arts & leisure

[jfb]

Oh New York Times, how I've missed you! Somehow, even on the Sunday when I was in New York (or at least nearby), I didn't pick up a single paper on the whole trip.

Unfortunately today's A&L is a little sketchy, but it's still better than no Times at all:

• Gus Van Sant's new Columbine movie, and a preliminary analysis of Look-Look, "a new magazine conceived to showcase the work of young artists."
  
• Best paragraph from Jon Pareles's Playlist:

  In Avril Lavigne's petulant footsteps comes another teen-rock rebel, 16-year-old Katy Rose. On her debut album, "Because I Can" (V2), she's peeved at boys, parents and the disappointments of adolescent life, and she describes them in long-lined, precisely rhymed couplets: "I need to take a shower when I look at you/ You sting and hurt like a bad tattoo." Somewhere in California, a high-school literary magazine has lost a star.

  Also, lots of albums I should be more excited about.
  
• The Strokes, the Rapture, and New York rock. Whatever.
  
• New movies about dead poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and fake journalist Stephen Glass.
  
• Twelfth Night with an all-male cast. (Yes, this means the woman disguised as a man is played by a man. Just like Shakespeare did it.) And Minneapolis's experimental Theatre de la Jeune Lune does Hamlet.
  
• Frank Rich's silly but fascinating comparison of the Republicans and the Rat Pack.
  

One of the interesting things about a newspaper is how its layout can lead you to read things you wouldn't seek out. Following one article to the page it's continued on, your gaze ranges across whatever shares the page with it, and maybe you learn something new.

Case in point: I pretty much never read the dance articles; the art itself is one I've never developed a taste for, and if I had, I still don't know if I'd want to read about it. But on my way to the end of the Stephen Glass article, I tripped over Roslyn Sulcas's article about classical dancers adapting to William Forsythe's momentum-driven, semi-improvisatory choreography.

"I remember, when I first did Bill's work, thinking I don't want to do it wrong, but then just deciding to go for it. You have to push past what you think is 'right.' The freedom of that can be a little daunting, but it's ultimately liberating."

I don't know if I'd actually enjoy seeing it, but it sure was fun to read about.

And a lovely piece about what people get out of opera, and what they feel like they should be getting. We've come to expect "transcendence," writes Anne Midgette, but "Opera deals in human emotions, not divine and ethereal ones. When singing is sublime, it's partly because it amplifies those emotions with a kind of inner purity." Also, quotes from Ann Patchett and Willa Cather novels.

Comments

[bnewmark.livejournal.com]

i have the nyt delivered on sundays, and since i've moved to cambridge, my sunday paper has been delivered minus the magazine and the a&l section. not acceptable. i've called them -twice- about it, and keep saying i want to cancel my subscription, and they keep asking me to try one more week to see if the problem is solved. i spoke with a manager today, who is supposed to call me by wednesday to let me know what the problem is. so frustrating, because i wind up buying -another- copy just for those sections. so annoying. i want a credit for the weeks i've been waiting for the problem to be rectified, but i was too chicken to ask...

[jfb.livejournal.com]

Yeah, really, without A&L, what's the point? You should totally get a credit.

[bnewmark.livejournal.com]

so, an update:
apparently all the sections that didn't come in today's paper arrived yesterday. my housemate brought it in, and i didn't know about it. so.... i guess i need to find out if they're planning on delivering on saturday -and- sunday or just sunday or what. so weird....