In Memoriam

For those of us who grew up in his literary thrall, losing him is like losing a planet, a fire sign of the Zodiac. But the initial sadness upon seeing the news of Norman Mailer's death--his headshot flashed on cable news, followed by a few stingy words of explanation segueing into an update about a homicide case; in such high regard is American literature held by our media--gave way to a renewed gratitude and admiration for all that Mailer accomplished and the forward-ho ferocity of his life-force that fed and fueled everything he did. He had a great life, a multi-storied career, a molecular-altering impact on postwar culture, and he never tamped down his iconoclasm and risk appetite for a cozy fade into the sunset as a senior statesman of letters. "The fact that Mailer continued writing up until the very end says more about him as a creative being than anything that any critic could offer," observes reviewer and blogger Laura Axelrod. Infirm as he was, "Mailer was clearly as curious and alive as he was in the 60s." As a writer and man, he went down fighting to the end, courting turbulence, willing to look foolish and willing to wage big, his body ravaged but his mind still keen and serrated. Mailer believed in karma, and may his transmigration be the voyage he was seeking.

Beauty and the Bob

The latest New Criterion is ripe with splendors, though for some reason they failed to include my tender, evocative personal reminiscence about the late Allan Bloom, "Kimono My House--and Make It Snappy," as part of their 20th anniversary Closing of the American Mind symposium. Perhaps there were space restrictions, or the editors considered my anecdotes not quite suitable to the augustness of the occasion. My turning in my copy after the issue went to press may have also contributed to the situation.

But I want to take advantage of the special personal privileges afforded by this blog and draw special attention to "Wall of Thorns," a halcyon essay-review of ABT's revival of Sleeping Beauty in the issue written by Laura Jacobs,* whose poetic apprehension of ballet's mortal depths oft makes me feel like a dum-dum. Perhaps the piece achieves its fullest wingspan in this passage, devoted to the dancer many of us have come to think of as Our Veronika:

...The big news of this Beauty was the announcement that soloist Veronika Part would dance the opening night Aurora. Part has become controversial. Her fans revere her for what she is (deep and vulnerable); her detractors insult her for what she isn't (fast and invulnerable). Her every performance is an event. At the same time, because she is so intensely watched and judged, her every performance is also an existential test, the bar set higher for Part than for any other dancer in New York. And still she takes the stage without camouflage or cheating or sell, bringing before us classical dancing in all its purity and poetry and risk.

When Part was cast as Aurora, some of her critics were actively hoping she'd fail—a level of partisan nastiness I've never seen in twenty-five years of reviewing. Even among those who love her dancing, some thought she was miscast. Aurora is an allegro role and Part is an adagio dancer. I myself was thrilled at the casting, not because I had hoped for it--I assumed Part would do Lilac Fairy--but when you adore a dancer you want to see them in everything: What will she do with it? I missed the preview of Beauty excerpts at the season’s opening gala, but heard that Part was rattled in the Rose Adagio and lost her balances. Knives sharpened.

Part has a tendency of fluffing first tries then coming back on high beam, and on opening night she came back and triumphed. Not with an imitation Aurora--bouncy and overbright--and not with theatrical finessing, flash thrown onto the end of ho-hum phrases. She triumphed with simplicity, with petite batterie of feathery loft, and with a clean, thoroughly achieved classical line (no decorative embellishment, no girlish mannerisms). In the intermission, Irina Kolpakova, one of the world’s great Auroras, described Part's performance as "like milk." Not cream--though Part's aplomb has often been called creamy--but lighter, modest, milk. I can't help thinking of Thomas Hardy's milkmaid princess, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, with "just that touch of rarity about her."

As always, Part's first appearance, her entrance in Act One, lifted the ballet to a higher and, because of her height, stranger place. She seemed born not of this king and queen but of vine-covered history. Her climactic port de bras in the Rose Adagio--dipping, reaching, rising over a turning spindle of bourrees (Petipa's brilliance: he's hinting at her fate just minutes away)--really was petaled, a long-stemmed rose ecstatically opening. And in the Vision Scene, no one performs that reaching pique arabesque which whorls 'round into an extension en avant with the centrifugal pull and plumb of Part, creating a wave, opening space. Notice how Petipa reverses this move in the Wedding Pas. Facing the Prince, holding his hand, Aurora unfurls a developpe en avant on pointe, arches her upper body backward from it, then flick, she pivots into an attitude that has them both facing the audience. It's a cantilevered strength move, very difficult, and where most dancers lay back stiffly, Part's arch sinks back into dream, revisiting the spell and giving us a glimpse of the curve, stress, and bevel that held her in that hundred-year sleep, and still holds in classical dancing. This is Part's power: radiant, radical imagining. In an era of allegro, she emerges--like something in a fairy tale--from the rhythms, the river, of adagio, with its rising inner life and ardor arrested, explored.

After Part has been in a ballet it can be difficult to see others come in. It isn't a question of interpretation, rather of dimension. Part has a way of opening the physical parameters of a role, not through conventional virtuosity, such as adding extra turns on a pirouette (her doubles are calla lilies; don't ask for triples), but by enlarging the measure of give within a phrase: deepening the plies; hitting the high note of a developpe with singingly perfect placement; bringing a blossom, a volumetric expansion, to a seemingly thin linearity. Part is a tautology: If you can't see what makes her great you're not really fit to judge her.

Among those most preeminently unfit to judge is the New York Observer's Robert "Ichabob" Gottlieb, who isn't really a critic as much as a self-appointed consigliere more interested in his agenda than in the art of dance. Although he's been attending ballet since the invention of the chandelier, his sophistication seems somewhat stunted; he expresses delight as if taking a hit from Rex Reed's strawberry shake. ("This is one of those ballets that just makes you happy, and the dancers were clearly happy dancing it." Golly.) His aesthetic is little more than pet likes and pet hates which he peddles as if campaigning to have his favorites crowned prom king and queen during intermission. His pet hates get the Carrie treatment, though Carrie may be too near-contemporary a film allusion for Gottlieb, who slags off Veronika Part in his latest column by comparing her to Pola Negri, a silent screen actress whose career was defunct long before most of the Observer's readers were born, assuming they were born and not simply hatched in a real-estate agency. "If I were allowed a favorite," writes Gottlieb, feeling a song coming on, "it would be Sasha Radetsky. He’s completely invested in every movement, every moment, without ever seeming self-conscious or showoffy. In fact, as I’ve written before, a little showing off wouldn’t hurt him; modesty can get you only so far." Modesty's never been your problem, Ichabobby!

*my wife, for those keeping score in the lower mezzanine

Claus Encounter of the Pod Kind

John Podhoretz, rising to the majesty and authority of his new position as editor-in-chief of Commentary, defies those doubters and naysayers who snipe that he's too intellectually shallow for the job by submitting for the ages his review of Fred Claus.

...Hollywood has sprung another Yule trap on me and millions of other unsuspecting Americans in the form of a new, colossally budgeted movie called Fred Claus, which wants both to be a gentle parody of Santa movies and traffick unironically in every North Pole movie cliche. The movie is based in a mildly funny notion that Santa Claus's older brother might be working as a repo man in Chicago with the ambition of opening an off-track betting parlor. This notion can, at best, support a three-minute sketch, however. The same can be said of its satirical extension of a childhood sibling rivalry into an agonized immortal eternity.

You'd have to be Elmer Fudd to fall for this Yule trap. Those millions of "unsuspecting Americans" deserve to get jobbed for being as dumb as Bush voters. Anybody remotely bright who saw the TV ads for Fred Claus knew that it had stinker stencilled all over it (snowball fights! sleigh rides!). The only holiday film that looks worse is the upcoming monstrosity with Dustin Hoffman in a frosted wig that looks like the sort of sparkled dementia that used to star Robin Williams before he bummed us out too many times. But even a bad movie can touch the child in all of us, if that child is as soppy as John Podhoretz:

Fred Claus is dreadful--and yet. At its climax, Santa's ne'er-do-well brother pulls up to a Chicago foundling home in the family sleigh, drops down a chimney, and delivers a Jack Russell puppy to a cute orphan. And, to my great dismay, I felt tears sting my eyes. It happened again, five minutes later, when a deeply emotional Santa Claus (Paul Giamatti) tells his ne'er-do-well older sibling (Vince Vaughan) that "you’re the best big brother in the whole world."

And this big baby crying into his Milk Duds is going to edit his father's former magazine! It's enough to shake one's faith in baldfaced nepotism.

In an Ideal World...

...Alan Dershowitz and Deroy Murdock could take turns torturing each other, forging a symbiotic bond of mutual pain and symbolic need not unlike that of Harry Lesser and Willie Spearmint in Bernard Malamud's The Tenants and sparing the rest of us their sophistic sadism.

Murdock could waterboard Dershowitz while reprimanding him mightily ("Mofo, I said more iced tea!"), then switch roles, allowing himself to be hooded and bent over a hobby horse and forced to listen to Dershowitz brag about his accomplishments ad nauseum until time and space dissolve into a black whirlpool and the fine line between Dershowitz and Ron Silver is extinguished.

The scenario above, a work in progress, should not be construed as a covert endorsement of torture.

Anyone who advocates, supports, defends, rationalizes, or excuses torture has pus for brains and a case of scurvy for a conscience.

No exceptions.

Cal Thomas, a real scurve.

Update: Deroy Murdock is a sicker puppy than I thought.

Laughter Is the Best Medicine

Unless you're actually sick with something--like, say, ague; in that case, those old Red Skelton tapes probably should take a back seat to a skilled, licensed health professional with a clean stethoscope.

But if we concede that laughter is the second or third best medicine for what ails thee, then you'll want to hop, skip, and jump over to Newcritics, which is holding a comedy blogathon all this week, no entrance fee or drink minimum required.

Being the sort of recovering Anglophile who subscribes to the Archers podcast, hanging on every moo and telltale rustle in the hayloft, I was particularly interested in Steve Bowbrick's primer on British radio comedy. One of the radio comic legends mentioned is the saturnine Tony Hancock, whose name rang a gong for me because years ago I had a fascinating lunch with Hancock's widow. I just can't remember why. It was one of those mysterious one-offs. I seem to have restricted access to sizable sectors of my vague past, remembering certain incidents without recalling how I got there, or why. On his own blog, Bowbrick selects choice goodies from Radio 4's docs and coms that might be of interest or amusement, including a radio profile (news to me) of Katy Haber, Sam Peckinpah's longtime assistant with many a war story to tell. Here again my memory falters. I know I spoke to Katy Haber back when I assigned to profile Peckinpah but I can't recall whether or not we actually met on the set of Convoy, or if that was one of the interims when she and Sam were on the outs. It was certainly no fun for whoever was delegated to rap on the door of Sam's inviolate trailer and roust him from whatever reverie was detaining at the time as the sunbeaten crew stood around waiting and production money splugged down the drain. It's hard dialoguing with a director wearing mirrored sunglasses and talking in a cryptic mutter about Mexican whores. Perhaps if Sam had discovered Transcendental Meditation, like David Lynch, he could have spent those valuable private minutes in his trailer attending to his mantra instead of practicing his knife throws. But TM was out of fashion then and couldn't compete with tequila.

"Can Analysis Be Worthwhile? Is the Theater Really Dead?"

Couple Saturdays ago, I attended a panel at the Philoctetes Center featuring three of the hardiest intellects ever to toil in drama criticism: Stanley Kauffmann, Robert Brustein, and Eric Bentley, all of whom were or still are associated with The New Republic and have managed to maintain their marbles despite being exposed to acres of meretricious twaddle during their long, hoarfrost tenures (and I do mean long--whatever the secret to their sage longevity is, let's bottle it). The panel was moderated by our friend Roger Copeland, whose Merce Cunningham study is to that I Ching grasshopper what Steven Koch's Stargazer is to Andy Warhol, who kept things moving nicely without succumbing to the Charlie Rose temptation to jump from boxcar to boxcar with his questions before any of the answers were completed. It was Kauffmann who struck a rueful notes of irony when he observed that highbrow critics of the theater used to rail against middlebrow drama as represented by Maxwell Anderson and the Theater Guild and, now, oh, to have that middlebrow audience back!--because today the theater landscape is dispersed, unrecognizable. All three critics lamented the devaluation and dumbing down of all arts coverage in print today, also the subject of Terry Teachout's impassioned lament in Commentary. It was an enjoyable, educating, involving, often funny two hours that is available for viewing here. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough time for me to ask any of the august guests if they had seen the musical that spoke so profoundly to me, but I didn't let that stop me from mingling at the reception afterwards, where I met the artist Jon Sarkin, whose work is part of a whorling, pulsating group show at Philoctetes that you really should pop in and see and prepare to be be-bopped by (pardon the preposition).

Pat Boone Is Just So Goshdarn Butch

Don't be fooled by his soda-shop image. He's Billy Jack in white buck shoes, a one-man morals squad in Freddie Mercury leather, defending the country from the enemy within, and as long as he's capable of recording a robocall message to all his fans out there still capable of answering the phone, Kentucky won't be renamed Willandgraceland or LizawithaZcountry anytime soon. Not on his watch. Not as long as there's a bathroom stall somewhere with two pairs of loafers visible just asking to be busted.

Satan Gives It a Big Thumbs Up

You'll never guess which rough-hewn cineaste hailed Jonathan Demme's Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains as "a beautiful, fascinating film, whose two hours sped by." Why, it's the sulfurous Prince of Darkness himself, the Beltway's non-answer to Otis Ferguson, expressing admiration for the candor and tenacity of our greatest living former president. (H/t: IOZ.) Meanwhile, over at Mondoweiss, Philip Weiss offers an interesting tidbit from an ominous report in Esquire.

Thy Lips Will Never Touch Thy Sandwich

"Conservatives often seem to miss, when raging about the stuff on their teevees, that it's really their beloved Invisible Hand that's slapping them in the face."

--Alicublog's Roy Edroso, addressing the frown lines and vapid valid concerns of the unworldly Anchoress, who would be boycotting Subway sandwiches if she actually chowed them, which she doesn't, but it's the principle that counts, especially when it provides an opportunity to preen.

Sunday in the Vajayjay with Hillaray

Sunday morning: a time for reflection, for taking that extra thoughtful sip of coffee and gazing out the porch window, watching the squirrels try to raid the backyard birdfeeder as autumn sunlight flickers through the soon-to-be-falling leaves.

Someday I hope to have a porch, a backyard, a birdfeeder, and a picturesque tree or two, but until then I have to draw wisdom and calm sustenance from whence I can, which on this particular morn comes from Molly Ivors* at Whiskey Fire sending Maureen Dowd a big, hearty f u. The occasion for this terse sentiment is MoDo's latest spin in the magic teacup back to those glorious Monica days that did so much for our democracy, a flashback that provides MoDo another opportunity to add a hairy wart or two to her portrait of Hillary Clinton.

If the gender game worked when Rick Lazio [Hillary Clinton's rival in her first run for the Senate from NY] muscled into her space, why shouldn’t it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle? If she could become a senator by playing the victim after Monica, surely she can become president by playing the victim now.

To which Ivors gently retorts:

Hillary won her Senate seat because she busted her fucking ass. I know the cocktail party circuit isn't so interested in the problems of rural upstate, but she was. She sat down with factory workers and farmers, she visited small towns and places where the population was hemorrhaging. I know, MoDo, I lived there. I live there still, and let me tell you, we don't really care, up here, if someone is a "real feminist"--we care if they will represent our interests.

I went to several campaign events in 2000, and you know what? She never mentioned Monica once. Bill wasn't with her. She wasn't a victim, she was a person with policies. Up here, I admit, we have a certain pugnacious 'tude toward those who assure us that New York ends at the Hudson. Hillary won because she knew that wasn't true, and didn't act as though it were.

[snip]

Let me clarify something for you. Rick Lazio was a proud-to-be-an-asshole fratboy in the mode of George W. Bush. Because the rest of the country went insane and decided to hand the reins of government to someone clearly unqualified and in over his head, don't assume that New York did the same. Of course, we went for Gore, too, despite MoDo's assertion that the Vice President, Oscar winner, and Nobel laureate lactated.

[snip]

Ms. Dowd is clearly determined to spin out every wingnut fantasy about Hillary and to attack her on everything except actual issues. As it happens, I differ with Hillary on several issues, but this line of attack pisses me off. Hillary's vajayjay has nothing--nothing whatsoever--to do with her governing abilities. Only MoDo and her compatriots in The Village** think it does.

I only caught part of last week's Democratic debate, and thought the gang attack on Clinton flopped in no small part because it was so heavily telegraphed before the orange traffic cone bearing the identity of Tim Russert went into his standard routine. Everybody's motives and tactics were so bumptiously obvious that it the debate took on the low spectacle of a traveling carnival dunking pool--or would have, had anyone managed to hit the bullseye square. Even the answer Clinton supposedly flubbed, about drivers' licenses in New York state, struck me as a minor wobble in a long evening--the price, as Balloon Juice's John Cole said, of trying to come up with an honest, equitable solution, a sensible compromise, to a complicated, intractable problem. (Cole's comment is quoted in Tom Watson's excellent wrapup of the shabby affair.)

As I post, MSNBC is running segments all morning titled Hillary Survives Stumble, relating to her latest positive poll numbers via Newsweek. It's a misleading teaser. Hillary didn't 'survive' a stumble, because there was no stumble. Hillary's so-called stumble was a fiction lodged exclusively in the skull casings of Chris Matthews and his Hardball cohorts and a few idiot pundits and envious bystanders (such as Newt Gingrich). James Warren, interviewed on MSNBC in a turtleneck sweater, cautioned us not to take too seriously these national poll numbers since it's the state polls (in Iowa and New Hampshire, etc) that signify. An okay if obvious point, but then he went on to say that Hillary could still trip up because of the perception that she isn't always candid, citing Peggy Noonan's most recent column that jibed that Hillary wasn't simply engaging in "double speak," but in triple speak, "quadruple speak." First of all, no sentient Democrat gives a badger's ass about what Our Lady of Perpetual Sighs has to say about Democrats in general, Hillary Clinton in particular, or anything beyond those spheres; like MoDo, Noonan only strikes a receptive chord with fellow echo-chamberites--the same ones who keep driveling about how this or that incident fits into the "evolving narrative" of a politician's public persona.

The Novel may be on its last legs, but when it comes to cheap symbolism, contrived conflict, minor traits magnified into mountain peaks, and master narratives into which any trivial event can be plugged, the political pundits are banging their empty coconut heads together until they're all nodding to the same dumb beat. It's like they're trying to create their own oral tribal myth, and making themselves dumber with each thud.

*Apologies. I originally mistyped and had Ivors' first name as "Milly." Perhaps my unconscious was thinking of Millie, the irrepressible next door neighbor on The Dick Van Dyke Show, which makes me question what my unconscious gets up to when I'm not around.

**The Village here doesn't allude to the Greenwich Village of yore where My Sister Eileen and other fine works were set but to the smug, parochial mental enclave of the Beltway ignorati.