Sounds & Fury

Heads, We Win; Tails, You Lose — Or: Pimps 1, Artists 0

When it was announced a couple weeks ago that Universal Music Group, owner of the top classical labels Decca and Deutsche Grammophon, was forming a new division called Universal Music Classical Artists Management and Production — a division designed to provide management services for prominent classical musicians, and produce recordings and live events for them, the division to be headed by classical superstar manager Jeffrey D. Vanderveen (Anna Netrebko is one of his clients), formerly of the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of artist management, IMG Artists — it sounded to us like a natural and a good deal all round for everyone.

How thoroughly silly — and purblind — of us. How we could have missed seeing this huge, devouring monster lurking beneath the surface of that cozy little arrangement is simply beyond our comprehension.

A manager has moved from one agency to another. So what? "It happens all the time," says Barrett Wissman, the chairman and owner of IMGA , and Mr. Vanderveen's former boss. "But here much more is at stake. The suit [instituted by IMGA against Mr. Vanderveen and the new Universal group] is about huge conflicts of interest. Who will protect the artist? No one is talking about that. And many of the artists don't even see what's coming."

Mr. Wissman conjures up scenarios of junior Artur Rubinsteins and Renata Tebaldis suckered into indentured servitude for the sake of a coveted recording contract with a major label. You want to sing Schubert in Salzburg? Too bad, this is business. It's show tunes at the Garden for you. For an analogy, think back to Hollywood in the days of the almighty studios, when the moguls owned stars virtually body and soul.

[...]

The Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes, wants an ally who answers only to him. "The recording company has to think commercially," he says. "That's the nature of their enterprise. As an artist, I need room to think completely differently, to think about which projects are artistically interesting and only that, and then to see if we can sell them."

The disagreements are never-ending, and recording executives are not the only ones who may think an artist's ideas too esoteric. Lately, Mr. Andsnes had to battle presenters in Paris who thought Debussy piano pieces too recherché for the French. How much harder it would have been had his manager — who is paid to represent his point of view — been a paid operative of his record label as well, working hand in glove with the impresario. Here we touch the crux of the matter: Under such circumstances, manager and impresario would be united in the common interest of maximizing profits for themselves rather than for the artist. And the artist's creative agenda would have no true defender at all.

During intermission at the Metropolitan Opera, a competitor of Mr. Wissman's explained some of the basics, on condition of anonymity. "Say I manage Diana Damrau," he said, referring to the diva of the evening. "As her manager, my interest is to maximize her fee, and thus my commission. But if I'm presenting her and selling tickets, my interest is to reduce her fee to zero or even to get her to pay me for the privilege of singing, and thus to maximize my take at the box office."

IOW, heads, we win; tails, you lose — or: Pimps 1, Artists 0.

RTWT here.

Glass As Composer For Film

So I was in the middle of watching the "Frozen Seas" episode of The Blue Planet, the beautifully photographed and poetically choreographed eight-part BBC documentary surveying undersea life in the world's oceans, when I remembered that the Met was broadcasting the Saturday afternoon matinee performance of Philip Glass's Satyagraha. Although the subject of the opera is of little interest to me, and the ethos being celebrated both irritating and tiresome (most especially so when co-opted in the Western world by the ethos of the Sixties), I did want to give the music with its incomprehensible Sanskrit text another listen. So I turned off the sound on the TV, and turned on the radio in time to catch the third act as it was opening.

It was bloody perfect. As soundtrack for The Blue Planet, I mean. And when I say perfect, I mean it was as if the music were written explicitly for the film right down to, for instance, the waddling step of the penguins who waddled on land in perfect time to the music, or the balletic, slow-motion swimming of whales to which swimming the music seemed a direct response. And then the next episode of the series — "Coral Seas" — came on, and the music fit that film, with its capturing of the evocative swaying movements of tropical undersea fauna looking more like lush flora than fauna, and the elegant gliding movements of myriad species of fish, even more perfectly.

I don't know what that says for Glass as an opera composer, but I can say I've never enjoyed The Blue Planet — or Satyagraha — more.

No Country For Old Men: Two Colossal Logical Blunders

[Note: This post has been edited extensively as of 11:26 AM Eastern on 18 Apr to correct a slew of small errors, add an extended parenthetical, and revise some infelicitous language.]

Late to the party as is usual with us with these sorts of things, we've just viewed the 2008 Academy Award Best Picture winner, No Country For Old Men, courtesy of Netflix. As with all Coen brothers' movies there's much here that's engaging. But unlike other Coen brothers' movies this one contained two colossal logical blunders (among a number of minor ones) which all but totally short-circuited our enjoyment; blunders colossal because the progress of the plot depended and turned on each.

Colossal Logical Blunder No. 1:

Moss returns to the scene of the slaughter of the Mexican drug runners upon which he had earlier stumbled after he's already returned home safely and undetected with the satchel containing the drug money he found some fair distance away from the scene. The movie has Moss returning to the scene of the slaughter to bring a jug of water to the one Mexican drug runner who was left only half-dead after the slaughter and who was in need of water when Moss left him, but for whose plight Moss had shown a callous disregard when he first discovered him.

It would have been one thing to have Moss return to the scene of the slaughter not to bring a jug of water to the half-dead Mexican, but to make sure the half-dead Mexican was either already full-dead or, if not, to himself ensure that condition for the Mexican as he was the only one to have seen Moss's face even though he couldn't have seen Moss take the satchel containing the money.

But there's no hint that was Moss's intention in returning to the scene (he's bringing a jug of water for the guy, fer chrissake!), and in fact, hunter of animals that Moss is notwithstanding, Moss just ain't the kind of guy who could knock off a human being in cold blood; even some already half-dead Mexican drug-runner-type human being.

Had Moss not returned to the scene of the slaughter he would have been home free with the stolen money forever as there would have been no way for anyone to have known he was the one who took it. Of course, there then could have been no movie — or, rather, no movie as we have it — and so Moss has to return to the scene for whatever reason in order to be discovered and identified by those really bad people. As it's handled here, however, Moss's return to the scene is a wildly improbable deus ex machina employed not to save the day for the hero, but to save the movie for its creators.

(We understand the Coens' reasoning in having Moss decide to return to the scene with the jug of water. But the logical blunder aside, and contrary to their intent, Moss's return to the scene doesn't work to show the deep streak of humanity in him as much as it works to mark Moss as a moron with a death wish.)

Colossal Logical Blunder No. 2:

Moss very early on knows just how much money is in the stolen satchel ($2M). We know he knows not only because it would have strained credibility beyond the breaking point to believe Moss never counted it (what human being on Earth wouldn't have in the circumstance?), but because Moss tells us how much money is in the satchel (we overhear him telling his wife).

So, having counted the money, how come Moss missed discovering the electronic tracking gizmo stashed in one of the banded stack of bills near the top; a red-light-blinking electronic gizmo that's almost the thickness and size of a pack of regular-size cigarettes(!)?

Answer: Moss couldn't have missed discovering it. But the plot depends on him not discovering it so early on. That the moviemakers have him not discovering it almost immediately is nothing other than a colossal logical blunder on their part; a logical blunder made necessary because the plot doesn't work if the gizmo is discovered almost right away. And so another deus ex machina is employed; a negative one this time, so to speak.

The Coens should at least have contrived to have the gizmo stashed in a hidden compartment in the satchel itself even though real drug distributors as experienced and sharp as these movie drug distributors apparently are would never have made such a mistake. Or contrived to have the gizmo be as thin as a note or two of currency and absent any blinking red lights so that it actually could have been hidden reasonably successfully in a banded stack of bills. But, then, that would have been beyond the technology of the time (1980 or so), and therefore anachronistic.

We sympathize with the Coens being presented with this gizmo problem, but we nevertheless would have expected them to have solved it in a believable way.

Perhaps we shouldn't have been as enjoyment-robbing bothered as we were by these two logical blunders (they didn't seem to bother anyone else if they were noticed at all). But as Emperor Joseph II was wont to say, "There it is."

Sweeney Todd: The Movie

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:41 PM Eastern on 8 Apr. See below.]

We confess, as we've on a couple previous occasions all but confessed, that we find nothing so tiresome and aesthetically artificial as the Broadway musical, unless it be a movie version of a Broadway musical, the latter invariably lacking even the few dubious charms of the staged version. The single exception for us among Broadway musicals, staged or filmed, has been Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd as we related in some detail in this October 2004 post. But, then, it's somewhat misleading to label Sweeney Todd a Broadway musical although we suppose technically that's the form on which it's based. Sweeney Todd more rightly belongs on the opera stage, not the stage of a Broadway theater so rich in complex (for the Broadway theater) and brilliantly written music is it, and, to their credit, opera houses worldwide have not been remiss in understanding this.

Last December saw the release of Tim Burton's film of Sweeney Todd. On first hearing of this project and its director and cast back in October 2006, we had an essentially one-word comment: Perfect!. And now, through the aegis of our New Best Friend, Netflix, we've just gotten around to viewing it for the first time.

In speaking of the film, Stephen Sondheim is reported to have said approvingly, "For those of you who know the show...forget it. This is not a film of a musical. It's a film based on a musical." And The Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout has declared the film to be "without exception, and by a considerable margin, the best film ever to have been made from a Broadway musical," and while, all things considered, that's not saying very much, we most wholeheartedly agree. Everything about this dark and richly-textured film is just as it should be, most especially its two leads: Johnny Depp as the wronged, vengeful, and bitter Sweeney, driven to demented murderous extreme; and Helena Bonham Carter as the "very creepy but curiously charming and touching Mrs. Lovett" as we described the character in our first-linked post above. And a decisive stroke of sound cinematic and aesthetic judgment on Burton's part it was that he insisted that all the actors, leads included, none of whom are singers, sing their songs using their own untrained voices rather than have the singing dubbed in for them by professional singers as is the usual Hollywood practice in such a circumstance. Had Burton not insisted on this, the musically polished result would have broken the film and made it not worth the celluloid it was printed on.

All that notwithstanding, and as much as we loved this film, at its close we had an overwhelming desire that simply could not be resisted. And so on shutting down the DVD player we immediately switched on the CD player, reached for the CD of the original cast Broadway production, popped it in, and spent the next couple hours or so listening to the whole thing all over again.

There's just no getting around it. Movingly affective horror show cum Aeschylean tragic drama as Sweeney Todd is, it's its music, coupled with Sondheim's pitch-perfect lyrics, that's its genius, and that defines and makes of it the genuine masterpiece that it is. Much of that superb music in its nonpareil orchestration by Jonathan Tunick was missing from this film. It was the absolutely right decision for this splendid piece of cinema, but, alas, the wrong one for the masterpiece that is Sweeney Todd. It's not for nothing that opera houses worldwide have not been shy to mount Sweeney on its stages. It's where it properly belongs.

---

Update (1:41 PM Eastern on 8 Apr): Something kept nagging at us about this film. There was something lacking in the horror of Todd's discovery of the identity of the beggar woman, but we couldn't quite put our finger on what it was.

We just watched the film again, and now know what it was.

In the show, almost right at the beginning, there's a first brief meeting between Todd and the beggar woman when he gets off the boat with Anthony, and the beggar woman, after doing her thing, peers at Todd questioningly, and sings in that strange melodic turn, "Hey, don't I know you, mister?" At the end of the show in Todd's shop, just before Todd slits her throat, she again peers at him in that questioning way, and again sings in that same strange melodic turn, "Hey, don't I know you, mister?" almost immediately after which Todd dispatches her ("I have no time!")

In the film, Todd meets the beggar woman only once at film's end, and only moments before he slits her throat after she peers at him and says (not sings), "Hey, don't I know you, mister?"

Sounds like a small fault, doesn't it. But it's not. It's HUGE.

How Burton could have made such a colossal dramatic error (and how we could have missed it first time around) is entirely beyond our comprehension, but he (and we) did.

Damn shame.

Anniversary Note

This month marks the ninth anniversary of the death of the great filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. We had published (in print) immediately after his death in 1999 an appreciation of Kubrick a reprint of which can be read here. Today in The Guardian is an article titled, “Making 2001: A Space Odyssey”, that throws some further light on the making of that seminal film that’s also worth your time reading.

Amadeus Revisited: A Brief Note

I’ve just finished viewing a tape of Milos Forman’s film, Amadeus, for the I’ve-lost-count number of times, and, as always, it was as engaging and moving an experience as it was on first viewing; a work of genuine cinematic art. And also as always, each time I view the film, I marvel at those who criticize it on the grounds that its portrayal of Mozart is as “a foul-mouthed idiot savant”; a portrayal that’s “a caricature” of the historical Mozart, as one prominent cultural critic put the matter.

I’m no Mozart expert, but I’ve studied enough of the literature to know that both those charges are ill-considered, not to say purblind. These critics seem to forget that this film is a work of fiction, not biography. And they seem to forget as well who it is that’s telling the story in Amadeus: crazy old Salieri, of course, not some historian or objective outside observer. But even though Amadeus is Salieri’s story about Mozart and a work of fiction, the film’s portrayal of Mozart captures and embraces in a brilliantly dramatic, theatrical, and, as is befitting of Mozart, comic way the awesome contradiction between the to all appearances ordinary man — a man, pace Maynard Solomon, as much child as man — and an astonishing body of work that in number, multifariousness, and profundity beggars the imagination as I’ve elsewhere put it on this blog. As I've also written,

Had Amadeus's Mozart come across as a "foul-mouthed idiot savant," and a mere "caricature," he would not have — could not have — captured as he did the hearts and minds of millions world-wide, most of whom knew Mozart previously only as a synonym for the precocious much in the same way Einstein has for almost a century been a synonym for genius. The Mozart of Amadeus is as warm-blooded, fully fleshed-out, and as true to the essential spirit of the historical Mozart ... as are the principal characters of Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro as warm-blooded, fully fleshed-out, and true to the essential spirit of the archetypes they represent. That's the genius of Amadeus as it is of the stageworks of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, God's amanuensis.

I wrote that more than two years ago, and nothing in the intervening time, and after numerous viewings, has given me cause to alter my judgment about the film or its portrayal of the man Mozart and his astonishing gift.

More On iPod/iPhone Mania

For a more expansive and detailed treatment of the matter commented on succinctly in the video linked in this Sounds & Fury post, take a look at this by Wall Street Journal movie critic Joe Morgenstern:

Feature films squeezed into iPods and the like represent a technical triumph. They are also an oxymoron bordering on a travesty for those of us who've grown up going to movies in theaters, where, in the company of others, we've been taken out of ourselves by images vastly bigger than real life. Yet the fascination with ever smaller screens seems unstoppable. In an era of take-out food, people want take-along entertainment. What's more, the downsizing of images will work inexorable changes in content. I'll be exploring some of those changes in a future column, but for now ponder this: Some Hollywood writers, recently returned to work with a contract that provides for new media, are now busily writing for cellphones.

Again, Word!

RTWT here.

Word!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:32 AM Eastern on 26 Feb. See below.]

We point you to this brief video by film director David Lynch courtesy of Bryant Manning’s blog, Mysteries Abysmal.

Word!

But, then, we’ve been saying the very same sort of thing for ages vis-à-vis experiencing classical music via an iPod, haven’t we.

---

Update (4:32 AM Eastern on 26 Feb): For a more expansive and detailed commentary on this matter, see this post.

Sweeney The Movie

Early this past December, before the release of Tim Burton’s film of Sweeney Todd, I wrote the following in an online forum thread concerning the forthcoming film:

Having little affection for American musical comedy, and even less for cinematic adaptations of same, I came very late to Sweeney Todd (some quarter-century late, actually), and was overwhelmed by it — most particularly by its musical treatment. I, too, wondered how so much of that music being cut in a cinematic adaptation of the musical could result in the film being anything but a resounding failure. But I trust Tim Burton implicitly. His cinematic sense is all but infallible, and according to all I’ve read, he clearly understands the work as envisioned for the stage. Cut music or not, I look forward to seeing how he re-envisioned the work for the cinema. Unhappily, as I refuse to attend a movie theater (three occasions excepted, I’ve not stepped foot in a movie theater since 1973), I won’t be able to see the film for some months to come when it makes its appearance in DVD release.

I can hardly wait.

Since the film’s release, it’s received almost unanimous praise from the critical press which pretty much lauded it to the skies, as the saying goes, including this latest from Ol’ Stormin’ Norman:

After the screening [of Burton’s film], cup of tea in hand, [Stephen] Sondheim himself made a claim so extravagant I had to ask him to repeat it. ‘This,’ he declared, ‘is the first musical that has ever transferred successfully to the screen.’

[...]

Is [Sweeney Todd] then, as the composer claims, the first stage musical ever to make a successful switch to the movies? After several weeks' reflection, I’d go one further: I cannot recall any modern theatre play — Pinter, Miller, O'Neill, Albee, Neil Simon, whoever — that has made the leap to screen carrying so little of its stage baggage while its character remains intact. Sweeney Todd is a gripping, skilful, troubling, ineradicable masterpiece of a 21st century movie. All that came before is gaslight.

Even given the source, it all sounds just as I expected it to be, and I’ll almost certainly weigh in here again after I’ve screened it on DVD for myself. And as I’ve already said, I can hardly wait.

A Sad If Sobering Bit Of Reading For The New Year

Bryan Appleyard of The Sunday Times provides us a sad if sobering bit of reading to launch the new year:

Something happened in 2007, something ended. Old gods stumbled and fell. New ones sprang up. But they sprang up in their thousands. That’s the point these days.

Technology, hype and the sheer profligacy of the arts when confronted with a large, hungry and wealthy audience have created a climate of excess — just too many artists, too much money, too many works and too much noise. Who knows who, now, is great? Even if greatness existed, how would we find it? Do we want greatness, or would we simply prefer choice?

RTWT here.

Happy New Year!, everyone.

Endnote

One of the several (predictable) eMail responses to my purposefully provocative snipe at Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor in particular, and bel canto opera in general, in this post wherein I declared Lucia "[a] piece of typical bel canto trash which contains but a single scene in its entire three acts to recommend it," asked me whether I'd forgotten the famous Act II sextet. The answer is No, I hadn't forgotten it, nor is it likely I'd ever forget it. How could I? It was a notable — and unforgettable — part of my very first introduction to the genuinely tragic in drama when, as an impressionable eight-year-old, I sat riveted by the gut-wrenching Disney tale of The Whale Who Wanted to Sing at the Met.

Oh, how I loved Willie (the name of the whale of the title), and hated the fame-and-fortune-seeking cretin: the opera impresario Tetti-Tatti who, convinced Willie has swallowed a great opera singer, sets out to harpoon Willie to rescue the unlucky singer and present him to the world. When he finally comes face to face (so to speak) with the opera-devoted Willie — who in the meantime has been alerted by his seagull buddy to Tetti-Tatti's search for him which search Willie imagines is for the purpose of Tetti-Tatti auditioning him to sing at the Met — Tetti-Tatti is in for a further shock: Willie can not only sing arias, but duets and trios as well — all by himself!

On hearing this, Tetti-Tatti is beside himself, for all Willie's prepared audition has convinced him of is that Willie has swallowed not one, but three opera singers, all of whom need rescuing to the greater glory and riches of the greedy and purblind Tetti-Tatti. Tetti-Tatti makes a mad dash for the harpoon gun, fires, and Willie sinks dead beneath the waves, his dream unfulfilled, his singing and the miracle of his gift silenced forever. (In true Disney fashion, at tragedy's close, we're assured that somewhere in whale heaven Willie continues to sing, and to sold-out houses.)

Oh, the pathos of the tale (NPI)! It haunts me still.

And just where does the Lucia sextet come in? The "duet" and "trio" sung by Willie are from the opening of that ensemble, the three male voices all sung by Nelson Eddy.

So, back to the question posed by my eMail correspondent, once again, no, I didn’t forget the Act II Lucia sextet.

Happy Fiftieth!

We ordinarily would have missed this entirely as it's well outside our regular Web surfing grounds (surfing grounds?). Happily, we picked up the link from a poster on one of the music forums in which we occasionally participate.

West Side Story at 50

Pauline Kael was the most respected film critic in America, but she had her off days. "I would guess that in a few decades," she wrote in 1963, "the dances in West Side Story will look as much like hilariously limited, dated period pieces as Busby Berkeley's 'Remember My Forgotten Man' number in Gold Diggers of 1933."

Guess again. West Side Story opened 50 years ago tonight - September 26th 1957 - at the Winter Garden on Broadway, and half-a-century on, when the Jets take off, in blue jeans and sneakers, thrusting up from the stage, arms stretching out to make their huge signature Ts in the air, audiences still thrill, in the theatre, at the ballet, and, pace Miss Kael, film and video audiences. West Side Story is the trick so many musicals since have never quite pulled off: great storytelling in American dance.

There then follows an authoritative, detailed, and fascinating piece that includes extended interviews with Hal Prince, the show's producer; Sid Ramin, one of the show's two orchestrators; and Arthur Laurents, the show's librettist (scriptwriter).

RTWT here.

Emblematic

So, you thought it's only classical music and the other high arts that have been marginalized in this iPod culture of quick, easy images and sound bites cum instant gratification, did you.

Think again.

The world of cinema mourned the passing of two titans last week. Ingmar Bergman was 89, Michelangelo Antonioni 94. Front page obituaries celebrated their accomplishments and the nightly news tossed up 30-second clips of "The Seventh Seal" (Bengt Ekerot's Death coldly moving his pawn) and "Blow-Up" to remind us of their greatness.

The two filmmakers almost seemed relevant again.

In truth, they're anything but. The hallowed days of post-World War II art-house cinema — that period from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s when people went to the movies expecting metaphysical transcendence to go with their popcorn — is long gone, and all the Criterion DVDs in the world won't bring it back.

I was reminded of this the morning Bergman died, as I put together the [Boston] Globe obituary. One of our department interns — a 20-year-old student who knows her pop history better than most — admitted she'd never actually seen any of his movies. After a pause, she confessed she'd always confused Ingmar Bergman with Ingrid Bergman, and what did he actually do?

The next day was worse: She hadn't heard of Antonioni at all.

[...]

[V]anished [today] is a sense of higher purpose in filmgoing. You didn't walk out of "The Seventh Seal" talking about the movie, you came out talking about life. The great art-house and foreign-language classics of the '50s, '60s, and '70s were good, and they were good for you. But that makes them sound like medicine now, and who wants that when there's so much tasty fast food available?

[...]

So if the Globe intern and her hipster friends do get around to checking out Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," say, or Antonioni's "Blow-Up," the slow pacing and high seriousness may seem even more foreign than the language.

O tempora! O mores!

RTWT here.

Atque In Perpetuum, Ingmar

The great filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, among the greatest directors in the history of the artform, is dead at 89. Of especial note for us classical music aficionados was his cinematic treatment of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, a unique achievement in that it remains true to Mozart at every point, and at the same time is a singular work of art in its own right.

Atque in perpetuum, Ingmar. Ave atque vale.

New York Times obituary can be read here.

Yeah, Right

We suspect the following somehow got its data packets reshuffled or rerouted somewhere in cyberspace, and what was supposed to show up online in the pages of The Onion instead got routed to The New York Times:

In an unusually blunt session [at the headquarters of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers] today, several of Hollywood’s highest-ranking executives called for the end of the entertainment industry’s decades-old system of paying what are called residuals to writers, actors and directors for the re-use of movie and television programs after their initial showings.

The executives stopped short of saying they would demand an immediate end to residual payments in the upcoming, probably difficult negotiations with writers, actors and directors. But they were emphatic in calling for the dismantling of a system under which specific payments are made when movies and shows are released on DVD, shown abroad or otherwise resold. Instead, they want to pool such revenue and recover their costs before sharing any of the profit with the talent.

Yeah, right. When pigs fly maybe.

RTWT here.

Explains Just About Everything

Regular readers of this blog over the years are more than passingly aware of our numerous, um, criticisms of the quality of the arts coverage of the mainstream media, particularly the daily mainstream media, in terms of its content, its writers, and the makeup of its pages, our most frequent target being the arts pages of The New York Times. We most frequently target The Times because it's our "native" newspaper, so to speak (although not a native New Yorker, we've been reading the arts pages of The Times since our junior high school days); a newspaper that's often, and for good reason, referred to as America's "National Newspaper of Record"; and because of the precipitous descent in the quality and content of those pages over the past couple years or so in particular.

Well, the man most responsible for that descent — New York Times culture editor, Sam Sifton, who was appointed culture editor of The Times in 2005 — is holding court and fielding reader questions this week in The Times's Talk to the Newsroom section of the newspaper, and so we thought we might ask a question or ten of Mr. Sifton. But all we could think of to ask was the simple question:

What specially qualifies you to "overse[e] the daily Arts pages ... and [the] Arts & Leisure [section]" of any major broadsheet, much less The New York Times, our "National Newspaper of Record"?

Needless to say, and as expected, our question wasn't published, and no answer was otherwise forthcoming.

We don't blame Mr. Sifton for that, actually, as the question was both unseemly and exceedingly rudely put, and aggressive in the extreme into the bargain. And so we went a-Googling for an answer. And what did we find? This, from the 2005 Times press release announcing Mr. Sifton's appointment as the culture editor of The Times:

Mr. Sifton, 38, has been deputy culture editor at The Times since 2004. He joined The Times in 2001 as deputy Dining editor, and became Dining editor later that year. Previously he was a founding editor of Talk magazine where he worked until 1998. Before joining Talk he held a number of positions at the New York Press from 1990 to 1998, including managing editor, media critic, senior editor, contributing editor and restaurant critic. Before joining the New York Press he taught social studies in New York City public schools from 1990 to 1994. Before that, he was an assistant editor at American Heritage from 1988 to 1990.

Mr. Sifton graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. degree in history and literature in 1988. He is author of A Field Guide to the Yettie (Talk Miramax Books, 2000).

Pretty much explains just about everything, doesn't it.

A Brief Cinematic Comment

I comment very little here on movies even though I used to be a cinema freak, and even contributed a couple papers to the literature of what we pompously called cinematic aesthetics. I comment very little on movies simply because I pretty much stopped going to the movies after the mid-'70s or so, the last straw for me being the critical reception (almost entirely favorable, and even some raves, from those who ought to have known better) of that risible cartoon of a movie, Star Wars, which signaled for me the beginning of the end of an era of cinematic seriousness that began with great promise in the late '50s, and continued through the '60s and early '70s.

The above is prelude to my voicing my, shall we say, astonishment on viewing a tape of Wednesday's CBS airing of the American Film Institute's 10th anniversary edition of its listing of America's 100 Greatest Movies. What, for egregious instance, is Casablanca, Singin' In The Rain, Vertigo, and The Wizard Of Oz doing listed in the Top 10 of those 100 movies, and listed there ahead of such also listed films as, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Chinatown, Dr. Strangelove, and a dozen other films I could name? And what is a clear masterpiece such as The French Connection — the very apotheosis of the American cop movie genre, and a brilliant film in its own right — doing listed way down there at position 93(!)? And why are clear masterpieces such as Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen — stellar examples of the venerable American horror movie genre, and, again, brilliant films in their own right — missing from the list altogether? Just who are those responsible for selecting and ordering the entries for this list? Backward-baseball-cap Gen X and Gen Y airheads (a redundancy, I know)?

Stupid question that last.

O tempora! O mores!

To Those Who Might Be Wondering...

To those of you who might be wondering: Yes I did, and no I'm not.

Prodigy

The following mordant commentary is from a retrospective piece appearing in the January 1940 number of the Saturday Evening Post:

After being a celebrity ... in Dublin and London, he had returned home [the following year] expecting to be a Broadway celebrity. But he got to the Algonquin without being mobbed. He discovered people in the lobby not talking about him. In Times Square he found large groups of people not mentioning him. A celebrity has a negative or an inverted sense of hearing: he can hear his name not being mentioned at forty paces. Everywhere he went, nonmention of his name drummed on his ear. He was bewildered. [...] By rights, [theater moguls] the Shuberts should have met him at the docks.

The celebrity in question was Orson Welles the first volume of whose wonderfully written and meticulously researched biography, Orson Welles: The Road To Xanadu, by Simon Callow I've just begun to read. I've gotten through only the first one-hundred-and-fifty pages, but already the life of the young Orson Welles has left me all but breathless so varied and broad in experience, and so rich in accomplishment it was.

The trip abroad referred to in the above quoted retrospective had taken Welles to Ireland where, traveling alone, and after myriad adventures in Galway and the country's West Coast, he'd set off for Dublin, and on arrival immediately presented himself to the directors of Dublin's famous Gate Theater to whom he announced he was available. His offer of services was duly accepted, and he was given the role of the middle-aged Duke Karl Alexander, the crucial second leading role in the play, Jew Süss, which had had a hit run in London's storied West End some four years previous.

Welles's performance was a triumph — a genuine phenomenon — eliciting delirious applause and cheering cum standing ovations from audiences, and unanimous raves in the theater critical press. "Interesting at every moment," said The Herald. "The young American actor received nothing short of a personal triumph," declared Dublin Opinion. "A touch of humanity and simplicity in [the Duke's] swinishness which in less expert hands might have been lost ... Orson Welles captured it magnificently," trumpeted The Independent. And this from J.J. Hayes, the New York Times's man in Dublin:

The Duke is played by a young American actor [Orson Welles] whose performance is astonishingly fine. [...] Dublin is eager to see him in other roles.... His coming will probably lead to the production of Coriolanus which was shelved ... because a suitable man could not be found for the title part ... 35 years since it was done in Ireland by Sir Frank Benson.

The last bit about Coriolanus was fed to Hayes by The Gate Theater Press Office, the presiding officer of which was ... Orson Welles.

All this took place in 1931. Orson Welles had just turned sixteen.

Wagner: The Movie

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:46 AM Eastern on 26 Mar. See below.]

Wagner-hater, Ms. Opera Chic, has some choice words about the four-hour cut version of the 1982, nine-hour, made-for-TV epic, Wagner, starring Richard Burton in the title role, and with a slew of first-rank actors such as Vanessa Redgrave, Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir John Gielgud, and Sir Larry Himself in supporting roles, and some even choicer if largely disproportionate and at times misguided words about Wagner himself.

The full nine-hour film is really quite dreadful, and considering its Hollywood-blockbuster-grade production values, a wanton squandering of time, money, and talent. Tony Palmer — who was the film's editor as well as its director — repeatedly cutting in visually effective but thoroughly irrelevant "moments" was more than merely annoying. It was aesthetically damaging in the extreme. Ditto the mostly irrelevant music track, all of it taken from Wagner's own works, which was damaging not only in its irrelevance to what was happening on-screen, but due the unavoidable and at-odds associations one could not help but make with what the music connotes and is associated with in the works for which it was originally written.

My sense of the thing is that intelligent editing would have done much to save the film from being the bloated, boring, impossibly confusing and disjointed thing it is. But even given intelligent editing, nothing could have saved the film from its arrantly vapid script. Apart from the script's amateurishness, it missed just about all there was to miss of central importance to a reasonable understanding of Wagner the transcendent genius, and to a lesser degree, of Wagner the man.

Bloody shame.

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Update (1:46 AM Eastern on 26 Mar): Just for the record...

I'm not quite sure what possessed me, but I just watched the tape of Wagner again — all nine grueling hours of it — and it's even more dreadful than I remembered it from the first — and last — time I watched it.

In the comments section of the above linked post on Opera Chic, I remarked in contradiction to the comment of another commenter that it was my recollection there was little representation of Wagner's anti-Semitism in the film. I was a bit off. There was no representation of Wagner's anti-Semitism in the film beyond three or four en passant, one-word remarks by Wagner such as could have come from any German of the time, and, at the end of the film, a good-natured(!), joking(!!) reference to Wagner's wanting the great conductor Hermann Levi, a practicing Jew and the son of a rabbi, to undergo baptism before conducting Parsifal.

So much for the accuracy of this ostensible TV biopic which had a number of other inaccuracies as well, and a few flat-out inventions throughout its length.