A cultural diary of my life in New York
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center on Thursday, September 21.
Wu Han, one of the Chamber Music Society’s artistic directors, described the program’s opening night concert as a “tasting menu,” a tantalizing preview of some of what the 2006-07 season has to offer. The metaphor is apt. Few of the selections were particularly filling in themselves, but the variety of musical offerings—from the Baroque to the twentieth century—was positively scrumptious.
In theaters.
The creators of Hollywoodland have styled the movie as neonoir—complete with a mysterious death, a bottom-feeding private detective, and several untrustworthy women—but those trappings aren’t really the point of the film. Despite feints in that direction, it’s not a murder mystery. It’s the sad tale of two lonely people whose lives don’t match their dreams. It’s about soul-crushing disappointment and the relentless indignities of aging. It’s about mortality.
That’s a lot to pack into the small, pitiable history of George Reeves, an actor who aspired to the realm of Hollywood stars but who foundered playing Superman in the trenches of kiddie television, but the film works surprisingly well. The screenplay is perceptive, the period detail is immersive without being ostentatious, and the strong cast boasts two remarkable performances: Ben Affleck is startlingly good as Reeves—this is the best work he’s ever done—and Diane Lane beautifully captures the complexities and contradictions of the unhappy Toni Mannix, Reeves’ older, wealthier, married lover.
Seasons one and two on DVD. Season three debuts Thursday, September 21, at 8:30 on NBC.
I should acknowledge up front that, though I have great respect for Ricky Gervais’ The Office, on which the American version is based, I have never been able to sit through an entire episode. The painfully awkward humor and the merciless probing of embarrassment, folly, and ennui makes me so uncomfortable that eventually, inevitably, I give up and flee from the television. I appreciate the show’s insights and perfectly drawn characters, but I’ve always been too susceptible to vicarious humiliation, and the British Office is more than I can bear.
The American Office, on the other hand, is comparatively gentle. I might view some scenes through my fingers—(Yes, really. I’ll watch grotesque violence with no more than a wince, but show me a shame-faced person surrounded by a laughing crowd, and I run for cover. I have issues.)—but the American show is more generous about relieving the tension, perhaps more forgiving toward the characters, no matter how foolish or weak they might be. Some might argue that its relatively gentle nature indicates that it is more conventional and timid than the groundbreaking British version, but I think that would be unfair. Rather, it indicates that the American version has found its own path and its own sensibility—not better or worse but different.
I thought about attending one of the many services held in New York to mark the fifth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Special exhibition at the Neue Galerie, extended through October 9.
No matter how many times I experience it, the dramatic difference between viewing a familiar painting in a book or on a computer screen and viewing it in person still startles me. Fixed images give you the illusion of having experienced a painting, but they don’t really show you how large or small the painting is or how the brushwork looks in three dimensions or how vibrant the colors are or how the painting changes when viewed from different angles. Being in the presence of a painting touches you in a way that simply seeing it cannot. I have to relearn that lesson every time I visit a museum, and this time I relearned it at the Neue Galerie.
I’d seen Gustav Klimt’s first portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer countless times alongside the numerous articles about its acquisition by the Neue Galerie, but the painting surprised me nonetheless. Photographs don’t do it justice. In person, the luster of the gold and silver and the bold accents of red and blue and green make it look almost mystical, like a religious icon.
“I Write Sins Not Tragedies,” Panic! At the Disco; “Fidelity,” Regina Spektor; and “Not That Kinda Girl,” JoJo.
Sean and I watched the MTV Video Music Awards on TiVo so that we could fast-forward through the commercials, boring acceptance speeches, painfully awkward patter, and performances by artists we don’t like or don’t care about. (We’re in our mid-20s—too old for MTV, really—so there was a lot of fast-forwarding. We are ancient.) In typical MTV fashion, they don’t actually show more than five-second clips of any of the nominees, and it’s the same dozen or so over and over again anyway, but it still put me in the mood to write about one of my favorite guilty pleasures: overproduced music videos. Whee!
In theaters.
From the moment I first read about Outkast’s idea for a movie musical, I loved it. Despite its R&B roots, hip-hop is a contemporary, urban genre, so the notion of a hip-hop musical set in Prohibition-era, small-town Georgia was wholly unexpected and thus wholly intriguing. And if anyone could pull it off, it would be the talented, innovative duo of André “Andre 3000” Benjamin and Antwan “Big Boi” Patton, supported by their frequent music video director, Bryan Barber.
Outkast didn’t disappoint me. Intellectually, I know that Idlewild won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s an outrageous patchwork of genres, both musical and cinematic, and it revels in smashing imaginative flights of fancy against well-worn movie tropes. Did I overlook the movie’s jumbled nature? Not at all. Idlewild teems with energy and life and creative juices; I loved it not despite the bricolage but, in part, because of it.
By Sigrid Nunez. Published in 2005.
The idealistic radicalism of the 1960s and ’70s has always bewildered me. I remember watching The Weather Underground, a documentary about the Weathermen, a violent organization of that era that sought to provoke revolution against the United States government, and feeling overwhelmed by the surge of conflicting emotions it inspired. As much as I abhor the violence of 1960s extremists and sneer at their misguided strategies and pity their naïveté and disdain many of their goals (I don’t support revolution, so back off, Gonzalez), I envy their conviction that real change is possible and that they had the power to effect it. I can’t comprehend that kind of idealism because I myself have never known it.
But I’m not the only one who was born disillusioned; one could say the same of many if not most of my generation. That’s certainly the implication of the title of Sigrid Nunez’s book, The Last of Her Kind, about a young woman who comes of age during the ’60s and ’70s. The novel’s protagonist and narrator is not, however, the heirless paragon, Ann Drayton, but her erstwhile friend, Georgette George. We see Ann through Georgette’s eyes, and we, too, chafe at Ann’s self-righteousness yet respond nonetheless to her principled certainty and charisma. She might be sanctimonious, but she holds herself to the same standards she does everyone else, and that relentlessness makes her far more intriguing than your average holier-than-thou hippie.
In theaters.
Against my better judgment, I’m rather fond of Will Ferrell and his absurdist humor. His unwinking deadpan delights me, and I can’t help but appreciate how unreservedly he throws himself into his roles — no shame, no apparent self-consciousness, total commitment to whatever silliness or stupidity he’s perpetrating on his amiable audience. And much of it is silliness and stupidity, of course. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is no exception.
By Jhumpa Lahiri. Published in 2004.
Names have fascinated me for more than a decade. When I was a teenager, I started collecting baby name books, a hobby I kept secret because people could easily get the wrong idea about a fifteen-year-old girl with a small stash of books for expectant mothers. How could I explain that my obsession wasn’t with babies but with what people name them and why and what that means?
I love studying names because thinking about names means thinking about cultural background, class, race, gender, and family history. Thinking about names means thinking about individual identity, collective identity, and the negotiation between the two. That’s precisely why Jhumpa Lahiri can use the name Gogol Ganguli, the name of the principal character in her novel, The Namesake, as a vehicle to address all of those issues. She doesn’t need to stretch; the issues are inherent in the name itself.
Much Review About Nothing 
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