Borat, Letterman, O'Reilly

Borat's guest shot on Letterman was worth catching. Sacha Baron Cohen has the character down. I must have laughed through the whole appearance, a real accomplishment on these deeply formularized talk shows. Letterman in particular is a hard case. Letterman's recent dumb put-downs of Bill O'Reilly was a major miscalculation — the audience doesn't like O'Reilly, but they listen to him. Letterman appeared more a bully than what was his probable expectation: wild cheers for currently fashionable opinions, a truly demagogic approach. The cheers never materialized, although the hoots evoked by spectacle were in evidence. O'Reilly, strange as it seems, came off sounding circumspect, amazing, given the obnoxious exhibitionism of O'Reilly's character; Letterman couldn't pull off…what?, I never could figure out if Letterman wanted to make a point or take a cheap shot. I don't think Letterman knew — he just thought he had an easy chance and he would take it.

I seldom stop even briefly anymore to see what Letterman is up to; he has become disturbing looking as well, as though he needs to check himself into the Nicole Richie Wing of a local treatment facility for anorexia. Letterman was always a control freak, always unsympathetic, giving guests a hard time — it was his shtick, conflated with an articulated, glossy professionalism that could sound smart, clever. But now Letterman has curdled into little more than a smart-ass celebrity. Borat reminded the audience that you can be funny, edgy, but likable. The audience was with Borat; I don't know why they would be with Letterman.

The World Series Not

Going into the World Series I didn't really have a team I was pulling for so I finally picked the Tigers because I didn't like La Russa. La Russa's clenched stare, joyless and cold, made Leyland look like a benevolent uncle. But the Tigers managed to do just about everything wrong as they embarrassed themselves and bored the viewers. The Cardinals played well enough, but the Tigers flat out lost it for themselves. The Tiger's pitchers can place a ball within a narrow tunnel at home plate, making the ball do somersaults on the way, at close to a 100-mph; but if the same pitchers swing toward first or third to throw someone out the result resembles a fire drill in a mental hospital. Five “fielding errors” by Tiger pitchers — throwing errors.

The closest spectacle to this ineptitude can be seen in many NBA games where you regularly see multi-million dollar athletes who can't nail a free throw. Big disappointment this World Series. Strange thing is that individually these are (nearly) all very good players. No team chemistry — no team rhythm. As it began, it looked like the teams that made it to the World Series were stand-ins for other teams — that impression was reinforced by the level of play.

Kagan / Springer

Robert Kagan had some interesting things to say on Charlie Rose. He feels that Hussein was “uniquely dangerous” and that it was a good idea to remove him. He said that the world was becoming, as Kissinger had predicted, “multipolar” and that, unlike France, he felt that was a bad thing — more dangerous. He felt that the consequences of not seeing Iraq through — which he said should include sending more troops, something he had advocated since 2003 — is a rational choice, perhaps the only choice; although he felt that troop levels would remain at about 150,000 for several years to come.

And the best line of the day, yesterday, from Jerry Springer after being voted off Dancing With the Stars, “I want to thank the public for letting me go home.”

Taking Responsibility

Jim Leyland was asked about his decision to pitch to Pujols in the first game of the World Series. Pujols, with first base open, homered and broke the game open. Leyland said he took full responsibility, it was his decision. He said that he told Justin Verlander to pitch outside and that “the ball trailed back over the plate”. The sportscasters went on about how Leyland took responsibility. When do you hear that?, they asked.

You hear it all the time. Hastert takes responsibility, Rumsfeld takes responsibility, and then they go back to their jobs. If Leyland was saying it was all his doing, why did he let slip an apparent mistake on the part of his pitcher? Leyland implied that it was his pitcher who didn't perform as instructed, not his responsibility at all. If Hastert and Rumsfeld take responsibility, how does that reflect any change in the real world?

“Taking responsibility” has become a meaningless deflection in the Kabuki theatre of public life.

Obama/McCain

Barack Obama's appearance on Charlie Rose was such an oasis of sanity, of intelligence, you would never know that this was an age of swirling contentiousness. Obama exudes confidence and balance — you just feel he understands that politics is about dialogue and negotiation.

If Obama/Lieberman ran against McCain/Rice in 2008 the country couldn't lose. I don't agree with some of Obama's approach, nor for that matter, with much that McCain advocates. But trust is paramount right now: when was the last presidential election in which you felt a degree of cautious admiration for the candidates?

Last Line

The last line of Joyce's The Dead:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Robert Hughes

I just heard the tail end of an NPR interview with art critic Robert Hughes. Hughes has a convivial, forthright manner that is very winning. But what really gains him points is that he is a writer and is wedded to the truth of his reactions — and he has the talent to communicate those reactions. His declamatory style is that of a blustery old frog, like Chris Mathews; there isn't a feeling of much nuance in his public utterances. I'd also like to hear more insight, rather than an elevated version of thumbs up/thumbs down.

Hughes was a painter, always a benefit for a critic to have had that experience of actual involvement, and it informs his judgments, making him a useful player in the inbred world of artspeak. In the interview, discussing German art, he elevated Kiefer and disparaged Baselitz, saying Kiefer was serious and often accomplished while Baselitz was “kitsch”. Kiefer has always seemed to me redolent of the grandiosity in much of German culture, but nevertheless, Kiefer's talents are more varied than Baselitz, who isn't as Hughes says a kitsch-meister; but Hughes is correct that often Baselitz' attempt to be authentic by employing crude technique doesn't work.

It is great hearing art discussed with such verve and involvement.

This article about Hughes is interesting in its personal angle.

Here is an interchange with his wife about changes in Hughes' personality after a terrible car accident:

“I would say you were the same way you are now, but without the injuries,” Ms. Downes says. “From someone who has such confidence, it is incredible how insecure you are of your own talents.”

“How sweet of you,” Mr. Hughes says, with not a touch of irony.

The Denver Art Museum

Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum carries on a tradition of endgame architecture most in evidence in Gehry's Bilbao; the standard being promoted is that a great revenue attractor is thereby a great edifice. It is not that form is function, it is that there is no function other than attention. The arthouse-as-freak-of-nature mentality, where the ego of the director and architect (and museum board) trumps the works that are supposed to be celebrated inside the structure, and the work of the curators in presenting that work, requires a suspension of common sense, of sophisticated taste, and of a concern for their public charge. With much conceptual art of little interest beyond description, it is easy to understand how the narcissism of administrators could trump the magic of the visual arts in the Denver Art Museum. The achieved motive: a logo to be noticed rather than a house of treasures which is meant to encourage meditation, circumspection, civilization.

From a review in the NYT:

[The Denver Art Museum's] … tortured geometries make it a daunting place to install or view art — hardly a minor drawback. And for all its emotional power, the building seems eerily out of date, and its flaws readily apparent.

Soul Mates

I've been reading Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets so it was especially interesting to me to read this review by Walter Kirn in the NYT of Ron Ronsenbaum's paean to Shakespeare, The Shakespeare Wars.

Kirn says, “… the literary journalist Ron Rosenbaum sets out to do what my teacher tried and failed to do: explain and transmit a sense of ravishment, “unbearably pleasurable,” brought forth by the “bottomlessness” of Shakespeare’s writings.”

There is an element of courage in Rosenbaum's efforts, in these days of adolescent ironic cluelessness masquerading as adult sophisticated ironic detachment, simple enthusiasm for a great work of art seems revolutionary. As Kirn notes, if you are going to lose it for great works of art, Shakespeare isn't a bad choice.

Vendler's book expresses another breed of love for the great poet's work. She memorized the Sonnets as a child — they are woven into her mind. One version of this book includes a CD of her reading many of the Sonnets. There is a dreamy, non- emphatic way she reads, as though in a trance. It is touching to hear this great critic read with such melting affection. (She criticizes actors who have read the Sonnets on CD for their lack of understanding of the text in their habits of emphasis.) The book itself is different in tone than the wonderful, conversational pieces she has been doing for years for the New York Review of Books. The book has a bit of the Latinized stench of structuralism, a pseudo-scientific analytical feel that isn't true to Vendler's depth and fiber as a commentator.

An Amazon.com reviewer was harsh:

I quote a single passage more-or-less at random as an example (this is from her discussion of Sonnet 129): “The impersonal mode allows for the habitual incompatibility and the perpetual sequentiality of both models. The couplet ironizes both models, ultimately, putting both mutual incongruity and repetitive sequentiality in a larger cyclical totalization in which one is only the obverse of the other, both existing in a mutual temporal dependency, represented formally by the chiastic well knows and knows well.” (p. 553) I realize this is out of context but trust me the context would not help relieve the ugliness of this “lit-crit” baloney. This is the style of her writing: “ironizes,” “sequentiality,” “totalization,” and her favorite word used in one form or another on almost every page “chiastic.” Vendler ostentatiously is given to using technical terms from philosophy and linguistics such as “speech act” or “deixis” and I question whether she is concerned to use them correctly or even understands their technical meaning. And on and on and on.

But Vendler is better than that — the Amazon reader's frustration is too global, excessive. Vendler's introduction is wonderful, her insights clearly wrought — there is much to learn from Vendler's balanced, complex reactions to the Sonnets:

She speaks of Shakespeare's mind “…working out positions without the help of any pantheon or any systematic doctrine.” That is, without religious or classical truisms to bolster his work.

Like Rosenbaum she is filled with wonder at Shakespeare's “…capacity to confer greater and greater mental scope on any whim of the imagination, enacting that widening gradually, so that the experience of reading a poem becomes the experience of pushing back the horizons of thought.”

Studio 60

When Aaron Sorkin portrayed a TV version of the US president on the West Wing, a president who spouted Lucretius to his press secretary, you bought the premise because the stage was so big already — the world, its ego-centered politicians, and high stakes social policy; war and peace. Now Sorkin's Studio 60 uses the same rat-tat-tat Front Page conversational style, and the same middle-brow wannabe high level discourse with SNL-type comedians; you begin to wonder if Sorkin has any flexibility as a writer or grasp of the trivial import of the context. What worked as high melodrama beautifully wrought on the West Wing doesn't transfer to the current show's setting; Sorkin expects the audience to be as rapt as the principals about ratings on a long marginalized SNL look-alike; about whether they can make it to air. The cast and network suits and their anguish, their pain, their hopes: they fill a thimble.