times trends

Always on the cutting edge, the New York Times this week notices that the city is full of people who shut out the world around them by listening to music on headphones! 1982, you ask? No, it's different this time because the headphones are white!

And another thing--what is the deal with people who talk on their cell phones on the train? And rude drivers? The travel section has two more articles on bad manners, which I didn't read, and an essay on the declining glamour of travel in the movies.

times oscar

There's a special section today on the Oscars. A. O. Scott says we live in a golden age of screen acting, and it's too bad we don't have movies that live up to it. Underscoring this in one of five short pieces on this year's lead actors, Terrence Rafferty amusingly describes Sean Penn's nominated performance:

He refrains from chewing the scenery, but something very peculiar happens in "Mystic River": Mr. Eastwood's camera decides to chew it for him. Beginning with an attention-getting overhead shot of Jimmy's anguished reaction to the discovery of his daughter's body, the movie keeps nudging us to notice Mr. Penn's acting, to be blown away by its understatement. After a while, every nuance seems to have the weight of a soliloquy.

Similar notes are struck in Scott's piece on Jude Law, and in the best actress essays on Diane Keaton (by Stephanie Zacharek) and Keisha Castle-Hughes (by Stuart Klawans).

Mysteriously missing from the online edition are unlikely acceptance speeches contributed by six comedic writers; the only one that made me laugh is ( here. )

And two pieces on The Lord of the Rings (whose third installment everyone thinks will win, although only Elvis Mitchell thinks it should): Will there be a Hobbit movie (again)? And the film trilogy's unusual rapport with its fans (and their Oscar parties).

times arts

Mostly I don't know why so many people have spent so many words on the Superbowl thing, but Frank Rich's column on the stupid aftermath is pretty funny:

If we are to believe the general outcry, the nation's families were utterly blindsided by the Janet-Justin pas de deux while watching an entertainment akin to "Little Women." As Laura Bush put it, "Parents wouldn't know to turn their television off before that happened." They wouldn't? In the two-plus hours "before that happened," parents saw not only the commercials featuring a crotch-biting dog, a flatulent horse and a potty-mouthed child but also the number in which the crotch-grabbing Nelly successfully commanded a gaggle of cheerleaders to rip off their skirts. What signal were these poor, helpless adults waiting for before pulling their children away from the set?

Jon Pareles writes an overview of music museums (American popular music, that is). I've never been to any of them, and the article doesn't inspire me to:

But while people go to art museums to closely examine paintings and sculpture, and to natural history museums to marvel at dioramas and skeletons, few people go to music museums for music, since it's available everywhere else: on radio and TV, in album collections, onstage, online. As it turns out, music museums do best at presenting everything but the music: the fashion, the detritus, the technology, the business, the biographies, the buzz. They're great places to soak up trivia and gawk at guitars. But as they try to nail the essence of popular music into exhibits and architecture, it eludes them again and again.

A sidebar describes tough times for the Experience Music Project, and notes that "a significant portion" (of what, it isn't clear) will be turned into a museum of science fiction, because Paul Allen likes science fiction.

Pareles's Playlist covers an interesting-sounding jazz trio called Fly, and a new album by the great and eclectic violinist Jenny Scheinman. An article on the struggle to replace Harvey Fierstein in the Broadway musical Hairspray culminates in Michael McKean. And Emily Nussbaum discovers that H. R. Pufnstuf wasn't very good.

(By the way, I've switched this week to a new procedure--new to me, anyway--for linking to Times articles. With luck this will prevent the articles from disappearing behind the wall of pay. Let me know if you notice any problems.)