papeetepatrick

I love this! I don't want to see any ballets about Iraq or Bush or Katrina, nor any modern probably either although Martha Graham could have done more 'tragedy of war' things with various events, but I don't want to be told about them by anyone older OR younger (if also dumber) than I am. Anyway, nice work there, Sandik.

Speaking of film directors, I'd like to know if filmmakers like Derek Jarman and Terence Davies are perceived as 'victim artists.' I only saw 'The Last of England' some years back of the former, but recently watched Davies's 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' and 'The Neon Bible.' This is a more sorrowful kind of thing than I usually care for, but I thought Davies was convincing in his sincerity. 'Distant Voices...' is the better of the two because he knows Liverpool far better than the Deep South, but in both I was struck by his use of music. It can work very effectively even when outrageously broad and somewhat corny, as using the whole 'Gone With the Wind' overture (including the opening bells) for sheets hanging on an impoverished family's washline, or that marvelous choir he uses in 'Distant Voices...' in this long Christmas montage of Liverpool housefronts. That's conducted by Simon Preston and is Britten's 'Hymn to the Virgin' followed by 'In the Bleak Midwinter' and is almost indescribably exquisite. (sorry--half Off-topic.)

I mentioned above that I was going to be reading Lawrence Wright's 'The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11'. I have just finished it and it is certainly (for me) as important a book as I have ever read. Not until this 5th year anniversary did I finally really get in touch with the grief I went through from seeing the Towers fall from West 13th Street out my south window and subsequently finding that a friend of mine had died in the Pentagon crash. There was a trauma from the very first, but that does a lot of paralyzing. This meant partially that I never was even able to master some of the most basic facts about the catastrophe, so this book was extraordinarily valuable. It's an incredible history, threaded with the fate of John O'Neill, the FBI counterterrorist man who lead the investigation on the USS Cole, who might have been able to get the CIA to stop withholding information which could perhaps have prevented 9/11 if he'd not been thwarted, and who died in the collapse of the South Tower, where he'd started a new job a few days earlier. I may say more later, but here are 2 recent reviews of the book, currently a hardcover NYTimes bestseller. I haven't gotten to the NYRB one yet. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/01/books/01...50f1248&ei=5070 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19433

I don't think she really did write about the work, but rather just about Jones, his other works, and what this work would probably be. It is this that makes, as dirac says, a 'pseudo-event'. She had it all together to write a really great piece and make it a real authentic event. And yet this result seems more the reactive, manipulated material--much more along the lines of what Jones would have really wanted. I cannot for the life of me see why the case wouldn't have been stronger and really airtight if she had just seen the thing. It is extremely unlikely that it would have changed her view. It is impossible to say she wrote about 'Still/Here' in the authoritative way that she did write on the matter of 'victim art' and yes, I'll agree, kfw, 'Jones's strategy.' Her own strategy should not have seemed so much like his. Then it wouldn't be 'probably' but 'definitely', and there wouldn't have been that atmosphere of being merely irritated. All right, whitelight, yeah, I hope you can find somebody who saw it (I'd certainly like to hear about that too. I'm fairly certain Ms. Jowitt did see it, but Ms. Croce's article became the focus at the time and there Jowitt was reviewing it but reacting to the article and debate at least as much as to the dance piece), but this was a part of your first post and we've needed to at least work on this too, since you brought it up, even if it's already been discussed.

Obviously she was familiar with his work, but she needed to be familiar with that work. She was even making a point that I essentially agree with, but I can only guess she thought not seeing it and writing about it (or around it, whatever it is that she considers the piece to be doing) was a legitimate response to the way the piece excluded, dare I say 'victimized,' her. That comes across as not journalistic enough, too emotional--not unlike something of what I think she didn't care for in his work. I think she abandoned that 'coolness' herself in refusing to see a work that she nevertheless enshrined by not seeing.

Thanks for that excerpt, Bart. I have not read it again since the time. I believe there was an article about Jones in the New Yorker around the same time, but not by Croce, that included the story about the child and father, etc. Croce writes that a critic has the choice: '(1) to see and review; (2) to see and not review; (3) not to see. A fourth option -- to write about what one has not seen -- becomes possible on strange occasions like Still/Here'. That she does want to include the fifth option, which would be (5) to see and write about but not in the usual 'reviewer's way', is where I think there is the flaw. She could have still written about how the piece was more like performance art than theater or what-have-you and how she felt excluded from it--'and here are the reasons why' etc. Having found out all these things about the piece beforehand, it is as if she then decided to leave out the most important piece of evidence. She is making a case and has to have all the evidence, not just the parts she prefers. If it still 'cuts off her approach', then she therefore proves it much more convincingly by seeing what she's been cut off from. If she knew all about 'the dying people' and how he was 'undiscussable', she only proves that she has seen other works and has learned something about what 'Still/Here' is going to be. And he obviously is not 'undiscussable' in all senses, because her whole article is a discussion about Jones which fails, in my estimation, because she was simply not being thorough in not seeing the work which she then uses for a kind of performative writing herself. No, I will never be convinced she had only the 4 alternatives. Her article convinces me that I wouldn't care to see the piece, but I could have read any of the other reviews or reports and found that out.

I saw Jones's 'Open Places' at the old Art on the Beach series in 1984. This was on one of the piers that have been replaced by Battery Park City and Hudson Park by now. I believe this was well before he was HIV + or had been diagnosed as such. It was a startlingly glorious performance, one of the most superb I've ever seen, and danced across a huge expanse outdoors, with wooden sets set at odd angles and then some were danced in or around and then left behind. This was the only case I've seen in which the elements added an incredible magic. It was always just about to rain, but never did. Male and female dancers would stand for long moments looking across to New Jersey as the sun finally set. Jones came out afterwards and said something about how we thought we weren't going to make it, but we did. I recall that Molissa Fenley was there. The 'victim art' article by Croce in the New Yorker was in 1995 or 1996, I believe. There was all sorts of controversy, including silly 'in letters' such as Susan Sontag writing in to make the final pronouncement on the debate (she hoped), making sure to include that she knew very well that Joyce Carol Oates had said the most preposterous things of anybody, but also that Croce was right in some sense, and not in some other (believe me, it doesn't matter that much.) Deborah Jowitt wrote an excellent piece in the period that I thought said it best. There was a kind of 'coolness' she identified as part of what Croce demanded. Jowitt said something like 'I like this coolness too, but I can live without having it all the time.' I am not sure I read a single reference to the Croce article which did not include the phrase 'magisterial critic.' (this is all right and may well be true, but people don't have to all use the same term of praise, and it began to sound as though 'haughty' may have been trying to be avoided as part of what was being included in 'magisterial.') I thought what Jowitt said was more balanced, but she did indicate that she knew what Croce objected to. Jones brought some of this on himself. Either in the Croce article or some other piece in the debate at the time, he had gone after a performance and exposed himself in front of a child. The furious father, who I believe was a friend of Jones, asked him why he did it, and Jones said something about things being taboo or overcoming taboos or some such demented, however arty nonsense. It could be that Croce already sensed that there was something in Jones's vision at that time that made writing a polemic more important than reviewing the individual work in her own way, i.e., she could have ignored the whole idea of 'victim art' and reviewed 'Still/Here' without reference to that, of course. But she obviously thought there was something Jones was trying to present that would have meant that, in the case of reviewing it as if it were not promoting this, she would have been reviewing something other than what the Jones work intended to be--and she obviously was refusing something of his vision. I never saw anything but 'Open Places,' which didn't have a trace of 'victim art' about it, but this sort of thing, once started and inflaming people, would naturally divide people into camps through the years. If what she said is correct, I would not be interested in it either, although I'd have to see it to know. It does seem logical that she could have also seen the work and then talked about it without actually reviewing it, otherwise it is as though she was basing it on previous work, things she knew about Jones in that period, etc., and that she could have still written her polemic, if necessary, quite as well having seen it as not--which, to my mind, makes the polemic a little too showy. Yes, I think that's what bothers me most about Croce's piece: In fact, till you wrote this I had not been aware that she hadn't seen 'Still/Here.' I don't see how, even if she is ultimately sound in her judgment about Jones's 'victim art', that she really is convincing if she didn't see the work around which all the controversy was swirling. In other words, if she didn't see it, there was something she didn't know, even if in seeing it nothing new was illuminated that would change her theory. Yeah, I don't buy that part either. *Edited to add: 'Open Places' would have been 1980, not 1984.l

Did Kirstein's Filene's money, which financed Balanchine, come from a time before or after Filene's Basement? I just did some more Googling and so have decided to Stop Worrying and Love the Rite-Aid just like it was a nice little neighborhood drugstore. I had not known that Filene's was something old and noble and Balanchine-oriented from Boston, but that makes everything about globalization all better now. Maybe the World Ballet Government should be in Davos so John and Teresa Kerry can go there, plus the Paul Newmans, etc.

I fully agree that this is the real danger and a very serious one. I think it was worth bringing up though, because it's something we should be aware of as a big smiling pitch possibly occurring all of a sudden. I just don't want to go to ballets that remind me of Rite-Aid, Filene's Basement and Bed, Bath and Beyond.

This is the closest I could get from Googling, but doesn't fit all the requirements. There's also a Swedish opera from the 70's or earlier that has lots of spacesuits. I'll see if I can figure out the composer. Yes, it's Karl Birgir Blohmdahl, the opera is Aniara. I was impressed with it, but don't know if there is any dancing in it, because I only heard a recording, but anyway I don't think an opera was being described. Gus Solomons jr NEW YORK -- "Aurora I," opening one of Ballet Tech's programs at the Joyce (March 11- April 13), reminded me that Eliot Feld is a very inventive movement maker and that the obsessive way he composes that inventive movement into dances drives me crazy. It's no surprise that one of his preferred composers is Steve Reich, whose insistent pattern music gives him a perfect field for endless repetitions of movement motifs. The dozen dancers in this 1985 work wear white sneakers and silvery space suits by Willa Kim, adorned at wrists and ankles with blurry bands of magenta or aqua. They slide down steeply raked platforms in myriad ways, sitting on their fannies, splitting their legs apart, diving upside down. The interlocking traffic patterns are stunning as dancers descend then climb back up the steep slope, progressing across the half-hexagon the platforms describe. Allen Lee Hughes uses low side light to cast long shadows: arctic twilight. But the pretty patterning persists for nearly half an hour without achieving a satisfying metaphor.

It probably was snotty. I think the London Times's obituary was entitled "Derrida 'Dies"'. These weren't nice things to do, but probably inevitable--as if impossible now to go back to speaking without reference to 'differance' and all the rest, due to intimidation by this kind of refinement. Anthony--it's hard to know where the good essayists and artists leave off another. Mailer, Martin Amis, Didion and Vargas Llosa have all done fine essays and 'made good art.' Maybe it's that the essayists who write less about art also 'write better art' than those who write primarily about art in their essays. The best art is perhaps not 'arty,' and essayists like Sontag, who write mostly or largely about art, tend to sound very arty when they set about trying to write real fiction: It can come across as mere erudition and rearrangement of some sort of connoisseurship and highbrow taste rather than something without too many citations (these can be very hard to edit out, even if you exclude most of the proper names.)

I am looking forward to the Royal Ballet sometime coming to New York. Does anybody know if they ever plan to start doing so again? That's who I most want to see.

I like that I got to see her in 'Liebeslieder Walzer' in 1985 and 2006, and several other things from both periods. I asked somebody in the audience in 2004 about the 'record' myself, because I thought she had danced longest. She wasn't sure at the time, but it looks that way now.

It's a bit like that at the New Yorker too. Alex Ross takes rather cheap shots at Adorno who, while extemely difficult, has written beautifully on Beethoven, Mahler, and on the language of music. Even Michael Kimmerman at the Times in otherwise excellent review on the terrible replacement for the Musee de l"Homme in Paris, stops Walter Benjamin short: NYTimes: Kimmelman article Everything goes too far for the Times. I respectfully disagree with all this. Having read a great deal of Derrida, Benjamin, and Adorno, I am very aware of the spell they can induce. While under it, it is almost impossible not to stand at rapt attention and even worship. Which does not mean they are not important, of course they are even though I would take even a single page of Deleuze's 'Mille Plateaux' over all of Derrida's effete delicacies (although in 'A Taste for the Secret' he does hit on something I hadn't yet found expressed quite so uncannily. Later I found that Lyotard said the same thing, but in a less death-loving way. Derrida himself said 'I think of nothing but death.' His business, but 6 volumes of Derrida was like a lovely life sentence I can look back on.) A lot of people took umbrage at the Times's obituary of Derrida. What startled me were op-eds declaring him the most famous (and most important? surely that is what is meant there) philosopher in the world (I suppose until his death, and including no one even immediately previous. Deleuze and Foucault were far more important to many of us--more life-giving, and not less true by virtue of their refusal to concentrate solely on tedium and death.) While Kakutani overemphasizes this, it is a necessary attitude for some non-rednecks to take, because the snob appeal in the French post-structuralists and post-modernists is enormous and equally as tiresome as she can be. Under the circumstances, she really ought to find Mailer's unsavoury characterization of her quite refreshing, at least in the sense that it does not reek of anything even remotely Derridean. The main problem she has here is not making the difference in the vast array of French philosophers of the last 50 years. There are many who think Baudrillard is a charlatan; I, on the other hand, think he is capable of huge sloppiness and occasional extraordinary profundity. that's just one of many examples. I find Slavoj Zizek to be a mere careerist with sparkles of cleverness (he's Slovenian, of course). The Times is always sort of middle-cult, you can't expect it to be subtle. Show me a greater newspaper, despite its massive faults. I agree with Kimmelman on Benjamin except that Benjamin was not even worth quoting in this regard. Anybody who has read 'the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' knows of his polemic of 'the film', how putting it together piece by piece comes up with this artificial 'perfect orchid' and his discussions of 'auras' are sure to put in the humourless 'the bad aura of the cult of the film star.' It would be interesting to know what he'd think now, when even this 'bad cult of the film star' is hardly to be seen as it was once. This is the serious intellectualism that is useful and useless by turns. Same with Adorno, whose writing on music is remote and purposely difficult, abstruse to the point that only a very few can understand any of it. And the usual Frankfurt Marxist humorlessness with his ridiculing of 'the light popular cinema' and the inferiority of jazz, among the most overrated and overdiscussed writings on art and 'artworks' I've ever had the displeasure to waste much too much time on. These are both examples of the high-minded philosopher who has the greater breadth of mind to write Scripture about art--Heidegger's horrible tracts as in 'The Origin of the Work of Art' are further examples of the arrogance of the philosopher. The artist, on the other hand, is not granted any reciprocal rights when it comes to philosophy. They even say this quite openly and until this day. To my knowledge, Deleuze is the only one of these French philosophers who had the largeness of mind to realize that the philosopher is not the only privileged thinker. Dirac--point well taken about how Franzen may be a fine novelist nevertheless. It was the particular odious qualities that Franzen bragged on, not that they were just odious. William Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and Truman Capote all have a host of qualities one might describe as odious, and they've never stopped me. Franzen just sounds like a bratty child or spoiled teenager, although I don't doubt he can write. I also wasn't swayed by Kakutani's opinions of Franzen, but rather his direct quotes. To counter any accusation of being off-topic, I will say that I am now reading ms. Kakutani's review of Bruce Wagner's latest novel. Although I think she is almost always wrong about which of his books are best, this particular review is far more subtle, assessing how the characters were made complicated and then unconvincingly simplified. On the other hand, I could never be a fan of hers, after her review of Didion's 'The Last thing He Wanted' and DeLillo's 'Cosmopolis.' She's occasionally useful, but no artist herself. Sontag said she never understood any of her novels. although she reviewed favourably some of what I think are Sontag's most ugly-styled novels (for me, this includes all of her novels, although not all of her essays, which are often extremely interesting.)

Quiggin--Here's the Kakutani review of Franzen's 'own story'. This is one case where I can't overlook the person terribly well, especially since I didn't read the 'masterpieces' first, and even though Ms. Kakutani gets on my nerves. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/29/books/29...d209124&ei=5070

Is that cool or what? http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/06/arts/07o...artner=homepage Never would have imagined this, and there should be some thought of doing it with ballet. They sure know something I don't, and I'll still believe it when I see it. Much better than television broadcasts.

If cell phones had to be checked in, couldn't doctors, etc., be asked for ID and told to keep on vibrate, etc. The number of people still allowed to have cellphones would be minimal. Doctors obviously need to be able to have theirs. As much as I dislike cellphones interrupting a performance, I don't hate it then any more than I do half the waiting room at an airport all on them, all full of hype, or on the sidewalk screaming into them. I just hate them period and won't get one till I have to. This may be inevitable, since pay phones are getting scarcer. People think you're crazy if you want to look at a phone book.

They should cast Patti Lupone. Sondheim was there for the closing last night, with a huge ovation, so she has to have been terrific as she always is anyway. She should have been in both 'Evita'--the terrible movie, and 'Sunset Boulevard', the Glenn Close thing, from which she got the boot. Can sing better than either of them (well, one of them can't really sing at all) and better than Meryl Streep too. I guess they think they'd be taking a HUGE chance, so maybe just cast Uma Thurman or Jennifer Anniston or give Britney Spears a break. If they don't care about anything but fears that it won't pay, they might consider the fact that it's not going to make money anyway. Maybe even Depp too big a risk, put Ricky Martin in it. Or then there's always Madonna, who would do a good surprise Oscar turn, or maybe Cher--good choices all.

It's like some pogrom. Since 2004, they've fired at least SEVEN major people, many of whom had been there for decades. The Village Voice never has a worthwhile article any more. This is truly, unbelievably disgusting. We used to be able to count on it for alternative everythings, without having to go to the thoroughly paranoid freaks with the 9/11 conspiracy theories, etc. Appalling.

I wish there had been more than talk, not that I care about that property much more than the rest of Lloyd Webber. What we got is the well-known singing voice that is not fine.

Just read DeLillo's 'Cosmopolis' and started his earlier 'Libra.' Phenomenol novelist, read 'Underworld' some years back. I think 'Cosmopolis' is great, and think Ms. Kakutani's review was one of the most wrong-headed I've read from her. She wrote what was an extremely interesting piece on Franzen's autobio, in which the quotes couldn't be made up, so I can live without reading both this book and not bothering to catch up by finally reading 'the Corrections.' He really sounds bratty. Anybody that didn't have sense enough to keep from describing the WTC attacks as 'their terrible beauty' is pretty tacky.

Lawrence Wright's 'the Looming Tower.' I'll have it in a couple of weeks. Al Qaeda, WTC.

'Vienese' is absolutely thrilling, one of the most wonderful things I've ever seen, and I also simply haven't ever seen anything quite like it. It doesn't resemble anything I've seen. I never even heard of Jakobsen, but that's just marvelous what he made here--like bathing under some tropical waterfall, it has that kind of refreshing power to it. Sizova just divine in 'Corsaire.' Since I don't know the terms, it is just that when she jumps and lands on pointe it's like some kind of flying, not the Balanchine kind, more like a real animal, and it looks different from anything I've ever seen anybody do. So--also what she does resembles nothing I've ever seen, and it's completely exhilirating. Nureyev is more exciting in 'corsaire' later, as with Fonteyn. Here he looked comparatively subdued to me.

Things find their own level at the Emmys, I guess. 'The Sopranos' and 'Desperate Housewives' didn't win anything last night, but what I've seen of them has been much more imaginative than that ABT Swan Lake.

I'd say that it should be, even if I'm not crazy about it. 'Candide' is also performed and I think it should be, even though I'm at least crazy about the songs. But the main thing is that non-opera works like 'South Pacific' and 'the King and I' are done by opera companies too. I recall the old lecture Bernstein does in 'The Joy of Music' in which he makes a difference between light opera, operetta and musical comedy. This is not necessary to accept, but had some interesting observations about exoticism vs. native atmosphere. So that there are works that bridge all the gaps between all of the following (and anything I've left out): musical revue and numbers-musicals and musical comedy and operetta and light opera and lyric opera and grand opera and music drama. I begin to think that the distinction made between ballet and other dance forms is stricter than that which can be made between sung theater, although I'm not suggesting that 'Waikiki Weddding' and 'Das Rheingold' have anything even remotely in common.