That’s “Very Long Wait” for Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee. But why? You’re Oz, Netflix! You can get everything! Can’t you? What do you have against Canadians? What did they ever do to you? I mean, besides burn down the White House in the War of 1812 and produce superior comedy and maple products?
Categories: Movies
Baryshnikov’s balletic bafflement, from Newsday via the AP:
When he was invited to play a role on “Sex and the City,” Mikhail Baryshnikov says he had two questions: “Which sex, and which city?” The legendary dancer told an audience at The New Yorker Festival that until then he’d never seen the HBO series, because he only watched news and golf on TV. So the producers sent him a few episodes to watch.
“I was kind of amused, and shocked,” Baryshnikov said Saturday of the racy series, which ended early last year. “At first I was watching it with my children. Then I said ‘Children, OUT!'”
Baryshnikov played a self-involved artist named Aleksandr, a love interest of Carrie Bradshaw, played by series star Sarah Jessica Parker.
Baryshnikov’s latest project is the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a new home for various art forms that will open in November on Manhattan’s West Side.
My continuing coverage of the New Yorker Festival is, as we speak, unfolding on Beatrice. Here’s Mikhail Baryshnikov, demonstrating a pose he saw in a modern dance poster back in the U.S.S.R. before Gregory Hines came to set him free.
That’s me, tonight, trying to absorb Lorrie Moore-itude via osmosis. One of the things I like most about her is that for years, she split her time between NYC and Madison. My hometown! Where she lives fulltime now, beloved by students and enjoying her spacious, lakefront view. See, she’s smart. We’re…drugged.
I couldn’t be happier that Jonathan Lethem got a MacArthur. He’s one of the most independent-thinking and hardworking, and least fad-tempted, writers we got, and as a nice bonus, he’s not a snappish prima donna. There’s no question he’ll make the most of the money, the moment, the extra visibility, and the mountains o’ love, which he seems to turn right back into good fiction rather than a lump of ego no one can swallow.
It’s not Darwinian elimination round here, but of course I love this Gawker hed: Lethem Wins MacArthur; Franzen, Foer Feel Out-Jonathaned.
You know how, in your twenties, you house-sat at every opportunity both to escape your own tiny apartment and to get to live in someone else’s world for a little while? I’m doing something like that this week at Beatrice, where I’m covering the New Yorker Festival from now till whenever I start bumping into things in a grinning, satiated stupor, like Woody Allen in Sleeper post-Orgasmatron. Do come over, won’t you?
Also, as you can see, the deli.cio.us categories are back! It’ll take a while to fill in the missing ones from the monthlong Dataless Dark Ages, but they’ll be filled in, never fear.
Try some bitterness with your listings! From a spirited roundup of this week’s highlights in The Pitch:
Wednesday, September 28
New Yorker readers know David Denby as one of the magazine’s film critics. We, however, like to think of him as the grinch who stole college. See, when we were at Columbia University, experiencing what the school calls the “Core Curriculum,” Denby had just published Great Books, his account of retaking the core’s signature classes—30 years later. Denby enrolled in Literature Humanities (which starts with Homer and ends with Virginia Woolf) and Contemporary Civilization (which includes all the philosophy and theory biggies). He attended classes, did all the reading and even wrote a few papers. Our feelings about this experience, which he romanticizes—while mocking his younger classmates—can be summarized as follows: Of course you had time to savor all these books, Mr. Film Critic. The rest of us? We were busy taking the classes for the first time, reading the books for the first time and—oh, yeah—juggling a full course load. So we felt some schadenfreude when Denby published American Sucker, an account of his attempt to make money during the booming ’90s. Denby writes about making $900,000 and losing it all—along with, we think, his dignity, by admitting to an obsession with online porn and ownership of an Audi A6. What, working at the New Yorker isn’t enough? Denby signs books at the University of Kansas’ Oread Bookstore at 4:30 p.m. and speaks on “Reading Great Books in a Modern World” at 7 p.m. in Woodruff Auditorium, both in the Kansas Union (1301 Jayhawk Boulevard in Lawrence), for KU’s Sixty Years of Western Civ celebration. We’ll be the ones with the “Great Books Suck” signs.
Aw, they’ve got a bit of a point about the savoring, though I half-wish now that I could take more of the Columbia Core (I was across the street, reading at large and being nurtured) just for the Hegel of it. Luckily, from the warp-speed mind of Johanna Drucker—who taught Art Hum in those days—I got a whole keg o’ knowledge that I’m still tipsy on.
For more on required reading and the problems of canonization and decanonization, take a look at my friend Michael Broder’s thoughtful post about lyric poetry, a mini-review of Helen Vendler’s Poets Thinking:
In the intro, Vendler points out that “Great Books” courses generally pass lyric poetry over in silence, preferring to talk about epic, dramatic, and other narrative forms of poetry (and of course prose) that are more amenable to discussion in terms of “thought” as commonly conceived. Consequently, the average well educated student who takes Literature Humanities (or whatever they’re calling it now) as an undergraduate freshman at Columbia University or Core Studies 1 (Classical Origins of Western Culture, the course I’m teaching now) at Brooklyn College has a satisfactory conception of how thoughts and ideas are conveyed in epic and dramatic poetry (like the Iliad, Odyssey, Greek tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare’s plays) and of course of how thoughts and ideas are conveyed in philosophical works (Plato’s Republic or Symposium, essays of Montaigne, etc) and novels (Dostoyevski’s Crime and Punishment, perhaps)…
…BUT MAY HAVE LITTLE OR NO CONCEPTION OF HOW THOUGHTS AND IDEAS ARE CONVEYED IN LYRIC POETRY, OR EVEN OF WHAT LYRIC POETRY IS. And of course, while many of us (poets) include narrative elements in our work, to a very great extent the contemporary practice of poetry is a practice of lyric poetry–in some form or other. As Vendler notes, this omission tends to result in a situation where intelligent readers from a variety of disciplines tend to read lyric poetry with a view towards abstracting its paraphrasable meaning, and then evaluating the work based on the perceived truth, validity, or value of this paraphrase.
Needless to say, I think she has a very good point here…. More Mike.
Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune:
An unsung fashion hero has finally been recognized as Michael Roberts, illustrator, editor, style director and maverick takes his book on tour. On Tuesday, Burberry will fete the British-born Roberts, whose trajectory from art school in High Wycombe in 1968 to the swinging London world of Carnaby Street and Kings Road, to fashion editor of The Sunday Times and today’s role at the New Yorker, was as arrow-straight as the graphic lines in his illustrated book.
The Snippy World of New Yorker Fashion Artist Michael Roberts, published by Steid/Edition 7L, tells the story in its title. It is both an intricate assemblage of collages, done, says Roberts “mostly in hotel rooms;” and a wry and sometimes scissor-sharp take on the world of style. You would have to look to Cecil Beaton’s very different decorative sketches to find someone with such a beady eye for what makes style. Even the skyscrapers of New York take on a dizzy geometric glamour, as Roberts fixes each image in the context of its time.
…
At fashion’s epicenter, yet always a lone observer, Roberts has a unique insight into the fashionable world, which he reduces, like Cocteau, to a few sparing lines. New York features large, although he is ambivalent about its attractions.“I feel most attracted and repelled about New York,” he says. “There is no strong guiding aesthetic. Everything is for the moment.”
Fascinating! More. And here’s the Globe and Mail review, which calls Roberts “a ludicrously multitalented guy.”
Here’s a nice, concise comment on last week’s White House Aswim cover art, from Arse Poetica (funny name, too). Sometimes brevity is the soul of blog.
My inspiring father continues to write about the Roberts nomination, and a good thing, too.
And because I’m a gentleman, or would be if I were a man—and sometimes I wonder, given my inconvenient intolerance for Rules Girl–like behavior—I tip my hat in greeeting to my new colleague in New Yorker observation, I Hate The New Yorker, who, as my genial rival, has already pointed out a broken link. Ahoy there, comrade! Seems like an interesting, smart Pittsburghian, and perhaps someday we can have a friendly debate. Or, better, a Grease/Rebel Without a Cause drag race where he’s Anthony Lane’s second and I’m David Denby’s. There’s something really great about that scenario. Who would be the pneumatic, shopworn girl with the silk scarf who starts the race? Or the studly boy? Having recently immersed myself in much of the wonderfully wounding first/only season of Freaks and Geeks, I think I’ve got to say Nick Andopolis. We never really get over the sweet drummer-stoners.
And, whoa, speaking of which—I just noticed that I Hate the New Yorker has been watching F&G as well. Spooky. We’re bound to see eye to eye on a few things, but I’ll be spending some time under the hood of Greased Lightning, so I’m ready just in case there’s a rumble.
