The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia!

In general I studiously avoid the summer blockbuster movies because, well, they always suck. Every summer, however, there are one or two that I find irrestible. This summer I felt I had to see the Indiana Jones movie (it was mediocre). Last summer, it was The Simpsons Movie (a disappointment), and the summer before that Superman (also sucked).

Now there are two more that I want to see. The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia. Both were reviewed in the New York Times this morning. Manohla Dargis gave The Dark Knight an excellent review that makes the movie sound like a brooding, “pop-Wagnerian” minor masterpiece.

A.O. Scott panned Mamma Mia! as a piece of disorganized fluff. Still, he doesn’t hate it. It sounds, basically, like an Abba music video set on a Greek Island with lots of campy fun and beautiful things to look at. (Wait, am I gay?). To me, this sounds like two hours of mindless summer escape.

At any rate, I’m tempted, and will probably go (if I can find the time). I let you know if, as usual, I’m disappointed.

The World’s Top Public Intellectuals Are…

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazine held voting for the top 100 public intellectuals earlier this year. The results are available now. They are surprising at first, and then not. The top 10 were all Muslims, a result that arose from bald politicking and religious and national identification among the voters. Although this might invalidate the results for some, they are still important for two reasons:

1) It shows a genuine desire and effort by the Muslim intellectual class to bring their public debates into the global consciousness. The brightest people residing in Islamic states do not want to be isolated and misunderstood.

2) This is a valuable education for people in the West (and around the world). To be honest, I had only ever heard of four of the men (and they’re all men) in the top ten. And among those, I had only a passing familiarity with three of them.

Perhaps I am horribly uninformed, or perhaps not. I will confess that my five votes were biased towards the West (they’re either American or English), though there were many more that I wished I could have voted for. In any case, I chose:

Craig Venter
David Petreaus
Tony Judt
Lee Smolin
Richard Dawkins

The results are also interesting because you know the people on the list care about where they rank. Salman Rushdie beat Christopher Hitchens (Amis wasn’t even on the list). Poor Ian Buruma finished dead last. Thomas Friedman was in the middle of the pack. And still other names shouldn’t have been there at all (I’ll leave you to judge who).

In any case, the results merit consideration, so here you go:

Foreign Policy Top 20 Summary
Prospect Top 100 List

Koons, Serra, Murakami, Hirst Under Fire

Jed Perl of the New Republic has authored a nice rant against the above mentioned “artists,” (you see, I used quotes) and others, in a piece covering their recent shows as well as the architecture of several new museums.

It’s like he took the words right out of my mouth. Referring to Murakami, he writes:

You cannot possibly understand what a safe haven for frauds and con artists the art world has become until you have walked into this trickster’s trap.

Elsewhere:

Those of us who are outraged that Koons and Hirst and Murakami now take up so much space in our museums are not angered by their work. We are angered by the significance that arts professionals are attaching to this work. There is no art here to enrage me–or to engage me, either.

And he goes on, decrying this dismal state of affairs. I don’t expect anything will change, but it’s good to know that people are trying.

Read also:
Koons in Chicago
Richard Serra in Paris
Robert Rauschenberg

Human Smoke

Nicholson Baker’s new book, Human Smoke, is brilliant. It is a work of diligent scholarship, presented simply and artfully, that does what the best books do: it will make you think seriously. There has been some controversy about the book, particularly from neoconservatives. The otherwise reliable Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun wrote, arguably, his worst review about the book. The Sun, as I’ve said before, is like the student paper at Neocon High. Any piece that can be filtered through a prism of neoconservative principles (of which I can ascertain two: blind, reactionary support for Israel, and war as a means of promoting democracy), will be. Kirsch, in this case, hates the politics he perceives behind the pacifism that Baker espouses and goes on to write a biased and ad hominem attack on the book. The only objective info you’ll get from his review are winning discussion points for a cocktail party at Paul Wolfowitz’s house.

The columnist Anne Applebaum, who was apparently deeply threatened by Human Smoke, wrote a hysterical and condescending review in the New Republic that ranted about bloggers and amateurism. And lastly, William Grimes panned it in the New York Times.

I honestly don’t know what they’re talking about. Human Smoke is an impressionistic masterpiece that presents simple information in chronology and let’s you filter it through your over-saturated understanding of World War II. It demythologizes the neocon sacred cow Churchill (they all want to be him); makes the U.S. entry into the war seems inevitable from the first; and presents a view of the little seen pacifism movement of the time.

When I was finished with the book, you know what I walked away with?

War is terrible and must be avoided at all costs and we must fight them only when we are forced to.

Can any book that reinforces these truths really be a “stupid” and “scary” book?

Go out and get it. I recommend it highly.

P.S. I know I promised a book recommendation every Friday, but I simply can’t do it. Look in every two weeks or so (click on the category link for books) for a new recommendation.

Koons in Chicago

Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker has written the perfect Jeff Koons review. Koons is being given a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The most revealing line from the piece:

“He [Koons] staked his budding penchant for expensively fabricated art by working as a commodities broker on Wall Street for six years.”

And the review in a nutshell:

“We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time.”

Koons’s work is art in the same sense that a Coke can on a pedestal in a white room is art. Duchamp to Warhol to Koons. Without a better definition, we are left to the hustlers. Judge for yourself.

Robbins’s Definitive Chopin at the NYC Ballet

The Jerome Robbins Celebration for the 2008 spring season at the New York City Ballet is on now. I saw a program last night called Definitive Chopin that consisted of three pieces set to the music of, uh, Frederic Chopin (who else?).

It is hard to me to overstate how much I loved this performance. Dance is the highest expression of human physicality, the absolute apotheosis of human grace and beauty. You can see why men were always falling in love with prima ballerinas in 19th century novels. Ballet is pure elevation of the female form, so feminine, so seductive, so… The dance exults in the human body, and the dancers perform with such strength and skill that I left the theater amazed and elated. I kid you not. It was genuinely sublime.

So I urge you to go, if possible. And because I can, I’d like to single out the work of a few of the dancers: Yvonne Borree and Antonia Carmena in Dances at a Gathering, the technically proficient and beautiful Julie Kent (from the American Ballet Theater) in Other Dances, and the entire company in the funny ballet, The Concert.

Robbins was an American master. Book tickets and go.

Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence

Marco Roth of n+1, the intriguing (apologies, I haven’t read it enough) hipster literary journal (not to be confused with their hated archrival McSweeneys) whose intellectual perspective, has, according to their website, singlehandedly saved (shame on them), Jonathan Franzen from existential despair, has reviewed Salman Rushdie’s new novel, The Enchantress of Florence.

He gave it a good review, though he takes Rushdie to task for indulging his ego through his characters.

The hyper-prolific and much-hated (but not by me, again I haven’t read her) Joyce Carol Oates also reviewed the novel (with lots of quotes) in the New York Review of Books. Funnily enough, she had more or less the same judgment as Roth.

Both commented on the fantastic unreality of the novel.

She writes: Though The Enchantress of Florence includes a densely printed five-page bibliography of historical books and articles and is being described as a “historical” novel, readers in expectation of a conventional “historical novel” should be forewarned: this is “history” jubilantly mixed with postmodernist magic realism. The veteran performer-author is too playful and too much the exuberant stylist to incorporate much of deadpan “reality” into his ever-shifting, ever-teasing narrative of the power of enchantment of cultural opposites: “We are their dream…and they are ours.”

Roth points out: There are pirates, shipwrecks, hidden princesses, lost heirs, and magic mirrors. There are giants, epic battles, and potions that “facilitate one hundred consecutive ejaculations.”

I don’t know about you, but this sounds pretty good to me.

I have only read one other (should I be ashamed to point out all the stuff I haven’t read?) Rushdie novel: Midnight’s Children. It was a while ago now, but the book stayed with me and I remember it as one of the best I have ever read; it was a whirling tableau of charm and color and I was deeply engrossed. Rushdie’s ego aside (Who cares unless it ruins the book? And if it does, why don’t they say so explicitly?), I am looking forward to this one. After getting dumped by that hot wife (it couldn’t have ended any other way), I suspect that he’s turned his anguish into art.

September, Inverness

This is a poem by Robert Hass. I post it with a recommendation that you buy his new book, and look forward to a summer whose spring hasn’t yet arrived.

Tomales Bay is flat blue in the

Indian summer heat.

This is the time when hikers on

Inverness Ridge

Stand on tiptoe to pick ripe

huckleberries

That the deer can’t reach. This is

the season of lulls -

Egrets hunting in the tidal

shallows, a ribbon

Of sandpipers fluttering over

mudflats, white,

Then not. A drift of mist wisping

off the bay.

This is the moment when bliss is

what you glimpse

From the corner of your eye, as

you drive past

Running errands, and the wind

comes up,

And the surface of the water

glitters hard against it.

This post represents the first of a new regular Friday (I know, it’s Thursday) series in which I will be recommending a book. Enjoy.

Lucien Freud’s $33 Million

I missed this story completely last week, but here’s the painting that set the record for the most ever paid for the work of a living artist, Lucian Freud’s “Benefits Supervisor Sleeping.” The next day, Francis Bacon’s “Triptych, 1976″ (see below) sold for $86 million at Sotheby’s. This price set the record for postwar art (Bacon is dead).

I have nothing more to say about this, except that I prefer the Freud painting.

Kirsch Slams Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning

The New York Sun, which otherwise seems like little more than the student paper at Neocon High, has got a first rate Arts section. The estimable Adam Kirsch is their chief book reviewer. On Tuesday, he slammed James Frey’s new book, Bright Shiny Morning. For anyone looking to indulge in a little schadenfreude, this will be a satisfying read.

His last line will disappoint though: “…I am sure “Bright Shiny Morning” will be a big best-seller.”

Robert Rauschenberg

I am generally skeptical of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. While I do believe that there were brilliant practitioners of these movements, there were not many, and even those who did great work were often sullied by the temptation to produce subpar work for a ravenous art market.

Still others, unfortunately, produced “art” that may have been of conceptual and, possibly, historical value, but lacked intrinsic aesthetic value.

Of course, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but no one looks upon an Winslow Homer watercolor and fails to see beauty. And, frankly, if a work is purely conceptual, I’d rather just have the concept written on a napkin.

Robert Rauschenberg, who died today at 82, was guilty of all of the above. Nevertheless, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I have seen a few of his mixed media paintings and found some of them to be compositionally beautiful, moving, true expressions of artistic talent.

But a lot of it was junk. So, as always, judge for yourself. Here’s his bio and video from PBS’s American Masters site.

James Frey Returns

Disgraced memoirist James Frey is now out with a new novel. Readers will remember that Frey created a scandal when it was discovered that he had made up portions of his best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces.

I haven’t read that book but I know that the furor against him was largely driven by envy. He became a famous, wealthy, and best-selling author. And there is no greater sin among the literary rank-and-file than that. Anyone who has read or written a memoir knows that they are filled with fiction. To believe every word is the literal truth is silly. That said, I don’t know enough about that book or the scandal, and it is possible that the whole “memoir” was created from scratch - in which case…booooo!

At any rate, Janet Maslin has given the new novel a good (if not quite clear) review in today’s New York Times. I understand that Frey’s publisher is putting on a full court public relations press for this one.

P.S. Craig Seligman on Bloomberg panned it. Adam Kirsch of the New York Sun slammed it.

Richard Serra in Paris

I am bewildered by the accolades heaped on Richard Serra.

The man places giant rusting sheets of steel in fields and public places. They are ugly, disruptive, and lack any indication of human talent (with the exception, of course, of steel manufacturing). To me, he is a silly fraud.

I’ve seen his work in a few places, mostly recently in the big retrospective at MOMA (even more out of place in so confined a space). It’s comical to watch well-dressed, middle aged bohos considering the work with expressions of deep thought and appreciation. (The subtlety of the line. The play of light over its surface.)

The only value of these curved behemoths (and this didn’t last long) was as a place for children to play. Otherwise, they just blocked your path. But worse, I’ve seen him clutter up perfectly beautiful meadows and lush rolling fields with his post industrial refuse.

There is a name and a context and it can all be explained, I know. But I have seen it and the truth is right there in front of you. The choice is yours.

Here is a sly Steven Erlanger on Serra in Paris.

Top Public Intellectuals

Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines have produced a list of the top 100 “thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time.” Readers can vote for their five favorite choices.

The list features a few head scratchers (Christopher Hitchens? Are we that hard up for public intellectuals?) and more than a few inspired choices (Craig Venter, David Petraeus) and seems well representative of the world at large. Voting closes on May 15. Results will be announced this summer.

Vote here.

Jerome Robbins Celebration

I am a lover of dance. There is no other stage where humans consistently display greater physical beauty and grace.

Sometimes, in sports, an athlete can achieve these heights, and this is what accounts, I believe, for the popularity of athletes like Michael Jordan, who was at once his sport’s greatest and most beautiful player.

Jerome Robbins is best known for choreographing West Side Story, and is considered “the most creative and revered choreographer the country has ever known.” This spring, the New York City Ballet (which he helped build with Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine) is celebrating his achievement by performing 33 of his ballets.

This is a great opportunity to have a true American experience. Don’t miss it.