-obsessed with the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam. I don’t remember which website first sent me there—countless sites have linked to it—but watching the live feed of six roly-poly puppies playing and wrestling and napping in their cozy little crate is now my favorite means of relieving stress or lifting a bad mood or simply killing a minute or two.

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The Wordy Shipmates

By Sarah Vowell. Published in 2008.

I wasn’t sure how long I’d have to stand in line to vote, so the day before, I picked up a copy of The Wordy Shipmates for the queue. As it turns out, my wait was only about thirty minutes, but Sarah Vowell’s short history of the Puritans who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony was still a worthwhile purchase—not to mention oddly appropriate for a post-election cool-down.

Vowell is the best kind of history buff, pulling off the difficult balancing act of placing people within their historical context while holding on to her own values and judgment. In other words, she is fair but not a moral relativist. She neither whitewashes the past nor condemns everyone who wouldn’t fit in at a contemporary urban liberal cocktail party, and she has a real appreciation for the quirks and foibles that transform people from generic historical figures into distinct individuals. Now that I think about it, Vowell is a talented popular historian for the same reason she’s a talented storyteller: she recognizes and celebrates the complexity of human beings.

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The Middle Ages

Presented by Theater Breaking Through Barriers, now playing at the Kirk Theatre, Theatre Row, off-off-Broadway.

Dramas in which we plunge into ongoing action intermittently are always rather interesting—not always effective (does life really work like that, vast periods of unimportance punctuated by a few sudden turning points?) but definitely interesting.* I enjoy piecing together context and elapsed time with each new scene, and the plotting is generally rather tight: after all, we only drop into a particular moment because something significant is happening.

Such structure also allows the story to cover a long period of time without needing to become epic. For example, in The Middle Ages, a play by A. R. Gurney, we spend time in just a single room, with only four characters, but span more than thirty years. I’m not quite convinced that the setting—the trophy room of a big-city men’s club—is truly so meaningful to the characters as to justify its being the site of so many critical moments in their lives, but I can set that aside. It’s an interesting conceit.

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Ashes of Time Redux

In theaters.

The best way to describe Wong Kar-wai’s moody, impressionistic wuxia epic is as a tone poem—a metaphor I particularly like. Tone poem isn’t just a pretty term; it refers specifically to a type of composition that emerged during the Romantic period. Before then, most orchestral works were symphonies, and symphonies followed rules, a specific architecture that outlined musical structure before a composer wrote a single note. The tone poem was a rejection of that architecture, an attempt to use the orchestra to convey something different: a story, a painting, a tableau, a feeling. Without the architecture, a tone poem can feel amorphous, but it can be beautifully evocative, too. Freed from symphonic strictures, the tone poem can find textures and flavors and colors so vibrant that the missing walls and roof hardly matter.

In Ashes of Time Redux, a reworking of his 1994 film Ashes of Time, Wong, like Liszt and Dvorák and Debussy before him, rejects the architecture of his medium. Ashes lacks a firm narrative and solidly defined characters. Even the swordplay that inevitably crops up in wuxia is vague and painterly here, conveying atmosphere without articulating details. It’s bewildering, even frustrating, until you stop trying to make sense of it, stop trying to find an A-leads-to-B-leads-to-C plot, and appreciate the haunting, mercurial, doleful enigma for what is.

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Conrad Tao, piano

At Paul Recital Hall at Juilliard on Saturday, October 18.

Conrad Tao is fourteen years old—a true prodigy, I suppose, though I hate that word—and I went to his solo recital at Juilliard with a friend from my old college piano studio. Sitting next to her, someone who’s heard me mangle basic Chopin nocturnes and Mozart sonatas, while some kid flew through a few pillars of piano literature was bizarre and kind of funny. Clearly I made the right decision in choosing not to pursue a career as a professional musician.

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San Francisco Ballet at 75: The American Tour

At New York City Center on Sunday, October 12.

I went to see the San Francisco Ballet because I wanted to diverge from the Balanchine-heavy repertory of the New York City Ballet, but perhaps inevitably, my favorite element of San Francisco’s program was Balanchine’s classic “The Four Temperaments.” What’s more, San Francisco felt somehow softer and less crisp than New York. I enjoyed the program—the dancing was lovely—but I think the New York City Ballet has brainwashed me more than I realized.