Holiday Family Round-Up
It's all about us (and friends) on this steaming Labor Day Weeknd (about 107 degrees where I live). Before my email mailbox gets flooded with list-serve evocations of Joe Hill, I thought I would clear some personal items. As it turns out, they are all related in some way or another to the L.A. Times:
*** Notice of The Brilliant's Daughter's direction of Shakespeare's Titus has hit the big time, precisely with a full review in the Los Angeles Times (second item on the linked page). While decidedly a mixed review, we take it to be --on balance-- a very positive one. The company Natasha directs in this staging is small, young, and under-resourced. That the Times' critics take them at all seriously is a major victory. Moneyline: "Shakespeare's grisly first tragedy gets a creatively twisted, Mussolini-era overhaul by the Porters of Hellsgate, a promising young company with a fine handle on iambic pentameter and rather more zeal than synthesis."
*** Speaking of moneylines. I've got a trifecta published in today's L.A. Times Travel section-- part of my ongoing series of pieces on Las Vegas gambling. Here's my report on sussing out Sports Books with the legendary gambler Stanford Wong. And two sidebars: a list of do's-and-dont's in betting the NFL along with my reviews of where to play. Anyway, this is all great ammo for the leftwing hairshirts to curse me further out of the movement for my manifest frivolity at a moment of acute global capitalist crisis. I'm giving 7 to 5 on that one.
*** Speaking of the L.A. Times, former Sunday Book Review Editor, good friend and my current literary agent, Steve Wasserman, offers up a wonderfully crunchy read on the current state of, well, newspaper book reviewing. His long, elegant essay appears in the Columbia Journalism Review and basically argues that while newspapers have long been shunting aside quality book reviewing things now are getting worse much faster. Take this one with you to the beach or the local park this holiday and have a great, textured read. This is a terrific piece. Steve will soon be directing a new literary section over at Truthdig.com and I'm already working on a lengthy review of three new books for him on a subject I don't feel like disclosing yet. But you can guess, Senor Presidente.
September 2nd, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Sure, you could write off Miss South Carolina Teen USA Caitlin Upton’s spectacular fumble of the question “Why can’t twenty percent of Americans find America on a map?” as just another example of an over-tanned bimbo trying to sound smarter than she is. Or perhaps you could try to see her verbal stumbling as a post-modern attempt to illustrate this country’s crumbling education system.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj3iNxZ8Dww
Or you might just view this as Caitlin Upton following in the footsteps of the leader, of the World’s greatest nation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsF3deE38xo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBm5ZSWbD14
September 2nd, 2007 at 5:49 pm
“I’m already working on a lengthy review of three new books for him on a subject I don’t feel like disclosing yet. But you can guess, Senor Presidente.”
I look forward to your Truthdig review, although I have a feeling it’s going to be a piece on Hugo Chavez that exhibits an erratic mix of horror and humor as well as your tendency on this issue toward high-decibel attack. Of course the best person to analyze Chavez would be Mel Brooks…
September 2nd, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Or Woody Allen.
September 2nd, 2007 at 7:31 pm
I’m going to spend part of Labor Day recognizing the good work of labor unions. I’ll spend the other 23 hours and 59 minutes being relatively unproductive in recognition of what unions have made of our “working people.”
We’ll be grilling out on the back deck if anyone wants to stop by.
September 2nd, 2007 at 10:26 pm
I’ll be right over, Woody. Can I bring a gay friend?
September 3rd, 2007 at 7:21 am
Yeah, bunkerbuster, but instead of serving you weenies, we’ll just let you eat each other.
September 3rd, 2007 at 8:37 am
I’ll leave it to someone else to make the joke about Woody sharing his buns…
I’ve got way too much class for that !
September 3rd, 2007 at 9:41 am
Bring your own bread.
September 3rd, 2007 at 10:42 am
Mr. Cooper, you’re one of a kind. Your climacteric peak knows no end.
September 3rd, 2007 at 12:13 pm
Bring your own bread.
“Compassionate conservatism” in a nutshell.
Reg and Woody, we’ve just GOT to set up a heads-up no-limit hold’em poker tournament between you two.
Marc, you can deal the cards.
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:46 pm
“Instead of serving you weenies, we’ll just let you eat each other.”
So Woody likes to watch. Is there a bathroom hand signal for that?
September 3rd, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Mr. Cooper. You are entirely too grandiose. Chill.
September 3rd, 2007 at 3:06 pm
qdpsteve, I’ll play a game of chance with reg that I learned on National Lampoon’s “Las Vegas Vacation.” It’s called “Pick a Number.” I’m thinking of a number. Now guess it.
bunkerbuster, the grill is ready. If you’re coming (not that way), then get here.
September 3rd, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Woody’s “Pick a Number” game shows a degree of self-awareness that’s unusual…
September 3rd, 2007 at 9:34 pm
All this talk about grills and buns reminds me of Carl’s Junior newest commercial, “Flat Buns”
http://youtube.com/watch?v=RNlakElmwFs
But I still like the Jack in the Box “Angus meat” commercial better.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=gIKizLGVtvA
September 3rd, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Add a trailing lower-case L to Marc’s link to get all umpteen pages of the article on one page.
About the article. Obviously a good guy to comment on the book biz and its relations to reviewing. But the article is overstepping these bounds and confusing lots of issues.
One of its questions is, what happened to serious book reviews? If you’re serious about US book reviews, you probably read NYRB. Do we need every metropolitan paper putting out reviews as esoteric as in NYRB? No. So those 5000, or 500, or 100,000, or 1.4 million (we get various numbers thru-out the piece) people who really dig reviews know where to go for their fix. No surprise, really. It’s the same reason there are specialist journals for other esoteric interests like, say, foreign affairs or electronics. Critical topics to our society — but not everyone has to be interested in them.
While we’re on the topic of “reviews that stand the test of time”. NYRB is sadly obtuse about contemporary culture. Their idea of contemporary music coverage is Tin Pan alley or Broadway composers. Maybe Brian Wilson or Bob Dylan if they’re really going out on a limb. But for all the talk about making tough decisions, what’s actually tough, and what actually adds value, is curating the here-and-now and institutions like NYRB avoid it.
Why are metropolitan book reviews collapsing? Same reason as newspapers are collapsing. Technology to deliver news other than by dead trees did not exist until recently. Now that it’s there, ad dollars are going elsewhere. The existence of the big LAT book review section was really not a critical part of the paper — kind of a vanity thing — and so it goes away first.
I think a much more interesting question than disappearance of book reviews is evaporating local coverage, in particular journalistic scrutiny of local politics. Lots of second-tier cities (eg, St. Louis) have less and less professional scrutiny of their politics. The new media can address this, but it will take time to figure out how it can work.
Truthdig has lots of interesting long-form articles and I wish them the best of luck.
September 4th, 2007 at 12:08 am
This is a wonderful set of comments to have appended to a thread about my daughter’s play. A real paen to the sensibilities of the Web.
September 4th, 2007 at 5:34 am
I’m sorry, Marc. I didn’t mean to slight your daughter, and I’m impressed by how much she does and the variety of things that she can do. I misinterpreted the subject of the post and believed that it was a more casual and open topic. Congratulations, Natasha.
September 4th, 2007 at 7:11 am
Marc – I thought the LA Times review was terrific for a young director and company. Major daily critics are the “big leagues”. I just thought lifting a few lines from it might make you laugh as a silly poke at you and your nemesis Hugo. As I’ve expressed before, your daughter’s accomplishment with her play would be most impressive even if it wasn’t one of many.
September 4th, 2007 at 11:52 am
Well I’m sure that the NFL is the place to do your sports betting – if you want to go with the crowds. But I learned some time ago, from a friend, that the best way to make money at the sports books was on College Basketball. If you study it long and hard you’ll beat the handicappers as there is usually at least one game where the spread is out of line. Kinda like arbitrage on Wall Street and probably susceptable to automation. So where’s Ed Thorp when you need him?
September 4th, 2007 at 2:44 pm
My comment on Wasserman is still awaiting moderation…
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