Daily Blague

Being thick as a post, I had to see the show twice before I got it. Why was Don Draper so determined not to be recognized as someone called Dick, by his own half-brother Adam? Had he committed some terrible crime? I was thinking à la 2007. Watching the show a second time - bless you, AMC, for re-running these fascinating episodes the moment they're over - I got it. What's Don Draper's horrible secret, the one that inspires him to pay his half-brother 1960$5000 cash American to make him "go away"?

It's in the names. The half-brother is Adam. The step-mother is Abigail. The uncle is Max/Mac. These are the people that Dick, a/k/a "Don Draper," walked away from over ten years ago, when Adam was an eight year-old boy. Adam and Abigail are popular names today, and they were popular with English (but only English) protestants into the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. In Mid-Century USA, however, they were common only to -

Jews.

Don Draper is Jewish. That's why nothing about his past is on display. That's why he can't have Seth as a half-brother. Is Matthew Wiener going to take the Sopranos formula and use it to etch the far subtler drama of bourgeois American anti-Semitism?

Jon Hamm's most amazing face - and he turned in many during this episode - is in response to Adam's pathetic question, "Did you ever miss me?" Don is paralyzed by the horror of having driven such "missing" from his mind with an iron discipline, until the Hallmark answer, "Of course I did," presents itself to his adman's brain. Don usually knows what he's supposed to say right away. The surprise of Adam, a brother whom one ends up (after the second episode, anyway) thinking that he loved, slows him down.

I may, of course, be wrong as Worcester about all of this. But when I shared my theory with Kathleen, she jumped on it. I'm suddenly wishing that I knew a few chat rooms.

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Any doubts that I might have had about the excellence of Mad Men - is it genius or is it just stylishly cool - were put to rest during a part of the long birthday party sequence that took up the final third of the episode. Betty has asked Don to pick up the cake, but also to film the party, something that it seems he forgets to do without prodding. Getting the cake turns out to be a very big deal, but before Don leaves, he gets out his camera and takes some - what? - 16 millimeter? Super Eight? - footage of the kids running around. It is silent, of course, as home movies inevitably were in 1960. But here's the payoff. The music playing in the background is "Voi che sapete," certainly the best-known aria from Mozart's  The Marriage of Figaro. It's so well known, in fact, that most people won't hear it. But it reflects Don's innocence about love. Like Cherubino (who sings the aria) he doesn't know what it is. By the time you hear the aria, Don is filming adults. First, he captures two people who are playing a sex game that's frankly acknowledged by the woman - much to the man's discomfort. Then he pans to a married couple still very much in love; their unguarded kiss is a gift. And then we see Don, the master of every situation but this. He still doesn't know what love is. Che cosa è amor.

Watching Mad Men has been a touchy experience. As it happens, I'm a half-generation away from Don and his children. My parents were ten years older (or more) than he is and I am ten years older than they. Our experience of the upheaval of the Sixties was different. But Don Draper is certainly more of a younger father than an older brother. There are moments in this show when I feel that I am invading the parental sanctum. As it happens, Jon Hamm is something like a year older than my daughter. But when I see him with his hair slicked down, and his five-o'clock shadow (which is how I'm sure he got the part - although he's great), and his wonderfully guarded impatience with everything, I see someone's dad, and I don't want to piss him off.

What an amazing show.

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So, did anyone see Damages last night? It's the new legodrama on FX that stars Glenn Close. Isn't it the most amazing piece of crap?

To be sure, Glenn Close is magnificent in the role of Patty Hewes, the formidable plaintiffs' attorney who will do anything to bring her lawsuits to victory. When she's onscreen, it doesn't matter that the show is rubbish. Ms Close long ago perfected a Wicked Queen persona that is compulsively watchable. But when she's not onscreen...

For example, when Hollis Nye (Philip Bosco) sonorously informs Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne) that the contract that she's about to sign (but won't) guarantees her employment for five years - or maybe it wasn't Mr Bosco but another actor in the scene - you gag. The law firm that hires associates on five-year contracts has yet to be invented. Associates are employees-at-will who can be fired without notice. (Partners are only somewhat harder to get rid of.) The scene, though brief, is utter confection, a tepid reheating of stock material. This is law as people who have never dealt with law firms envision it.

Damages isn't about law, though. It's about the price women pay for pursuing worldly - as opposed to maternal - ambition. Damages' price is preposterously exaggerated. Patty Hewes, although brilliant and glamorous, is obviously a vampire as well, and she will sooner or later sink her canines into Ellen's neck. Isn't that why the opening scene shows Ellen fleeing from an apartment, covered in blood? And then catatonically slumped in an interrogation room? Excelling in the footsteps of Patty Hewes will strip you of your humanity. Damages stokes the ancient resentment of powerful women that attributes to them crimes that even Attila the Hun would balk at.

Leaving for the office this morning, Kathleen told me that she might be out of touch this afternoon, meeting with her five personal shoppers at Bergdorf and waiting for Barbara Walters to show up in her dressing room. Seriously, though, she is going to ask her paralegal if she has ever seen an attorney standing in his office in boxer shorts. Kathleen certainly hasn't.

The difference in dramatic quality between Damages and Mad Men is huge. By the end of the summer, will friendships and marriages have foundered because of divided loyalties? Kathleen and I are safe, at any rate. She may never see Mad Men (although she'd like to - but she's so busy with those personal shoppers), but we're united in our scorn for Damages.

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If you're a regular reader, you know that I never watch television. And that's true. Except tonight. Tonight, I am watching Mad Men. I am watching the re-run of the first episode. Jon Hamm is frighteningly good as a thirty-something account executive on the make. His character, Don Draper, is brilliant at advertising because he's open to despair.

But the real treat is the total holiday from political correctness. Have you ever seen so many smokers? And when was the last time anybody talked to a secretary, even nicely, as Don and his associates do? I was twelve in 1960. More to the point, I had my first summer job on Wall Street four years later, when everybody looked pretty much the same as they do in Mad Men. I am so not nostalgic! The glory of the show is that it's safely imprisoned at AMC. It's not real anymore!

By the way, whaddya think about Michael Vick?

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If you happen to find yourself at the Metropolitan Museum of Art between now and 5 August, make sure that you don't miss the Poiret show. It's on exhibit in what I believe is the only special-exhibitions space on the first floor. It's tucked in between the Greek and Roman Antiquities Galleries and the Petrie Sculpture Court.

This is not just another fashion show. First of all, the costumes are in magnificent condition. It's hard to believe that clothes made nearly a century ago have held up so well. But what's more important is the nature of the couture. Paul Poiret (1879-1944) was a draughtsman, but he could not sew. Perhaps for this reason, his designs are structurally quite simple - simple, that is, in the way that it takes great genius to arrive at. There may be a riot of detailed embroidery, lace, or cutwork, but the shape of his gowns and coats is elemental. Much of it looks strangely up-to-date.

And then there are the colors. Poiret's saturated colors, often presented in remarkably edgy contrasts, simply have to be seen. (This is especially true of linings. The coat above is lined in an arresting turquoise satin.) The bold luxe of Poiret's work is probably easier for the average man to like than is usually the case at the Costume Institute.

The show offers two hypnotic graphics, presented on scrims mounted in front of mannequins. In each case, the construction of the dress or coat in question is shown in fluid animation. In the first of these, a long oblong of cloth is folded and puckered and turned inside-out until, without cutting of any kind, a coat suddenly emerges, as bewilderingly as any rabbit out of a top hat.

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The following exchange always stops me cold, coming as it does atop the sizzlingly funny Cinderella spoof in which Charles Pike (Henry Fonda) plays shoe clerk to Eve Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck. Then the two of them rejoin Eve's father (Charles Coburn).

Col Harrington: Ah, there you are. Well, it certainly took you long enough to come back in the same outfit.

Eve: I'm lucky to have this on. Mr Pike has been up a river for a year.

Then the Colonel has the nerve to apologize for his daughter's ribaldry.

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For quite a while, I'd been looking forward to Blackbird, with Alison Pill and Jeff Daniels. Our MTC subscription seats us toward the end of each run, which is fine with me, because I believe that actors, if they do anything, simply get better over the course of a run. And I don't mind waiting. But I do feel a tad silly being the last person on the block to write things up.

¶ Blackbird, at MTC's Stage I.

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At MTC the other night, a cell phone went off in the first act. The ringtone was strange, feathery and ephemeral rather than percussive. The thing was, nobody moved. Everybody in our part of the audience looked at everybody else; the play sailed on; eventually the ringing stopped. It was horrible.

At the interval we were all subjected to the firmest inquisition that the management would dare inflict upon patrons. Nobody fessed up. I was terrified that we'd be asked to produce our phones. Mine was on. I usually don't turn it off, because I can silence it before it rings, thanks to preliminary vibrations. (I used to wonder rhetorically who on earth would be calling me, but wrong numbers are not confined to land-lines.)

It's against the law to allow an electronic device to disturb a play or a concert.

¶ Our Leading Lady.

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I don't mean to make a habit of posting links to YouTube, but this short film by Georges Méliès is a treat.

(Thanks to Digsummer.)

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Brian Friel's Translations - I'd rather forget it than write it up. It bored me deeply, as do most plays - and novels and movies and whatnot - set in Ireland's past. "Let it go!" I want to shout. It's a horrible past, okay! The Irish are always beautiful dreamers; the British, monsters of arrogance.

Conundrums abound, but they're not interesting conundrums. They're like the thing stuck between your teeth that you can't keep your tongue from palpating. And they swamp the very possibility of drama, because everything is utterly foregone.

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Anyone in search of that good, old-fashioned French-movie atmosphere ought to make a point of seeing Gabrielle, a film made two years ago by Patrice Chéreau. Based on Joseph Conrad's story, "The Return" (which I've now got to dig up), the film concerns the end of a marriage. A woman leaves her husband for a man whom she loves, but turns around on her way and comes back, not because she has changed her mind about her lover, but because she fears that, after years of stunted life with her husband, she won't be able to love him back. The husband, meanwhile, comes home early from work and reads the now-unnecessary note. He goes through every range of reaction, from rage to tears to bland acceptance.

The story has been given hieratic treatment. Jean (Pascal Greggory) staggers through his huge town house (part of the Gare de l'Est?) while Gabrielle (Isabelle Huppert) floats in resigned desperation. There are the couple's worldly guests and there is also a flock of housemaids and kitchenmaids. Yvonne (Claudia Coli) is a sort of head housemaid (although she's a young woman) with whom Gabrielle has obscure conversations. Every now and then, an immense title card is superimposed on the action, announcing a dramatic statement ("Restez!"). Fabio Vacchi's portentous score promises melodramatic developments that tend not to materialize. This would be annoying if it were not for the hypnotism practiced by the filmmaker and his cast.

Gabrielle is not a long movie, but uninitiated American viewers probably won't make it through - so you'll have that satisfaction.

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Now I can't recall where I read it. Somebody remarked that a movie that had come up in conversation was his mother's favorite film - along with Three Coins in the Fountain. I really couldn't remember a thing about the movie, but I knew that I'd seen it, a million years ago. Not when it was new, certainly - I wasn't really going to grown-up movies in 1954. (Yes, I know; it's hard to believe. A couple of years later, though, I'd stay in my seat after the kiddie matinee and watch the first ten minutes of High Society. That was how long it took my mother to hiss her way down the aisle and extract me.)

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Yesterday, Joe posted a link to the Mr Deity videos at YouTube. Brian Keith Dalton's hugely funny shorts, which the Mr Deity site tells us are sketches for a half-hour comedy show, seem on the face of it to poke fun at Judeo-Christian beliefs. But that's not how I see it. I turn the telescope around and peer through the other end. What if Creation were the undertaking of some American corporation?

What if "God" were played by a dithering project manager, so beset by delusions of grandeur that the idea of accountability never crossed his mind? What if the Holy Spirit - "Larry" here - were the impatient, stressed-out, but ultimately sycophantic deputy actually responsible for making things happen? What if "Jesus" were an aimiable, team-playing lug who looked great with football greasepaint under his eyes? And what if Satan - "Lucy" - were the hysterical female executive, butting her head against the glass ceiling?

Now, go watch the clips again.

All four actors are superb, but there's something about Mr Dalton's high-pitched wheeze that's truly divine.

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It seems that I'm no longer on the mailing list. For several years, I would receive sporadic postcards inviting me to readings at the KGB Bar, on East 4th Street. I never went. It was too far away, on several dimensions. But when I heard that Vestal McIntyre would be reading there last week, I screwed up my resolve actually went, despite the frigid weather.

Continue reading "Vestal McIntyre at KGB Bar" »

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On a recent Saturday, Kathleen and I descended into Chelsea, to attend an the opening of a show at the Noho Gallery. The artist whose work is on exhibit there is Nancy Staub Laughlin, the sister of one of Kathleen's most ancient friends (and a friend in her own right). We have owned two of Nancy's pastels for almost twenty years, and it has been great fun to follow her career. We were very taken with her new work at the Noho, and if money (but mostly wall space) were no object, we know which picture we'd be bringing home.

An even more ancient friend of Kathleen's was there, as expected, and he and Kathleen soon fell into a good gossip. I didn't even try to listen, but I watched for cues to laugh or nod. That's what you do when you're standing in a noisy room and you're almost a foot taller than your interlocutors. This time, though, Kathleen took notice. "You can't hear a thing we're saying, can you?" she asked me. I could hear that.

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Last Wednesday, I tootled down to Union Square to attend a book event at Barnes & Noble. A very sophisticated and lighthearted book event: Michael Musto, the Voice columnist, interviewed Rupert Everett, author of Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins: The Autobiography (Warner Books). According to IMDb, Mr Everett will turn forty-eight in May, which makes the writing of an autobiography seem a tad premature, but what's in a name? A book by Rupert Everett would be just as funny by any other. The paragraph that you are reading was massively stalled by a premature opening of the book, which is not what I am here to talk about.

The performance space, so to speak, at the Union Square Barnes & Noble is capacious, but it's also the venue of choice for the most popular events, or so it seems to me. I had no idea what kind of a crowd to expect, so I left the house at ten to six and reached the fourth floor of the branch half an hour later. There were still plenty of seats, but because of my size I am miserable in anything but an aisle seat toward the rear, preferably blocking no one's view. Happily, there was one. Since I was alone, I had to sit in it for forty minutes, which was something of a drag, but I'd brought along The New Yorker and the London Review of Books. A minute passed. And then another minute. By ten to seven, every seat was taken. Very shortly after seven, there was a sort of commotion on the other side of the room as Mr Musto and Mr Everett approached. The latter was all but poleaxed by a gaggle of photographers. I had never seen such a shoot before, and it seemed very silly. It was for that reason that I somewhat priggishly declined to take a snapshot of the event with my cellphone.

I had heard about Mr Musto, but never seen or heard him before; my, what an insolent and impudent piece of work he is! Which is another way of saying that he's a brazen old queen. Mr Everett is a gay guy, not a queen, and a stylistic dissonance was soon humming from the dais. (Mr Musto actually promoted his own forthcoming book, La Dolce Musto, which certainly made me squirm.) There were plenty of laughs, but the mood of the evening relaxed considerably when the discussion was opened to questions from the audience.

Rupert Everett is a past-master at playing blithely irresponsible rakes and cads on screen; in life, he's clever but thoughtful. Asked about his response to 9/11 by someone who apparently knew that he was in Manhattan that morning, Mr Everett remarked on the strange passivity of people in the street, "before the wailing." At first, before the enormity of the incident could hit home, the sight of the towers in flames really just seemed to be another computer-generated image, another special effect. This made him think about the terrible desensitization that has been wrought by "life in a media age," as another questioner put it. "We're all too entertained," Mr Everett said, and, speaking as an entertainer, he wanted to find ways of restoring the vitality of experience. For a moment, he sounded as though he were contemplating another career entirely, but any fears of that were wonderfully dashed by his announcement that "at the end of next year" (next season? 2008?), he's going to play Henry Higgins in a West End production of Pygmalion that, if successful, may come to New York. If I were Michael Musto, I would regale you with the excited response to this news of my plumbing.

The evening was a lot of fun, and it dislodged me from the blue doldrums that had kept me in bed for too much of the morning. I came right home and, knowing that Kathleen would be at the financial printer until close to midnight, I calmly set about making a dish of spaghetti alla carbonara while watching Deceived By Flight. I'm watching all the Inspector Morse episodes, in alphabetical order. It is very much the thing for this time of year.

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I stood in front of the painting until I was afraid that I would either weep or get down on my knees. Never has a painting reached out and caressed my heart as this one did. I had always loved the image, but, seen on the canvas, over seven feet square,* John Singer Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) has the mysterious power exerted by great religious paintings upon pious Christians and venerators of Renaissance painting. It is my Mona Lisa, my top-of-the-heap picture. And I saw it this afternoon for perhaps the last time. When Americans in Paris, the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, closes at the end of the month, it will go back to Boston.

Sargent's composition is extremely eccentric, and the setting extraordinarily spacious. There is a lot of empty room on view. That, oddly, is what gives the picture its vigor. It conveys the sense of walking in on children at play. The third daughter, standing to the left, might very well have been discovered on the right a few minutes ago. The oldest girl, leaning against the great vase, will probably sit down in a moment and try to pretend that she is a grown-up lady. The baby is too young to be expected to stand for guests.

Where are we? Old masters posed their figures against fanciful obscurities that were not intended to represent real-world interiors. Here, we can tell that we are in an actual apartment. The glass over the mantelpiece shows us the windows in the adjoining room. And yet the absence of tables and chairs makes it impossible to say how the space is used by the family when the girls are not playing.  The broad carpet and the imposing porcelains, in conjunction with the fact that there's nowhere to sit, suggest the occasional arrangement of palatial chambers; if chairs are wanted, lackeys will bring them. But for all the backward glancing toward Velásquez, the painting may appeal to us now more than ever because a century of abstraction has made us comfortable with large volumes that lack "pictorial" significance. We're unlikely, for this reason, to be irritated by the warped red screen.

Sargent's way with textiles is always a surprise. From a distance, the brushwork seems orderly enough, but, up close, it becomes riotous and haphazard. (The same thing is true of many of Fragonard's pictures.) Stand near the canvas, and the pinafores are shown to be anything but white. The baby girl's smock breaks down into abstract squiggles, something that beautifully offsets the careful modeling of her face.

And it is her face, I concluded today, that is the center of the picture. It is the part of the painting that draws and holds our attention with strange but pleasurable insistence. Eventually, we may come to feel that Sargent has replaced innocence of a child with something like unearthly wisdom. The older sisters are being polite. They know that they're being looked at, and their expressions are guarded when not simply averted. Only the baby really sees us. It may be mere curiosity; she may simply want to know what we think of her dolly.

Finally, there is what we know about the lives that awaited the daughters of Edward Darley Boit. Just as religious paintings illustrate scenes and events with which the viewer is expected to be familiar, depending for their expressive power upon the viewer's pre-existing associations, so the enchantment that hovers over these girls deepens when we reflect that not one of them would ever marry.

*The painting is a quarter of an inch wider than it is tall.

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On Saturday night, Kathleen and I went down to the Blue Note, on West Third Street, to hear The Crusaders. Kathleen was already a big fan of The Crusaders when I met her nearly thirty years ago, and she was eager to catch them in their first appearance at the club since 1986. She made reservations for the second set, which was scheduled to begin at ten-thirty but which, in the event, started much closer to eleven. By then, we were wedged into tight seats in the corner nearest the bar. We'd thought that getting to the club at 9:30 or so would net us a good spot in the first-come-first-served line that's the unavoidable downside of an outing to the Blue Note. The sidewalk is less than capacious, and the weather is usually unpleasant. It wasn't too bad on Saturday night, but we arrived at 9:40, and were well back in the last quarter, perhaps the last fifth, of the line. (We had never been to the Blue Note on a Saturday before.) Hence the lousy seats. We both ended up standing alongside our chairs.

Only two of the original Crusaders are still in the band, pianist Joe Sample and sax player Wilton Felder. Nils Lundgren has come on board to play the trombone, along with drummer Steve Gadd and bassist Nicklas Sample (the pianist's son). So far, so good. These capable musicians were all very evidently on the same page. The surprise was the appearance of Ray Parker, Jr, on the guitar.

Some other time, I'll tell you why I think that "Jack and Jill" is the greatest pop song of the Seventies. It initially appeared on Raydio, Mr Parker's first album, along with the amazingly transgressive "Let's Go All The Way" (every teenaged girl's father's worst nightmare). A very gifted blues guitarist, Mr Parker wasn't an obvious fit, and he didn't get to do much, either. I wondered, in fact, if this might be the Ray Parker, Jr Rehabilitation Tour, with the musician being grateful just for the chance to appear on stage. He wasn't given a solo until the penultimate number, "X Marks The Spot," and by then I was pretty impatient to hear him let it rip. Let it rip he did, however, and for the first time that evening I found that I had simply fallen into the music.

The houseful of serious Crusaders fans got what it came for, an hour or so of bluesy jazz that pulled off the neat trick of being brightly assertive and laid-back at the same time. Wilt Felder and Nils Lundgren turned in a series of bravura solos that drew enthusiastic applause, while Joe Sample attacked his keyboards with untiring vigor. I think I might have had a better time without the distraction of waiting to hear Ray Parker, Jr.

I know that I'd have had a better time, as would almost everyone in our quarter of the room, without the distraction of a couple of dateless young women, one of them a willowy blonde, who lost interest in the music early and required a massive hushing from the surrounding tables to remember where they were. I wish I could say that such bad behavior at the Blue Note came as a surprise.

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This afternoon, I watched Bob le flambeur, Jean-Pierre Melville's 1955 marvel, starring Roger Duchesne. More varied in tone that Touchez pas au grisbi, a film that Jacques Becker made the year before with Jean Gabin, it is equally saturated by the taciturn, American swagger of its leading men - both of whom drive big American cars. Bob is so American-accented, in fact, that it's difficult to believe that Humphrey Bogart wouldn't have remade it had he a few years longer.

I wonder if an American who hadn't seen very much French cinema would see what I'm talking about. In France, "taciturn" means three or four words for every one that an American gangster would utter. And everyone is very well turned out. In his first scenes, Bob is heading home after a night gambling, and he looks pretty rumpled, but from then on he's always sharp. His hair is perfectly combed, his ties are beautifully knotted, and he glows with well-being even when his fortunes take a turn for the worse. Most of his colleagues, such as his partner, Roger (André Garet), and his friend le commissaire Ledru (Guy Decomble) are scruffier, in a Gallic way, but they're never grubby or oafish. Nobody is overweight.

Then there is the pace of the film, which betrays a tie with the silents that Hollywood had put completely behind it twenty years early. The pacing is slightly too fast; dialogue is exchanged with the brio of a tennis match, even when it is not at all witty. It's as though the characters don't stop to think what they say. The soundtrack is also, from an American standpoint, nothing less than bizarre, shifting schizophrenically between the tinkling gaiety of Montmartre's boîtes to portentousness worthy of Bernard Herrmann, and with a dispatch that, for anyone not actually watching, sounds deranged. It took the French cinema longer to abandon the old idea that every movie ought to have something for everyone.

But it is pretty easy to see the American dreams that this film must have hinted at to French audiences. Bob is free with his money, but quietly, always for generous and never for ostentatious purposes. He cares very much - more than he ought to, perhaps - for his protégé, Paulo (Daniel Cauchy), and for Anne (Isabelle Corey), the streetwalker whom he takes under his wing but releases without protest when Paulo takes an interest in her. In a very American way, Bob is too disciplined and mature to get mixed up with women in any complicated way, and one suspects that, if he did have a girlfriend, it would one along the lines of Max's well turned-out American in Grisbi.

The climax of the film is not what you're led to expect. In a touch that might have inspired Ronald Neame's wonderful Gambit (1966; inexcusably out of print), the big heist that Bob has planned is presented "as he expected it to go" - in other words, without a hitch. This scene is not labored, however, and it turns out to be a rehearsal of nothing. Instead of the heist, we have Bob at the Deauville tables, raking in winnings and still more winnings - on this fatal night, his luck has changed. The inconstant mood of the film gives no real assurance as to what sort of ending to expect (id est, dead or alive), and I don't want to spoil the movie even if I can't imagine why anyone would be reading this without having seen. I'll just say that the last three lines are increasingly droll, and the last one downright clever, a genuine touché!

I put off watching Bob le flambeur for years, thinking that it must be just another gangster movie with a bloodbath at the end. But it's not. It's a fascinating appropriation of American possibilities by French manners.

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Am I the only reader puzzled by Charles Isherwood's dyspeptic take on The Little Dog Laughed and Regrets Only?* Of Julie White's Hollywood agent in Little Dog, he writes,

At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those [homophobic] lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.

"Funny gal"? I don't think so. "Shameless" would be more like it. The audience laughs because Diane's promiscuous insults reflect impatience, not malice. They're funny pretty much in the same way that Archie Bunker's insults were funny. They tell us that Diane's bloodstream runs with iced vodka.

Is Mr Isherwood unacquainted with the glee of slipping perfectly horrid remarks into everyday conversation? With the right friend, of course.

As for Regrets Only, Mr Isherwood is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I've promised not to discuss the plot of that show here, but I can say that "clever antigay jokes" appear to be the last thing on Paul Rudnick's mind. I should have said that the play demonstrates the importance, to everyday life in affluent Manhattan in any case, of hairdressers and florists, many or most of whom just happen to be gay. Does Mr Isherwood think that it's shameful to be a hairdresser? That hairdressers per se reflect badly on gay men? The longer I look at his essay, the more that seems to be the case.

In the film Flannel Pajamas, the mother-in-law says to the husband, "I want you to know that I believe every negative stereotype about the Jewish people." This zinger comes out of the blue, and I was not the only person in the theatre who laughed, even though there was nothing funny about the context. What an outrageous thing to say! And how gratuitous! The humor runs very deep: the Jewish husband has been very naive about the consequences of marrying a Catholic girl, and this is his wake-up call. (He sleeps through it.)

* "Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity," in The New York Times, 17 December 2006.

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Last week was a busy one, with two concerts and a play. The concerts were both very satisfying, but the play was such an outstanding delight that I shall try to tell you something about it now. I don't want to give away the plot, because a great part of the fun is anticipating, if only by minutes, the direction in which it goes. And I shall try not to re-tell any of the fifteen or so drop-dead jokes.

If I did tell one of the drop-dead jokes, you might not find it all that terribly funny - or, in the case of the Donna Karan joke, you might not get it all. But the New York audience at MTC's Stage I the other night didn't miss a thing. Expectations were high - Christine Baranski and George Grizzard in a Paul Rudnick play!!!! - but they were met and then surpassed. It was obvious from the start that the show was going to be funny, possibly very funny. What was not so obvious was the show's very satisfying ending. So often, comedies turn into overtired three year-olds as the finish approaches: they don't want to end, but they can't quite keep going, either. So they fuss, and when the curtain comes down the audience is simply grateful. Not so at the end of Regrets Only. The play's final moments are just poignant and sweet enough to give a dash of Der Rosenkavalier. Just a dash.

For years if not forever, Paul Rudnick's humor has operated on the assumption that gay men and women - but mostly gay men - already control the world. It is a brave, whistling-in-the-dark way of dealing with a society afflicted by patches of stolid homophobia in which gay men are occasionally beaten to death. In Regrets Only, the playwright lets his postulate off the leash and permits it to rule, if not the world, then the second act of his play. This duplex fantasy, playing on the surface but also shoring up the foundations, is the perfect catalyst for transforming pointless, empty lives into magical ones. 

Continue reading about Regrets Only at Portico.

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This evening's home movie (last evening's, actually) was Shopgirl. Although it's late and I'm lazy, the reason I don't pull down the books to get at the novel - it's triple shelved, way at the back - is because I'm still under the movie's spell, and the movie and scholarship even of this slightest kind are grossly incompatible. But! They changed the ending, no? As I recall, Mirabelle ended up with Ray Porter, not with Jeremy Whatsis. I remember feeling sorry for the kid, because the older man's advantages were so out of proportion. Shopgirl the book is one of the very first that I wrote up for Portico (way back in 2000!), but, typically - and I'm proud of this - it's useless in the Cliff Notes department. Tomorrow I'll excavate. At least I know it's there.

It's a beautiful movie, with a truly magical score by Barrington Pheloung. Beyond that, it had an extraordinary charge for me. I had expected to identify with Steve Martin's character - even though I'd stayed away from the film precisely because I think it's kind of creepy to write a bestseller and then star in the movie adaptation. But I didn't identify with Steve Martin at all (much as I'd love to be mindlessly rich). Instead, I wanted to throw him out of the house, because when Claire Danes wasn't busy looking like my first wife (especially when she wore eyeglasses in her pickup truck and tried to see where she was going), she was doing a fine job of acting pretty much exactly like my daughter. This conjunction of influences (mother/daughter) has never occurred before, and I'm more than a little shaken. But I like Claire Danes a lot more than I used to do.

For a very moving account of Shopgirl, don't miss MS Smith's essay at CultureSpace.

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Anyone curious to see Daniel Craig in action, without supporting the military-indoBroccoli complex, ought to run out and rent Archangel, Jon Jones's film of Robert Harris's 1998 novel of the same name. (I read it.) The BBC production only rarely betrays its origins in television, and the length - just under two hours - also suggests a feature film's crispness. The production is, overall, dandy.

Archangel is about (did I say that?) the possibility that Stalin fathered a carefully-bred child child, a son who was quietly nurtured in the rough countryside outside the eponymous Arctic port that, contrary to the film's say-so, was not built by Peter the Great (Elizabethan merchants did business there). Daniel Craig plays Kelso, an American historian who finds himself drawn into a carefully woven plot that will rely on his credibility as a Westerner to burnish the Stalin legend. Perhaps because he has the sense to figure this out pretty quickly, he keeps his life; a suave Russian intelligence chief (Alexei Diakov) and a bruyant American cable reporter (Gabriel Macht) are not so lucky. Yekaterina Rednikova plays the smart girl who helps Kelso out, and she's terrific, one part Rachel McAdams, one part Sally Field, and one part gifted Russian actress whose English it is a pleasure to hear. Archangel is the best English-language Russian noir since Gorky Park, and it's almost as good, which is saying a lot.

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The American Pilot, David Greig's new play, is a remarkable piece of work, and MTC Artistic Director Lynne Meadow has done a bang-up job of directing it. I don't think I'd seen any of the cast members before, and most of them had not appeared on Broadway, but they were all super, and I expect to see more of them. As I say perhaps too often, one of the pleasures of frequenting the New York theatre is the chance to see actors routinely tackle wildly different roles, something not quite a handful of Hollywood actors are allowed to do.

The story is simple. An American Pilot (Aaron Staton) crashes his plane in a remote Eurasian village that is under the control of a guerilla opposition. The government...

Continue reading about The American Pilot aux Champignons at Portico.

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Losing Louie, the comedy by Simon Mendes da Costa that's about to close at the Manhattan Theatre Club, was a strange show, in that I laughed all the way through it and then felt like an idiot. The moment the curtain came down, I felt that I'd been made to sit through a something dredged from the Seventies. There were plenty of good lines, but in the context of the completed performance they withered with age. Why the play's problems didn't obtrude until it was over remains a mystery to me.

As long as Matthew Arkin and Mark Linn-Baker were emoting on stage, I could buy their angry half-brother routine. It was almost cute. When it was over, though, it was suddenly just acting. The actual brothers whom they'd been impersonating didn't seem very real to me, because they were too much the product of Plotting.

The action takes place in a Pound Ridge bedroom, in both the Early Sixties and the present, in a scenes that alternate between the periods. This an interesting device, because not only does it double the narrative and, with that, the climax, but it offers the opportunity to wash the later action in irony. By revealing, in the denouement of the earlier story, that the relationships between the characters in the later story are not what we or they think it is, the playwright can give his show a neat double take. Mr Mendes da Costa, does not sneak up to us with any surprises, however. Long before Bobbie Ellis (Rebecca Creskoff) leans over the bassinette and coos, "Reggie, Reggie, Reggie," we know that the relationship between the middle aged Tony (Mr Linn- Baker) and Reggie (Mr Arkin) are closer than most adoptive brothers, because they share a father, the late lamented Louie (Scott Cohen). Memo to Mr M de C: Tell us something we didn't see coming before it sailed under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge!

Continue reading about Losing Louie aux Champignons at Portico.

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The Little Dog Laughed, the new play by Douglas Carter Beane, is one of the best-plotted pieces of theatre that I've enjoyed in a long time. It ends with a fantastic ka-chink that's a surprise only because the solution to the problem ought to have been obvious from the start. Of course, it would never have been obvious to a normal person. Only a barracuda-powered Hollywood agent could work it out.

For that reason, I can't say much about the play itself. It has two modes, questioning and answering. The questioning scenes are the ones in which Julie White, playing the role of Diane, is not on stage. Alex - to my mind the show's lead, magnificently played by Johnny Galecki - is the questioner. A hustler, he is tripped up by a botched encounter with movie star Mitch (Tom Everett Scott), and the question is, what if these two guys really like each other and just want to be together? Alex has a girl friend, Ellen (Ari Graynor), who's ready to upgrade her status to girlfriend when her lover dumps her. It's a case of bad timing, especially because Mitchell is slated to make a big movie about two gay men in love, and it won't help his career if he's actually gay in real life. As Diane, his agent, puts it, if he's straight, then playing a gay man is "noble." If he's gay, it's bragging!

Diane is the answerer. Julie White is almost terrifyingly dynamic onstage. Always alluringly outfitted, she's in motion even when she's sitting still. As quick and cynical as any "industry" personality ever to appear on stage, screen, or television, her Diane is a monster of calculation and bullshit (a lot of the bullshit, in fact, is abbreviated or pantomimed, as if it were a question of Diane's not being able to utter some falsehood or other for the trillionth time). Her handling of Mitchell, especially when he flounders in new-found love, is so deliberate that she's more animal trainer than agent. Let's hope that Ms White gets a Tony for her breathtaking performance - and that all the other playwrights rush to provide her with future vehicles. Not since Angela Lansbury rolled out Mame Dennis has there been an actress so loudly and blindingly that astronomical phenomenon that we call a Star. The woman is a one-man kick line.

Mr Beane allows himself everything, even Diane's announcement that it's time for intermission. Diane actually deconstructs the play's plot at one point, with a funky rule of thumb. In the first act, you put your characters up in a tree. In the second, you throw things at them. In the third act, you bring them down from the tree. And the difficulty with this play, she observes, is that what's being thrown at the characters in The Little Dog Laughed is happiness. Up in the tree, Mitchell and Alex, who have never been honest about their sexuality, discover that their desires might actually lead them to happiness. This is the romantic surprise of the play's "second act" (Little Dog has only two acts, of course.), and Mr Scott and Mr Galecki are very sweet about it.

And then, somebody throws in a baby.

I've read in the Times that The Little Dog Laughed has been tinkered with since its Off-Broadway days. Ms White and Mr Galecki are veterans of the earlier production; Mr Scott and Ms Graynor are new. The production team - Allen Moyer (sets), Jeff Mashie (costumes), Donald Holder (lights), and Lewis Flinn (music) - set the show off wonderfully well. Director Scott Ellis makes sure that his four highly talented actors are always on the same page. (October 2006)

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As to why we went to see Butley, refresh your memory.

Simon Gray's Butley is a Greek tragedy in every way but the most important one: there is no catharsis. The hero comes to no blinding insight. He does not reach the sudden understanding that he himself is the cause of everything that has gone wrong. And, given Ben Butley's situation, it would wholly bogus if he did.

Butley is no longer a contemporary play. The world has slipped since the early Seventies (the show opened on Broadway for the first time in 1972). It no longer accommodates people like Butley; it institutionalizes them. Today, Butley would be shuffled off to rehab, which, from what I can tell, is a mild form of what the Cultural Revolutionaries in China used to call "re-education." You are taught the new, the correct values. You are assured that, in order to make any headway with your life, you must not only subscribe to but enact these values in your daily life. For better or worse, the expression of existential anomie is no longer tolerated in Western society.

Largely, perhaps, because everyone got tired of the Butleys of the world. Brilliant, bitter, committed to drunken malingering, Butley has nothing to do, really, save wait for death. He fills his hours with repartee, seduction, and evasion. If he can avoid teaching - he has taught at Cambridge, but has slid somewhat to London University - he will. Students are as disagreeable to him as mosquitoes. His love life is a shambles, and soon in ruins; if Butley has learned anything in the course of the play, it's that he doesn't have the energy to try to kindle something new. He is terminally disaffected.

He is also, however, extremely entertaining. Butley is an aggressive troublemaker, gifted with a fluent tongue that's capable of many modes of speech. His head is stuffed with poetry that he can rattle off by the yard. (If you ask me, his misery owes to the fact that, for some reason or other, there came a time when Butley stopped learning new lines.) He is a one-man George-and-Martha, conducting a war of attrition against himself while only appearing to take on the other people in the room. He is dishonest, disloyal, insincere and cruel, but these are not so much character flaws as battle wounds. Butley's downfall, such as it is, comes across as sad as it is inevitable.

Continue reading about Butley at Portico.

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Scandal and uproar: No Saturday piece! Of course, I've backdated this a bit so that it will fit, but the truth is that I didn't write a thing on 14 October. Truth be known, I usually write everything the day before, painstakingly writing in the past tense. I don't know what happened today. I was just busy.

Happily, the movie that I saw yesterday was Infamous, the new Douglas McGrath movie about Truman Capote. The movie that Waited A Year to run in theatres, so as not to compete with Capote. All I'm going to say is that the two movies are brilliantly complementary, each magnificently better than the other in one way and totally lacking in another. The skinny, at least according to me, is that Capote is about writing, while Infamous is about love. Ordinarily, that would make Capote out to be the loser, but, watching it tonight, I had to hold on to it. Infamous is easy where Capote is analytical. And Capote has the best lines. The one about growing up in the same house and walking out different doors, for one. The line - the last line in the movie - about how "you didn't want to." Infamous has nothing to compare with these.

But Infamous is far better sourced, resting on a good book instead of a bad one, and Toby Jones, I must say, made me feel terribly sorry for Philip Seymour Hoffman. Because, jeeze, after I'd seen Infamous, I thought that PsH was me! So broad and strong. Toby Jones made me think that, if I had tried to impersonate Truman Capote, he'd have made me look like a a bear training at somebody's table. 

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It's clear to me, novice though I may be, that the time constraints imposed by Project Runway are truly deforming. They're getting in the way of the information that the show's creative designers have to tell us.

I say this because it was very very clear to me, novice though I may be, that Michael Knight would have recut his dress several times, if need be, to get the open part of his bodice just right. The judges were correct when they said that it was too much - and they were correct not to kick anybody off the show this week. What was wrong with Michael Knight's dress was time. He hadn't had the time to do the sort of fitting and recutting that his concept really required, and that is part of most bold designing. Michael was concentrating, as one might expect, on the weaving at the waist of his dress. He didn't realize that his dress had a hole instead of a cutout until it was too late.

So I hope that Project Runway will become more intelligent about stopwatches. In the real world. couture is very much not about deadlines, much as the show might wish to convey that idea. There are deadlines, to be sure, but they're not the deadlines that Project Runway imposes.

A real designer is not somebody who has to use a certain amount of cloth in twelve hours of cutting and sewing. I understand the commercial/marketing underpinnings of the show, but Project Runway will lose its audience the moment that it's perceived to be a marketing how-to. Sure, the big buyers want clothes fast and cheap. But audiences don't.

As Tim Gunn said this evening, fashion is essentially subjective. Of course it is - and that's one of the hurdles that Project Runway manages to jump from week to week. So let me just say that I really liked Jeffrey Sebelia's dress this week. I didn't understand why the judges disliked it, not at all. I thought he'd done a magnificent little Marie-Antoinette gown (the judges said "milkmaid," not realizing - why? - what a striking move this dress was for Jeffrey), and then photographed his model as Kirsten Dunst. What were the judges thinking? Or not.

And what am I thinking, writing about this show. 

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The MoMA is presenting a series of Otto Preminger films this month, and Ms NOLA asked me if I'd like to accompany her and her parents to an eight-thirty showing of Bonjour Tristesse yesterday evening. As Kathleen would be working late, I thought I might at least spend a bit more time with M & Mme NOLA. I didn't know what to expect of the movie. I'd never seen it, and only fell into talking about it in conjunction with recent discussions, here and there, of Jean Seberg. I had never stopped to think about the oddity of a Hollywood adaptation of a sensational French novel. In 1958, I might have been old enough (just) to have seen Vertigo, but Bonjour Tristesse would have been quite beyond the pale for a ten year-old. Since then, Preminger's reputation has never amounted to the sum of his parts, largely, I think, because he's the very opposite of Hitchcock, a dabbler in every genre. People who like Anatomy of a Murder will probably loathe Forever Amber. I certainly don't remember any Preminger festivals from college days, for what that's worth, which isn't much. And then there's the ambiguity of Laura. It's clearly a top-fifty film, sometimes a top-ten, but there's no denying that it dabbles in glamorous trashiness. It's very highly distilled pulp. So I haven't made a point of seeing movies just because Otto Preminger produced and directed them.

What a revelation, to see Bonjour Tristesse at a time when I've been reviewing the films that were very serious when I was young. The Antonionis, the Godards. The movies that I didn't really understand - even though I certainly felt their anti-bourgeois sting. Movies such as L'Eclisse didn't prompt disgust with the affluent classes; they merely reminded me that I belonged to one and would always belong. In many ways, Bonjour Tristesse is the ancestor of such films, and how telling that it's an "American" picture produced by a Viennese!

As film writer Foster Hirsch, who introduced the movie last night, pointed out, Preminger was the first filmmaker to present the inanity of unanchored life. He put together a dazzling show that American critics didn't like at all and that French critics were mad about. If the argument that Preminger inspired the Nouvelle Vague hasn't been made, then it's time that someone made it. Rather than analyse the film - a rather premature undertaking, since I've only seen Bonjour Tristesse once - I'll just offer a list of details that interested me. If you don't know the picture, I hope that they'll pique your curiosity.

• The car in the water at the end. I'd like Antonioni to deny that this is the source of a similarly-toned episode in L'Eclisse.
• The housemaid who, while all the fashionable guests are helping themselves to coupes of champagne, drains, as surreptitiously as possible, a tumbler of booze, off to the left. It's sort of like one of Hitchcock's appearances in his own movies, but also quite different. The help have no respect for their masters. Which is another way of saying that they are characters, too, not "housemaids."
• Martita Hunt, ferocious in green taffeta at the craps table. (Craps has just been introduced on the Côte d'Azur.) I first saw Hunt in The Brides of Dracula, something I wasn't supposed to see at the time, and I've never gotten over her performance as Dracula's mom.
• Mylène Demongeot's preposterous ribbon-basket hat. Very Fellini. The women's clothes, by the way, are incredibly beautiful, Givenchy and Hermès. You could watch Bonjour Tristesse for the couture alone.
• Deborah Kerr. Never has she looked quite so sleek and sophisticated - and yet she plays (as usual) the character who stands for "the good life," in the moral sense. (She actually labors, at fashion design.) It's almost impossible to cope with the fact that in her very next performance she would be the beaten-down daughter of Gladys Cooper, in Separate Tables. On my first trip to London, in 1977, I saw Ms Kerr, who was born in 1921, play Candida in the West End. It was a stretch, but it held.
• The gist of the story of Bonjour Tristesse is that Cécile, a rich girl of seventeen who, in Henry James's view at least, has been exposed to adult misbehavior far too early in life. resents the steadying but restrictive influence that a prospective stepmother (her own late mother's best friend) is going to have on the companionate life that she and her father have been quite inappropriately enjoying. (She calls him by his first name and kisses him, if briskly, on the mouth.) She comes up with an opera buffa plan to break off the impending nuptials, and there is a great deal of youthful plotting and scampering about. The rub of the story is that the child has no idea how very unfunny the consequences of her ruse will be. That giggling can lead to tragedy is something that the Nouvelle Vague auteurs would treat more starkly, more absurdly. But - and, again, Antonioni comes to mind, as well as Fellini - their films are certainly marked by unconsciously inappropriate laughter. Monica Vitti certainly knew how to transpose teenaged naughtiness into adult registers.
• The alternation between the black-and-white of the framing scenes, set in Paris, and the glorious color of the Côte d'Azur.
• I'll come back to that, but let's note that this movie was shot entirely on location in France. The actors may have been Anglophone. But as a Viennese, Preminger demonstrably knew how to coax his cast into speaking English as if it were speaking French. There is an insistence on the word "brilliant" - fun experiences are always "brilliant" - that points to a lot of génial in Françoise Sagan's novel.
• The Paris, black-and-white scenes are solemn and insouciant at the same time. That's to say that the buildings are solemn and the people are insouciant. While the Mediterranean scenes are backflashes in which the story unfolds, the black-and-white scenes constitute a period of less than twenty-four hours. They are increasingly conducted in voice-over, as the girl, now about a year older, looks back on the previous summer and refers to the "invisible wall of memories" that stands between her and all genuine feeling. Preminger dances on the cusp between the European idea that memories can be crippling and the American idea that you can do things that are so bad that you never feel right ever again. How strange that these are two different ideas!
• David Niven is quietly amazing as Cécile's father. He does the usual "tennis, anyone?" thing with consummate leggerezza while reflecting the dark awareness that he is not leading his life correctly. He and Jean Seberg are very handsome people whose lives are very, well, fucked up.
• There is a scene in which Cécile and the boy next door, Philippe, are about to succumb to passion-on-the-tiles. This is a pivotal scene in the plot, because Anne (Deborah Kerr, as the stepmother-to-be) walks in on the action and decides that the two kids can't see each other anymore. What you see when you hear Anne's admonition is a pair of a pair of legs, one white and smooth, the other lean and hairy. The sheer hairiness of Philippe's legs recalled, for me, Picasso's slightly pornographic Suite Vollard, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I don't think that I have ever seen a more sudden telegraphing of "where this is going." Philippe is a young law student, but, from the thighs down he's a satyr.

And the satyr was there last night, too: Geoffrey Horne, the actor who plays Philippe. He sat in the row in front of us, along with Preminger's widow, Hope, who at the time that Bonjour Tristesse was made was only Hope Bryce, the costume coordinator. After the showing, they both spoke, and Mr Horne inspired a lot of thought about the passage of time. We'd seen him, at twenty-five, playing a virile but soulful (and somewhat naive) twenty-five year-old. Last night, he was seventy-three: hale and hearty, but definitely not "the boy in the Speedo" whom Mr Hirsch introduced. Mr Horne did say how grateful he was that Bonjour Tristesse was as old as it was, because "nowadays, we'd have been naked, and what an embarrassment that would be!" Everyone laughed. But of course it wouldn't be embarrassment. It would just be a more mercilessly chiseled loss.

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