I will miss the "summer of darkness," the many films noirs that TCM showed in June and July; I also took the excellent course they offered, free, through Ball State University and the Canvas Network, taught by Richard Edwards. There are, however, many good films on TCM in August. As usual, I recommend any films by Chaplin, Hawks, Lubitsch and Ford. The best Chaplin in August is A Woman of Paris (1923), August 3,an elegant melodrama that was a major influence on Lubitsch and others. The best Lubitsch film of August is Ninotchka (1939), Aug 26,with Garbo at her best in one of the few films she made with a director who understood her. The best Ford and Hawks films star John Wayne: Ford's The Searchers (1956) and Hawks's Rio Bravo (1959), each something of a farewell to the classical Western. The best post-classical Westerns are by Sam Peckinpah: Ride the High Country (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969), both on Aug. 24. Other movies I like and recommend include:
Aug. 1 Otto Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962). One of the loveliest films made in widescreen black-and-white and one of the few intelligent films about American politics.
Aug. 2 James Whale's The Great Garrick (1937). A vivid film about the great 18th C. actor and the times in which he lived, by the stylish director who did not make just horror films.
Aug. 3 The Tall Target (1951). Terrific B film by Anthony Mann, about the attempted assassination of Lincoln.
Aug. 5 Films starring Fred Astaire, one of Balanchine's favorite dancers. My favorites include the elegant Shall We Dance (1937,with music by the Gershwins) and Minnelli's melancholic The Band Wagon (1953).
Aug. 6 Joseph Losey's The Romantic Englishwoman (1973), with an intriguing screenplay by Tom Stoppard
Aug. 7 Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby (1938), one of the best of that generally overrated genre "the screwball comedy."
Aug. 8 Raoul Walsh's Desperate Journey (1942), one of Walsh's felicitous collaborations with Errol Flynn.
Aug.12 Nicholas Ray's The Lusty Men(1952) and Minnelli's Home From the Hill (1960), two of the best films starring Robert Mitchum
Aug. 15 Max Ophuls's The Exile (1947). Stylish film, with beautiful tracking shots, made by someone who was himself an exile.
Aug. 16 Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950). A powerful and moving version of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, considerably more downbeat than Hawks's version.
Aug. 24 Budd Boetticher's The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond (1960), one of the last classical gangster films.
Aug 27 Frank Borzage's Three Comrades (1938), A film somewhat ahead of its time in its depiction of Nazi Germany, made by one of the most romantic of directors.
Aug. 28 Rossellini's Viaggio in Italia (1955). A masterpiece of post-neorealism.
Aug 29 Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959). A best-seller turned into an exploration of objectivity and ambiguity.
Aug. 30 Billy Wilder's Love in the Afternoon (1957). With a gracefully aging Gary Cooper in love with Audrey Hepburn.
Friday, July 31, 2015
Monday, July 27, 2015
Movie Chronicle: July 2015
Some of the movies I have seen and enjoyed this month, not including such dubious cotemporary movies as American Sniper and Inherent Vice (seen but not enjoyed), which look as if D.W. Griffith had never lived (though both Eastwood and Anderson have shown some ability in the past). The following films were all broadcast on Turner Classic Movies.
The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941). One of the best of Florey's stylish B pictures. Peter Lorre arrives in the U.S., finds a boarding house, and is disfigured in a fire before he can get started. No one will hire him, though he is skilled with watches, so he turns to a life of crime and gathers a gang. When he falls in love with a blind girl (Evelyn Keyes) he tries to go straight but his gang won't let him and kill Keyes with a car bomb. The gang them flees to Mexico but Lorre quietly takes the role of pilot and lands the whole gang in the middle of the desert, where everyone dies. Veteran cinematographer Franz Planer helps Florey to limn the dark side of the American dream.
Too Late for Tears (Byron Haskin,1949). $60,000 cash is thrown into Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy's car, by accident, and they keep it while sleazy Dan Duryea tries to get it back. Scott is driven to escape the "middle-class poor" and eventually kills Kennedy and Duryea, fleeing to Mexico with the money, where she dies falling off a balcony. Money is more important than anything to this femme fatale. Director Byron Haskin directed mostly science-fiction but did do one other excellent film noir: I Walk Alone (1948, also with Lizabeth Scott).
The Last Hurrah (John Ford, 1958). A relatively minor Ford film, reflecting his continuing disillusionment with modern America and the diminishing role of the Irish. Spencer Tracy plays a mayor, struggling with a re-election campaign where television is assuming a dominant role. Ford assembled many of his favorite aging actors, from Anna Lee to Donald Crisp, as the defeated mayor walks one way and history. represented by the victory parade of the new mayor, heads in the opposite direction.
The Strip (Leslie Kardos, 1951). One of many comeback attempts by Mickey Rooney, this is something of a musical film noir, with Rooney working as a bookie and a drummer and having his girl stolen by his gangster boss. There is some great music (though not enough) by Louie Armstrong, Earl Hines and Jack Teagarden and a serious role by William Demarest as "Fluff," the owner of a nightclub mourning his lost love. This is an unusual noir in that Rooney plays a Korean War vet. Once the Korean War came along, with all its ambiguities, the mood of the film noir changed considerably.
The Castle of Sand (Yoshito Nomura, 1974) is a beautiful Japanese detective film, directed by the little-known (in the West) Yoshito Nomura. It starts out as a routine policier and then ranges across forty years and all of Japan in an attempt to find the murderer of an unidentified man in Tokyo. Detectives travel across Japan in pursuit of obscure clues, the film ending with a flashback, a lengthy journey many years before by a man with leprosy and his young son through snow and rain, intensely depicted in widescreen color, with a moving score by Yasushi Akutagawa. Also present in the film, in a small but important role, is Chishu Ryu, a regular in Ozu's films.
The Face Behind the Mask (Robert Florey, 1941). One of the best of Florey's stylish B pictures. Peter Lorre arrives in the U.S., finds a boarding house, and is disfigured in a fire before he can get started. No one will hire him, though he is skilled with watches, so he turns to a life of crime and gathers a gang. When he falls in love with a blind girl (Evelyn Keyes) he tries to go straight but his gang won't let him and kill Keyes with a car bomb. The gang them flees to Mexico but Lorre quietly takes the role of pilot and lands the whole gang in the middle of the desert, where everyone dies. Veteran cinematographer Franz Planer helps Florey to limn the dark side of the American dream.
Too Late for Tears (Byron Haskin,1949). $60,000 cash is thrown into Lizabeth Scott and Arthur Kennedy's car, by accident, and they keep it while sleazy Dan Duryea tries to get it back. Scott is driven to escape the "middle-class poor" and eventually kills Kennedy and Duryea, fleeing to Mexico with the money, where she dies falling off a balcony. Money is more important than anything to this femme fatale. Director Byron Haskin directed mostly science-fiction but did do one other excellent film noir: I Walk Alone (1948, also with Lizabeth Scott).
The Last Hurrah (John Ford, 1958). A relatively minor Ford film, reflecting his continuing disillusionment with modern America and the diminishing role of the Irish. Spencer Tracy plays a mayor, struggling with a re-election campaign where television is assuming a dominant role. Ford assembled many of his favorite aging actors, from Anna Lee to Donald Crisp, as the defeated mayor walks one way and history. represented by the victory parade of the new mayor, heads in the opposite direction.
The Strip (Leslie Kardos, 1951). One of many comeback attempts by Mickey Rooney, this is something of a musical film noir, with Rooney working as a bookie and a drummer and having his girl stolen by his gangster boss. There is some great music (though not enough) by Louie Armstrong, Earl Hines and Jack Teagarden and a serious role by William Demarest as "Fluff," the owner of a nightclub mourning his lost love. This is an unusual noir in that Rooney plays a Korean War vet. Once the Korean War came along, with all its ambiguities, the mood of the film noir changed considerably.
The Castle of Sand (Yoshito Nomura, 1974) is a beautiful Japanese detective film, directed by the little-known (in the West) Yoshito Nomura. It starts out as a routine policier and then ranges across forty years and all of Japan in an attempt to find the murderer of an unidentified man in Tokyo. Detectives travel across Japan in pursuit of obscure clues, the film ending with a flashback, a lengthy journey many years before by a man with leprosy and his young son through snow and rain, intensely depicted in widescreen color, with a moving score by Yasushi Akutagawa. Also present in the film, in a small but important role, is Chishu Ryu, a regular in Ozu's films.
Sally Gross, 1933-2015
Bruce Weber's obituary in yesterday's New York Times was eloquent in its descriptions of Sally's life and her beautiful minimalist dances. Sally's work to me seemed to span what little difference there was between ordinary movement and dance. I remember when I saw her and her company perform at the Joyce: when I walked out onto the street afterwards I saw choreography everywhere. She made one aware that even standing still could be part of intense movement.
Sally was also an excellent and enthusiastic tennis player and I played doubles with her many times in Central Park. Not only did she move beautifully on the tennis court, she also had unusual skill in working out the movements of doubles with her partners, sort of choreography on the fly! I had to concentrate during a point not to be distracted by the fascinating quality of how effectively and efficiently she moved.
I hadn't seen much of Sally in recent years, as my young children were taking up much of my time, but whenever I see dance these days my perception of the choreography is influenced by Sally Gross's minimalism.
Sally was also an excellent and enthusiastic tennis player and I played doubles with her many times in Central Park. Not only did she move beautifully on the tennis court, she also had unusual skill in working out the movements of doubles with her partners, sort of choreography on the fly! I had to concentrate during a point not to be distracted by the fascinating quality of how effectively and efficiently she moved.
I hadn't seen much of Sally in recent years, as my young children were taking up much of my time, but whenever I see dance these days my perception of the choreography is influenced by Sally Gross's minimalism.
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Nabokov in America: On the Road to Lolita by Robert Roper
But he did love America -- many things about vulgar far-flung America.
--Richard Roper, Nabokov in America (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Vladimir Nabokov is one of my favorite writers and I never tire of re-reading his books or reading new insights into his work. Roper does not have much in the way of detail to add to Brian Boyd's two-volume biography (Princeton University Press, 1991) but he does bring his own views as a novelist to bear on Nabokov's works, giving precise details of Nabokov's life in America, where he began as a butterfly collector for the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History.
Nabokov's life has many interesting parallels with that of Georgian George Balanchine, who was five years younger than Nabokov and also spent time in France before coming to America, achieving fame in the 1950's by making many wonderful ballets that showed an intense influence of America combined with a detailed knowledge of Russian classical and folk dance, from Serenade to Western Symphony, Stars and Stripes and beyond. Roper barely mentions Balanchine, who was great friends with Stravinsky (and did many ballets to his music) and used the music of Vladimir's cousin, Nicolas Nabokov, for his elegiac Don Quixote.
One of the many pleasures of re-reading Nabokov is the richness of his vocabulary, especially compared to the impoverished vocabulary of many contemporary novels. Roper himself is somewhat sesquipedalian and is unafraid to use appropriate words, such as supercilious, riparian and flaneur. He is also quite good with metaphors and similes, something increasingly rare with writers of both fiction and non-fiction (editors seem to think, probably correctly, that most people will not understand them!)
I don't know how many people remember the feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, over Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, but Roper brings this alive, vividly evoking a time (1965) when such things mattered to more people than they do now. Roper is not only conversant with all of Nabokov's novels, in great detail, but he has mastered most of the secondary material and has excellent (implied) suggestions about what else to read.
--Richard Roper, Nabokov in America (Bloomsbury, 2015).
Vladimir Nabokov is one of my favorite writers and I never tire of re-reading his books or reading new insights into his work. Roper does not have much in the way of detail to add to Brian Boyd's two-volume biography (Princeton University Press, 1991) but he does bring his own views as a novelist to bear on Nabokov's works, giving precise details of Nabokov's life in America, where he began as a butterfly collector for the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History.
Nabokov's life has many interesting parallels with that of Georgian George Balanchine, who was five years younger than Nabokov and also spent time in France before coming to America, achieving fame in the 1950's by making many wonderful ballets that showed an intense influence of America combined with a detailed knowledge of Russian classical and folk dance, from Serenade to Western Symphony, Stars and Stripes and beyond. Roper barely mentions Balanchine, who was great friends with Stravinsky (and did many ballets to his music) and used the music of Vladimir's cousin, Nicolas Nabokov, for his elegiac Don Quixote.
One of the many pleasures of re-reading Nabokov is the richness of his vocabulary, especially compared to the impoverished vocabulary of many contemporary novels. Roper himself is somewhat sesquipedalian and is unafraid to use appropriate words, such as supercilious, riparian and flaneur. He is also quite good with metaphors and similes, something increasingly rare with writers of both fiction and non-fiction (editors seem to think, probably correctly, that most people will not understand them!)
I don't know how many people remember the feud between Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, over Nabokov's translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, but Roper brings this alive, vividly evoking a time (1965) when such things mattered to more people than they do now. Roper is not only conversant with all of Nabokov's novels, in great detail, but he has mastered most of the secondary material and has excellent (implied) suggestions about what else to read.
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Four
At that time, I was sixteen that summer, there were only three things I wanted. The first was a girlfriend. The second was to sleep with a girl. The third was to get drunk.
Or, if I am being totally honest, there were only two things: sleeping with a girl and getting drunk. I had lots of other interests, I was full of ambition in all sorts of areas: I liked reading, listening to music, playing the guitar, watching films, playing soccer, swimming and snorkeling, traveling abroad, having money and buying myself bits of equipment, but in effect all that was about having a good time, about spending my time in the most agreeable fashion possible, and that was fine, all of it, but when it came to the crunch there were only two things I really wanted.
No, when it actually came down to it, there was only one.
I wanted to sleep with a girl.
That was the only thing I wanted.
--Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett).
The fourth book in Knausgaard's saga is the most recently translated. We have to wait a year for the next one and a year after that for the sixth and final volume. There have been numerous attempts to analyze what makes these volumes so compelling and I think "totally honest" is one of the reasons, as well as a feeling for the poetry of the mundane and the quotidian, something Joyce, Faulkner and Nabokov all had. Volume four is somewhat more organized and limited in time than the previous three volumes; it covers ages sixteen to nineteen, starting with Karl Ove going to northern Norway to teach school at 18 and flashing back to his last two years of high school (apparently in Norway one can be a teacher without any college).
Karl Ove's attempts to sleep with a girl are constantly thwarted by premature ejaculation:
I rubbed against her, and then, oh no, for Christ's sake it can't be true, not now! Not now! But it was. A jerk, a spasm and it was all over.
Of course it never occurs to him to seek medical or psychological help with this problem; he keeps it to himself and just keeps trying, not letting it interfere with his teaching, his reading and, especially his writing, from record reviews to short stories. He is as determined to be a writer as he is to successfully have sexual intercourse.
Throughout the book Karl Ove struggles with his family, living with his mother and brother before and after going off to teach and going to his abusive father's second wedding (where he falls asleep, drunk in the bathroom, and misses the celebratory dinner). There are marvelous descriptions of the people and the weather in the fishing village where he teaches and works hard to reach the sometimes indifferent students. And throughout he has the observant eye of a poet: I shook my head and passed a garden surrounded by wire fencing, inside which there were three trees groaning with dark red apples. A blue station wagon parked in the adjacent drive glinted in the sunlight.
Or, if I am being totally honest, there were only two things: sleeping with a girl and getting drunk. I had lots of other interests, I was full of ambition in all sorts of areas: I liked reading, listening to music, playing the guitar, watching films, playing soccer, swimming and snorkeling, traveling abroad, having money and buying myself bits of equipment, but in effect all that was about having a good time, about spending my time in the most agreeable fashion possible, and that was fine, all of it, but when it came to the crunch there were only two things I really wanted.
No, when it actually came down to it, there was only one.
I wanted to sleep with a girl.
That was the only thing I wanted.
--Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett).
The fourth book in Knausgaard's saga is the most recently translated. We have to wait a year for the next one and a year after that for the sixth and final volume. There have been numerous attempts to analyze what makes these volumes so compelling and I think "totally honest" is one of the reasons, as well as a feeling for the poetry of the mundane and the quotidian, something Joyce, Faulkner and Nabokov all had. Volume four is somewhat more organized and limited in time than the previous three volumes; it covers ages sixteen to nineteen, starting with Karl Ove going to northern Norway to teach school at 18 and flashing back to his last two years of high school (apparently in Norway one can be a teacher without any college).
Karl Ove's attempts to sleep with a girl are constantly thwarted by premature ejaculation:
I rubbed against her, and then, oh no, for Christ's sake it can't be true, not now! Not now! But it was. A jerk, a spasm and it was all over.
Of course it never occurs to him to seek medical or psychological help with this problem; he keeps it to himself and just keeps trying, not letting it interfere with his teaching, his reading and, especially his writing, from record reviews to short stories. He is as determined to be a writer as he is to successfully have sexual intercourse.
Throughout the book Karl Ove struggles with his family, living with his mother and brother before and after going off to teach and going to his abusive father's second wedding (where he falls asleep, drunk in the bathroom, and misses the celebratory dinner). There are marvelous descriptions of the people and the weather in the fishing village where he teaches and works hard to reach the sometimes indifferent students. And throughout he has the observant eye of a poet: I shook my head and passed a garden surrounded by wire fencing, inside which there were three trees groaning with dark red apples. A blue station wagon parked in the adjacent drive glinted in the sunlight.
Friday, July 17, 2015
Carl Theodor Dreyer's Day of Wrath (1943)
With Day of Wrath Dreyer tackled head on for the first time his perennial preoccupation with witchcraft -- or rather, with woman as witch -- and came up, of course, with a verdict of not guilty to the black arts of superstition, but guilty to having power over the souls of other human beings.
Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, (A.S. Barnes and Company, 1971).
Danish director Dreyer is little talked about today and I think that is, in part, due to the fact that many of us were exposed to his The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) when we were students and it was promoted as the epitome of film as art (along with Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, from 1925). These rigorous but arcane films turned students away from film, especially silent film, as effectively as A Tale of Two Cities and The Mill on the Floss (the weakest novels of Dickens and Eliot) turned students away from literature. Some of us who persevered with films as we grew up, however, eventually came to discover the intricate beauty and austerity of Dreyer's sound films, of which he made only five (compared to nine silent films).
Day of Wrath was made during the German occupation of Denmark, leading some critics to see it as a simplistic allegory, though it is much more. It takes place in Denmark in 1623 and its black-and-white chiaroscuro is comparable to Rembrandt, who painted in the 17th century. It starts out with an accused witch tortured and burned alive and follows the struggle of a parson's young wife who falls love with the parson's son and who is accused of being a witch by her mother-in-law when the parson dies; the wife confesses that she did wish her husband dead. The stuffy parsonage is contrasted with the freedom the son and wife feel when they are outside (where the parson and his mother never go), enjoying the rivers and the trees, an obvious influence of Griffith, who stressed the cinematic importance of "the wind in the trees."
Dreyer's austere and slow-moving style emphasizes the choices people have and how those choices are often suppressed by religion and society, often working together. But Day of Wrath is not particularly didactic, demonstrating its intense sympathy for everyone's struggle to believe and to do the right thing.
Tom Milne, The Cinema of Carl Dreyer, (A.S. Barnes and Company, 1971).
Danish director Dreyer is little talked about today and I think that is, in part, due to the fact that many of us were exposed to his The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927) when we were students and it was promoted as the epitome of film as art (along with Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, from 1925). These rigorous but arcane films turned students away from film, especially silent film, as effectively as A Tale of Two Cities and The Mill on the Floss (the weakest novels of Dickens and Eliot) turned students away from literature. Some of us who persevered with films as we grew up, however, eventually came to discover the intricate beauty and austerity of Dreyer's sound films, of which he made only five (compared to nine silent films).
Day of Wrath was made during the German occupation of Denmark, leading some critics to see it as a simplistic allegory, though it is much more. It takes place in Denmark in 1623 and its black-and-white chiaroscuro is comparable to Rembrandt, who painted in the 17th century. It starts out with an accused witch tortured and burned alive and follows the struggle of a parson's young wife who falls love with the parson's son and who is accused of being a witch by her mother-in-law when the parson dies; the wife confesses that she did wish her husband dead. The stuffy parsonage is contrasted with the freedom the son and wife feel when they are outside (where the parson and his mother never go), enjoying the rivers and the trees, an obvious influence of Griffith, who stressed the cinematic importance of "the wind in the trees."
Dreyer's austere and slow-moving style emphasizes the choices people have and how those choices are often suppressed by religion and society, often working together. But Day of Wrath is not particularly didactic, demonstrating its intense sympathy for everyone's struggle to believe and to do the right thing.
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Frozen
I generally avoid animated features, especially in this age of computer-generated animation, when animated features are ugly and claustrophobic. I do continue to enjoy the animated shorts of Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and others, who produced hand-drawn mini-masterpieces with such characters as Bugs Bunny and Wile E. Coyote. My about-to-turn-four daughter Victoria, however, has become rather fond of the characters Elsa and Anna from Disney's Frozen (they are ubiquitous in her pre-school) so Susan and I thought we would watch the film before we offered it to her for viewing.
The Palace Walls were of driven snow, the doors and windows of cutting wind; there were over a hundred halls, as all the drifting snow had formed them, the largest stretching for many miles, and all brightly lit by the strong Northern Lights. They were vast, empty, ice-cold and gleaming.
Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen.
The Disney movie has little to do with the original Andersen story, but rather is a meretricious and bland version in typical Disney style. I can't even say it is for children of all ages because there is too much gratuitous violence, unmotivated cruelty and primitive humor for a four-year-old (or anyone else, for that matter); it's as harsh as a Norwegian winter, as Anna seeks her sister Elsa in the snow. One thing I found interesting were the parallels to the gentler TV series on Disney, Jr. Sofia the First; Disney has always been a studio unafraid to repeat themes endlessly: Sofia the First also has friendly trolls, squabbling sister princesses, and a talking bunny who plays a more pivotal role in Sofia the First than the snowman Olaf does in Frozen.
If you have young children I recommend reading them fairy tales, or finding versions they can read themselves. There are also some excellent puppet shows around: Nicolas Coppola did a fairly straightforward version of The Snow Queen at Puppetworks in Park Slope that my daughter loved.
The Palace Walls were of driven snow, the doors and windows of cutting wind; there were over a hundred halls, as all the drifting snow had formed them, the largest stretching for many miles, and all brightly lit by the strong Northern Lights. They were vast, empty, ice-cold and gleaming.
Hans Christian Andersen, The Snow Queen.
The Disney movie has little to do with the original Andersen story, but rather is a meretricious and bland version in typical Disney style. I can't even say it is for children of all ages because there is too much gratuitous violence, unmotivated cruelty and primitive humor for a four-year-old (or anyone else, for that matter); it's as harsh as a Norwegian winter, as Anna seeks her sister Elsa in the snow. One thing I found interesting were the parallels to the gentler TV series on Disney, Jr. Sofia the First; Disney has always been a studio unafraid to repeat themes endlessly: Sofia the First also has friendly trolls, squabbling sister princesses, and a talking bunny who plays a more pivotal role in Sofia the First than the snowman Olaf does in Frozen.
If you have young children I recommend reading them fairy tales, or finding versions they can read themselves. There are also some excellent puppet shows around: Nicolas Coppola did a fairly straightforward version of The Snow Queen at Puppetworks in Park Slope that my daughter loved.
Thursday, July 9, 2015
Laura Jacobs, Cathedral of Ice (in The New Criterion, June 2015)
It's been too slowly dispelled, the Kirstein-Balanchine taboo placed on intense interpretation of the ballets.
Laura Jacobs
Laura Jacobs's fascinating article is a history of Balanchine and Stravinsky's Le Basier de la Fe, and a review of Elizabeth Kendall's Balanchine and the Lost Muse: Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer, which, as Jacobs says "showed that there existed a wealth of material that no one had thought to look for." (I wrote about Kendall's book on this blog Nov.12,2013). Although I am not one who believes that biography is crucial to an understanding of an artist's work, Balanchine's life can shed a lot of light on his choreography. But even more crucial is what Jacobs does in her article: following the path of particular ballets and their music; Balanchine was continually re-working his ballets and changing the music-- the switching of movements in Serenade is the best-known example.
We are still waiting for Arlene Croce's book about Balanchine, originally scheduled for 2004. Meanwhile, as Jacobs points out, discussion about Balanchine is expanding: she mentions Don Daniels in Ballet Review, Jennifer Homans at work on a Balanchine biography (Richard Buckle's biography, published in 1988, was severely cut before it went to press), and Lynn Garafola's conferences on Russian ballet at Barnard. We do have Croce's useful collections of columns, collected in two volumes, and Charles M. Joseph's Stravinsky and Balanchine, as well as poet Edwin Denby's collection of dance writing (he wrote intelligently in the forties about Balanchine's ballets).
One of the problems that needs to be solved is how to describe Balanchine's choreography so that even those without technical knowledge can understand it. My initial suggestion is to use ballet terms to whatever extent necessary and to provide detailed references and an extensive glossary of those terms, from attitude to tour jete.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
The Kid: The Immortal Life of Ted Williams by Ben Bradlee, Jr.
In the fallout from the cryonics affair, people were reminded of the fact that Williams was not just the greatest hitter who ever lived, not just the war hero, and not just the man who had helped sick children but also a man with all the same human frailties that fans had. He had never really shaken the shame he carried from childhood -- about his mother, the Salvation Army zealot, who had time for street urchins but not for him; about his absent and indifferent father, who finally abandoned the family; about his jealous, thieving brother; and about his own bloodlines and ethnicity.
Ben Bradlee, Jr., The Kid (Little Brown and Company 2013).
When I was a child in the fifties Ted Williams and Elvis Presley were my heroes, due in no small part not only to how much they accomplished but also to how much they were disliked by adults for their unwillingness to conform. One of my favorite stories about Williams is how in 1941 he could have sat out the last two games of the year, a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics, and would have ended up with a .39955 average, which would have been rounded up to .400. But Williams was no Jose Reyes, who in 2011 removed himself from the last game of the season in order to win the batting title, and Williams went six for eight in the two games to end the season with a .406 average. Bradlee points out that Williams is the only .400 hitter in the modern era who did not benefit from the sacrifice fly rule: the sacrifice fly rule, a sacrifice fly does not count as a time at bat, was not in effect from 1940 to 1954; if the rule had been in effect in 1941 Williams, who hit six sacrifice flies that year, would have batted .411.
Williams was a great hitter on mostly mediocre Red Sox teams, owned by cheapskate Tom Yawkey and the last major league team to have an African-American player. When I was a kid on vacation in New Hampshire in the fifties I did see Williams hit a home run in Fenway Park and he did not tip his hat to the fans, though he did not spit at them, as he was known to do and for which he was vilified in the Boston newspapers, of which there were from seven to nine during Williams's career. The good that Williams did for the Jimmy fund, which raised money for kids with cancer, he kept out of the newspapers, but he neglected his own three children as much as his mother (whose Mexican heritage he concealed) had neglected him. When Williams died, in 2002, Williams's son John-Henry arranged to have Ted Williams's head frozen indefinitely, with the announced hope of possibly marketing the DNA at some future point. It was never cleared up whether John-Henry had permission to do this from Williams, whose will said he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the ocean. John-Henry himself died from cancer in 2004 and he also was frozen.
Williams was married and divorced three times and had numerous affairs, during and between the marriages. Two other women he is known to have proposed to: one said that she would only marry him if he put her first and he said no, baseball was first, fishing was second and she would be third. Another woman turned him down because he wanted exclusive rights to her and he would only marry her if she put her children in boarding school.
Williams had quite an ego and was known to pop off often, his tirades full of obscenities; Bradlee does a superb job of quoting much of what Williams said publicly as well as personally, having interviewed many of those in Williams's life. Williams was considered a hero for forfeiting three years of his career for service in the Korean War and WW II; Bradlee documents how Williams fought his induction in both cases, though this did not stop him from an accomplished career as a pilot in both wars.
The one thing I have a quibble with in this biography is that there is little devoted to Williams's fielding, playing in the pre-DH era. He supposedly was slow and didn't have much of an arm, but Bradlee does not discuss how well or how poorly Williams played left field. After all, the fielding abilities of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth are seldom mentioned or analyzed but rather taken for granted.
Ben Bradlee, Jr., The Kid (Little Brown and Company 2013).
When I was a child in the fifties Ted Williams and Elvis Presley were my heroes, due in no small part not only to how much they accomplished but also to how much they were disliked by adults for their unwillingness to conform. One of my favorite stories about Williams is how in 1941 he could have sat out the last two games of the year, a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics, and would have ended up with a .39955 average, which would have been rounded up to .400. But Williams was no Jose Reyes, who in 2011 removed himself from the last game of the season in order to win the batting title, and Williams went six for eight in the two games to end the season with a .406 average. Bradlee points out that Williams is the only .400 hitter in the modern era who did not benefit from the sacrifice fly rule: the sacrifice fly rule, a sacrifice fly does not count as a time at bat, was not in effect from 1940 to 1954; if the rule had been in effect in 1941 Williams, who hit six sacrifice flies that year, would have batted .411.
Williams was a great hitter on mostly mediocre Red Sox teams, owned by cheapskate Tom Yawkey and the last major league team to have an African-American player. When I was a kid on vacation in New Hampshire in the fifties I did see Williams hit a home run in Fenway Park and he did not tip his hat to the fans, though he did not spit at them, as he was known to do and for which he was vilified in the Boston newspapers, of which there were from seven to nine during Williams's career. The good that Williams did for the Jimmy fund, which raised money for kids with cancer, he kept out of the newspapers, but he neglected his own three children as much as his mother (whose Mexican heritage he concealed) had neglected him. When Williams died, in 2002, Williams's son John-Henry arranged to have Ted Williams's head frozen indefinitely, with the announced hope of possibly marketing the DNA at some future point. It was never cleared up whether John-Henry had permission to do this from Williams, whose will said he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered in the ocean. John-Henry himself died from cancer in 2004 and he also was frozen.
Williams was married and divorced three times and had numerous affairs, during and between the marriages. Two other women he is known to have proposed to: one said that she would only marry him if he put her first and he said no, baseball was first, fishing was second and she would be third. Another woman turned him down because he wanted exclusive rights to her and he would only marry her if she put her children in boarding school.
Williams had quite an ego and was known to pop off often, his tirades full of obscenities; Bradlee does a superb job of quoting much of what Williams said publicly as well as personally, having interviewed many of those in Williams's life. Williams was considered a hero for forfeiting three years of his career for service in the Korean War and WW II; Bradlee documents how Williams fought his induction in both cases, though this did not stop him from an accomplished career as a pilot in both wars.
The one thing I have a quibble with in this biography is that there is little devoted to Williams's fielding, playing in the pre-DH era. He supposedly was slow and didn't have much of an arm, but Bradlee does not discuss how well or how poorly Williams played left field. After all, the fielding abilities of Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth are seldom mentioned or analyzed but rather taken for granted.
Monday, July 6, 2015
Cubs at Mets, July 2, 2015
I have felt fortunate the last two years that there have been day games during the week on my birthday, July 2, last year the Yankees and this year the Mets. (I generally don't go to night games or day games on week-ends because I prefer to spend the time with my daughter, who will soon be four and should be ready to see games soon). This year we took the R to the D to the M to the 7 to get to Citifield on a lovely day for a ball game. We sat in the promenade club fairly high up in seats that cost $28 and had a beautiful view of the field. In my previous visits to Citifield I sat at field level and didn't particularly care for the view; at that level the ball is against the background of the fans while where we were sitting Thursday the background of the ball was the green grass and the blue sky. I've previously compared baseball to ballet and sitting in the promenade club is similar to sitting in the 4th ring at the New York City Ballet, where all the gorgeous patterns of Balanchine's ballets can be best appreciated, spread out before you as the field is in baseball from the promenade.
The game itself was beautifully pitched by Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta but not so beautifully by Mets pitcher Jacob DeGrom, who as removed in the 6th after giving up four runs, though he did score the only Mets run of the game, hitting a double and being driven in by Granderson in the 2nd. Jonathan Herrera laid down a successful safety squeeze for one of the Cubs' runs, quite a contrast to the Mets totally botched suicide squeeze the previous day, when Darrell Ceciliani completely missed the ball and two Mets ended up on third base! (though one can't blame Mets manager Terry Collins in his desperation to score a run).
The final score was 6-1 Cubs and an enjoyable day of relaxation, watching the elegant game of baseball at the ballpark.
The game itself was beautifully pitched by Cubs pitcher Jake Arrieta but not so beautifully by Mets pitcher Jacob DeGrom, who as removed in the 6th after giving up four runs, though he did score the only Mets run of the game, hitting a double and being driven in by Granderson in the 2nd. Jonathan Herrera laid down a successful safety squeeze for one of the Cubs' runs, quite a contrast to the Mets totally botched suicide squeeze the previous day, when Darrell Ceciliani completely missed the ball and two Mets ended up on third base! (though one can't blame Mets manager Terry Collins in his desperation to score a run).
The final score was 6-1 Cubs and an enjoyable day of relaxation, watching the elegant game of baseball at the ballpark.
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
Turner Classic Movies in July
Today, July 1, we have two of the best films of two of the world's best directors: John Ford's The Searchers, his best Western, and Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer's Day of Wrath, a story of a witch hunt in 17th century Denmark, made in Dreyer's rigorously austere style.
Turner continues its "Summer of Darkness" with its Friday night films noirs. My favorites include Raoul Walsh's White Heat, with an explosive James Cagney, and Nicholas Ray's lovely and sad They Live by Night on July 3. On July 10 is Anthony Mann's Side Street and his Raw Deal (a great film noir title), Rudolph Mate's D.O.A. (about a man who solves his own murder), Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (where Mike Hammer acts tough but is used as a patsy). On the 17 is Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (with a Raymond Chandler screenplay based on a Patricia Highsmith novel) and Phil Karlson's 99 River Street (about a boxer who tries to play it straight and suffers for it). On the 24th is Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (a dark film about infidelity) and Otto Preminger's Angel Face (Preminger's films noirs are among his best films). On the 31st there is more Lang, The Big Heat and the brilliant Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Nicholas Ray's colorful period gangster/musical film Party Girl, Robert Siodmak's fatalistic Criss Cross, John Huston's Asphalt Jungle, a failed caper film, and Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, the ultimate film about the prosecution of an innocent man.
There are other John Ford films this month, including The Last Hurrah (Ford's final comments on contemporary America) July 18, The Quiet Man (about Ireland as seen by an American) July 21, and Wee Willie Winkie (about the world as seen by a child) July 13. There is more Nicholas Ray -- the iconic Rebel Without a Cause July 18-- and an Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart that shows the genre at its most intense: The Man From Laramie July 11.
Also this month are two musicals by Vincente Minnelli, the rich period piece Meet Me in St Louis July 7 and the melancholy The Band Wagon July 5,and there is Jacques Demy's fairy-tale musical Donkey Skin July 5. There are two sparkling comedies by Lubitsch, Shop Around the Corner July 11 and Heaven Can Wait July 8, as well as Chaplin's The Great Dictator July 5.
Three of my favorite films in July are melodramas, all three about dealing with death, both courting it and trying to avoid it : Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse July 29, King Vidor's Duel in the Sun July 8, and Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim July 2.
These are among my favorites for July, though as always I strongly encourage the viewing of films that are not familiar or that you may not even have heard of; there are always new gems to find.
Turner continues its "Summer of Darkness" with its Friday night films noirs. My favorites include Raoul Walsh's White Heat, with an explosive James Cagney, and Nicholas Ray's lovely and sad They Live by Night on July 3. On July 10 is Anthony Mann's Side Street and his Raw Deal (a great film noir title), Rudolph Mate's D.O.A. (about a man who solves his own murder), Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (where Mike Hammer acts tough but is used as a patsy). On the 17 is Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (with a Raymond Chandler screenplay based on a Patricia Highsmith novel) and Phil Karlson's 99 River Street (about a boxer who tries to play it straight and suffers for it). On the 24th is Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (a dark film about infidelity) and Otto Preminger's Angel Face (Preminger's films noirs are among his best films). On the 31st there is more Lang, The Big Heat and the brilliant Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Nicholas Ray's colorful period gangster/musical film Party Girl, Robert Siodmak's fatalistic Criss Cross, John Huston's Asphalt Jungle, a failed caper film, and Hitchcock's The Wrong Man, the ultimate film about the prosecution of an innocent man.
There are other John Ford films this month, including The Last Hurrah (Ford's final comments on contemporary America) July 18, The Quiet Man (about Ireland as seen by an American) July 21, and Wee Willie Winkie (about the world as seen by a child) July 13. There is more Nicholas Ray -- the iconic Rebel Without a Cause July 18-- and an Anthony Mann Western with James Stewart that shows the genre at its most intense: The Man From Laramie July 11.
Also this month are two musicals by Vincente Minnelli, the rich period piece Meet Me in St Louis July 7 and the melancholy The Band Wagon July 5,and there is Jacques Demy's fairy-tale musical Donkey Skin July 5. There are two sparkling comedies by Lubitsch, Shop Around the Corner July 11 and Heaven Can Wait July 8, as well as Chaplin's The Great Dictator July 5.
Three of my favorite films in July are melodramas, all three about dealing with death, both courting it and trying to avoid it : Otto Preminger's Bonjour Tristesse July 29, King Vidor's Duel in the Sun July 8, and Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim July 2.
These are among my favorites for July, though as always I strongly encourage the viewing of films that are not familiar or that you may not even have heard of; there are always new gems to find.
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