21st November 2011
The Vision Thing
“The director has achieved the trifecta of a fulfilling, creative life: enough money to do only what truly interests him, enough freedom to attack those projects in a way that is satisfying, and enough appreciation from his peers to tame—just slightly, just ever so slightly—the neurotic beast of self-doubt. After 22 movies, five commercials, 13 documentaries, a handful of music videos, three children, five wives, and 25 studios; after insolvency and misery, after box-office failures and years of going unappreciated; after the one Oscar and all the others he should have won, Marty Scorsese has earned the right that every creative person dreams of: the right never to be bored. And what all this adds up to in his case, what this really means to this particular man, is that he has earned the right to continue to fret every little detail in the world well into the next decade and for as long as he cares to make movies.
17th November 2011
Shakespeare and Verdi in the Theater
“Verdi adored Shakespeare. Besides the three operas he took from him—Macbeth, Otello, and Falstaff—he considered (though briefly) doing a Tempest or Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. He considered for a very long time, and came near to creating, an opera from his favorite play, King Lear.1 He did not take lightly the duty of being true to Shakespeare. When he read the score of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet, he said of the librettists, “Poor Shakespeare! How they have mistreated him!” He did not mean to mistreat the great dramatist himself.
14th November 2011
The Rise and Fall of the Columbia House Record Club
“The allure of the record club was simple: you put almost nothing down, signed a simple piece of paper, picked out some records, and voila! — a stack of vinyl arrived at your doorstep. By 1963, Columbia House was the flagship of the record-club armada, with 24 million records shipped. By 1994, they had shipped more than a billion records, accounted for 15 percent of all CD sales, and had become a $500-million-a-year behemoth that employed thousands at its Terre Haute, Indiana, manufacturing and shipping facility (see sidebar).
Of course, most of the record clubs’ two million customers failed to read the fine print, obligating them to purchase a certain number of monthly selections at exorbitant prices and even more exorbitant shipping costs. At the same time, consumers plotted to sign up multiple accounts under assumed names, in order to keep getting those 12-for-a-penny deals as often as possible. Record clubs may have introduced several generations of America’s youth to the concept of collection agencies — and the concept of stealing music, decades before the advent of the Internet.
4th November 2011
Sherlock Holmes And The Adventure Of The Impudent Scholars
“The universe of Sherlock Holmes has expanded well beyond the confines of the stories in which he appears. Partially to blame for this is the wholly new, very specialized and possibly unique brand of literary criticism—known as the Great Game—that has grown up around him. The Game originated in a paper delivered at Oxford in 1911 by Ronald Knox. In this paper, as Michael Dirda relates in his book, Knox “compared the Sacred Writings to Platonic dialogs and Greek tragedies, proposed a deutero-Watson, addressed the possibility of spurious adventures, expatiated at length upon the importance of Watson’s bowler hat, and most important of all, provided an eleven-point morphology of the Sherlockian tale, organized according to Greek rhetorical categories.” Sherlockian (as opposed to Doylean) scholarship was born; the game was, as they say, afoot.
1st November 2011
Her Way
“Grimaud doesn’t sound like most pianists: she is a rubato artist, a reinventor of phrasings, a taker of chances. “A wrong note that is played out of élan, you hear it differently than one that is played out of fear,” she says. She admires “the more extreme players … people who wouldn’t be afraid to play their conception to the end.” Her two overriding characteristics are independence and drive, and her performances attempt, whenever possible, to shake up conventional pianistic wisdom.
31st October 2011
The Movie Set That Ate Itself
“Five years ago, a relatively unknown (and unhinged) director began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home
28th October 2011
One Google Books To Rule Them All?
“In 2002, Google began scanning the world’s 130 million or so books in preparation for the “secret ‘books’ project” that eventually became Google Books. In 2004, they began offering access to these scans, displaying the irritatingly-named “snippets” of books in their search results. And in no time at all, they were getting sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers for copyright infringement. These lawsuits, plus two more that were filed subsequently against Google, resulted in a six-year rollercoaster ride that, like all good roller coasters, exhilarated, terrified and rattled all the participants, and ended by thumping their quaking bods to a halt, last March, in very nearly the same place from which they’d started out.
18th October 2011
Destroy All Monsters
“A journey deep into the cavern of Dungeons & Dragons, a utopian, profoundly dorky and influential game that, lacking clear winners or an end, may not be a game at all.
10th October 2011
Just Kids
“When Jeffrey Eugenides moved to New York, he was 28 years old and things were not looking good. After graduating from Brown in 1983, he and Rick Moody, a college friend, had driven out to San Francisco with no real plan other than making a go of it as writers, and lived together awhile on Haight Street, listening to the sound of the electric typewriter coming from the other room. Eugenides stayed in the city for five years and didn’t publish a thing. He calls these “the lost years” now. “My life just didn’t seem to go forward.” In 1988, Eugenides moved into a cheap place with roommates on St. Johns Place in pre-gentrified Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, when muggers freely worked the area. A $75 payout on a scratch-off lotto card was a bright spot of that summer. Eugenides would look out over the darkening rooftops at the Manhattan skyline and think, How can my writing take me from here to there?
That same summer, Jonathan Franzen, also 28, was living in Jackson Heights, Queens, and feeling “totally, totally isolated.” The neighborhood was an immigrant jumble, and Franzen was a solemn, intellectual guy from St. Louis without much occasion to leave the house. He had gotten some attention and money for his debut novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, but the axis of the planet had not obediently shifted. He was frustrated with living in “shared monastic seclusion” with his then-wife, he says, when he got a fan letter from a writer he knew of but had never read. David Foster Wallace, then 26, was having dire troubles of his own and wrote to praise what Franzen had done in a “freaking first novel.” It was the first time Franzen had ever heard from a peer, he says. “And I was desperate for friends.”
Gradually, he found some: first Wallace, then William T. Vollmann, David Means. Through Wallace, who also knew Vollmann, he met Mary Karr and Mark Costello. Later Franzen would connect with Eugenides, Moody, and their other college friend Donald Antrim. A scene was taking shape and growing. Some had published work when they met, but many hadn’t; some were closer than others, some more competitive. The crowd was overwhelmingly male, very close in age, largely from the Midwest, and engaged in a kind of generational struggle to make sense of the postmodern literary legacy—of Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and others—that they found both consuming and unsatisfactory, especially as a guide to writing about the new, weird America of the eighties and nineties.
