June 2001 Archives

« May 2001 | Main | July 2001 »

Wednesday, June 27, 2001

Hitchens

Memory can play nasty tricks on one. I "discovered" Anthony Lane long before Tina Brown, for instance: he was the film reviewer for the Independent on Sunday before he moved to the New Yorker, and I always loved his reviews there. I especially remember his review of London Kills Me, Hanif Kureishi's regrettable move from writing into direction. A masterpiece of comedic criticism, it left both subject and reader helpless on the floor, although, of course, for different reasons. It ranks up there with Clive James's review of Princess Daisy, by Judith Krantz, where at least he has the good manners to pause at one point and say that attacking such a book is a bit like kicking a powder-puff. (Sidenote: while going to Amazon to provide you, gentle reader, with a URL for the bonkbuster, Seattle's most famous bookstore tells me that "Felix, you'll love this!" with a predicted rating of 4.5 stars out of a maximum five.When I ask Amazon why, it tells me that it's because I bought Paris to the Moon, by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. Huh?)

But London Kills Me came out a long time ago, and I've long since lost the review (actually, I lent it to Purni Mukherjee, and she never gave it back). And when I finally asked a friend with Lexis-Nexis access to email me a copy of the review, it turned out to be much shorter, and much less funny, than I had remembered.

So it was with trepidation that I opened my brand-new copy of Unacknowledged Legislation, the new book from Christopher Hitchens. I ordered it from the library, and was particularly looking forward to rereading Hitchens' article on Oscar Wilde, which had first appeared in Vanity Fair and which I had loved. As luck would have it, the article was the first thing in the book. And was I disappointed? Not a bit. It's all of five pages in the book, but I daresay it's the best single thing that has ever been written about Wilde. I urge you all to go out to your nearest bookstore and read it: it doesn't take long to read five pages.

Of course, a lot of the piece is given over to Wilde himself, who naturally shines in his own words much more brightly than he ever does in the words of others. But quoting a genius to good effect is harder than it looks. And some of the quotations are not nearly as familiar as you might think. I'll leave you with this one, if only because the subject of the death penalty in the United States is getting a lot of coverage at the moment:

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

Posted by Felix at 1:41 EST | Comments (0)

Friday, June 22, 2001

Gays in The Wall Street Journal

It's Pride Week this week, that time of year when opinion-formers' minds turn to the status of gays in society. And helpfully, the Wall Street Journal editorial page is here to give them a little pastoral guidance.

[The narrowness of the Senate vote to withhold federal funding from school districts who prevent Boy Scouts from meeting on their premises] underscores the sharp cultural divisions that were revealed in the last election. But in particular it shows the power of the gay-lesbian lobby in modern liberal politics. Far from being besieged in American life, homosexuals now have the clout nearly to defeat a group that has historically done as much as any other to turn unruly boys into responsible men.

Well, the gay-lesbian lobby can't be that powerful if it lost the vote. But what I'm interested here is the way that the Journal's editorial page has moved from a kind of beefed-up Economist-style libertarianism to supporting anti-gay Jesse Helms amendments. How many people on Wall Street (the Journal's self-declared constituency), or indeed in America, would find it shocking, surprising, or even noteworthy that gays and lesbians in America might have as much power as the Boy Scouts?

In fact, the more one reads that paragraph's last sentence, the less it makes sense. Is there some a priori lemma that anybody with nearly as much clout as the Boy Scouts cannot be besieged in American life? Wonder what the African-American community would make of that. And what's the other side of the implied distinction? If Boy Scouts turn unruly boys into responsible men, what does the gay-lesbian lobby do? Surely the Journal can't be implying that it takes responsible men from the heartland of America and turns them into unruly boys displaying their pierced nipples during the Gay Pride Parade?

Posted by Felix at 1:43 EST | Comments (0)

Thursday, June 21, 2001

Sexy Beast

Sexy Beast is the latest British import to get rave reviews among the art-house crowd, and it's obvious why: it features first-rate performances from two of England's best film actors (Ray Winstone and Ben Kingsley). Kingsley is astonishing as an East End gangster sent over to Winstone's villa on the Costa del Sol to persuade him to come back to England for one last job. The novice director, Jonathan Glazer, allows Kingsley and Winstone the time and space to show just what they're capable of. (Glazer came from directing television commercials, but there's very little jump-cut freneticism here.)

But partly because of the relatively sedate camerawork, and partly because of the script (by Loius Mellis), the good bit of the film -- the war of wills between the two leads -- feels like an adapted stage play. And when the action moves to England and the pace picks up, Glazer turns out not to have any ability to build suspense. I think Winstone narrowly avoids death at one point (just as he does right at the beginning of the film, for no obvious reason), but it wasn't very clear.

A lot of the film simply fails. Glazer insists on throwing in various dream sequences and magical realism which don't work at all, and the exposition of the reasons for the heist seems utterly pointless. (There's also a shot of Ian McShane dripping water, which needed a lot more explanation. Ambiguity is not always a good thing.) On the other hand, Kingsley's last lines will stay with all who see this movie for a very long time, and not only because Kingsley is such a good actor: Glazer shoots them magnificently.

So it's a curate's egg of a movie. If you go to the movies in order to see great acting performances, then go see this one. If you want to see a perfectly-formed film, however, don't bother. Go rent Dog Day Afternoon or something instead.

Posted by Felix at 1:45 EST | Comments (0)

Thursday, June 14, 2001

Towards a Radically Contingent Destination

In the post-war years, it was quite common for a gentleman to eat at his club every day, never varying his routine in the slightest. Members of the following generation rebelled somewhat against such habits, cutlivating a menu of restaurants from which they were able to choose; the list became ever more diverse as bars and multi-ethnic restaurants were added to the acceptable possibilities.

With the arrival of the 1980s, where one went in the evening became a matter of style as much as substance. Restaurants and bars became hot spots, places to be seen, where the elite could congratulate themselves on getting past the front door.

And in the 1990s, all pretense at timeless quality was thrown to the wind in a tornado of openings, flashbulbs, secret phone numbers; of destinations becoming more famous than most of the boldfaced names inside them.

The lifespan of a hot new bar/restaurant started shrinking dramatically. Years turned to months, and months to weeks, as Balthazar begat Moomba, Spy begat Veruka, and the Soho Grand begat the Mercer Hotel. It wasn't long before the downtown fabulous started abjuring all destinations except those which hadn't opened yet: the "soft opening" had arrived, and with it a condescension towards anywhere actually listed in the phone book.

There was a parallel development, too: as the number of destinations increased, the chances rose that no matter where you were, you would be better off somewhere else. And as the number of cellphones approached the number of revellers, groups of friends in different places found it increasingly necessary to meet up with each other, usually at some third location.

It wasn't long before the amount of time spent moving between parties exceeded the amount of time spent at the parties themselves; before minutes of airtime overtook minutes of facetime. The greatest bar, the most exclusive event, was always just the right cellphone number away; even first-name-only supermodels started suffering the Groucho Marx syndrome of never being satisfied at any bar which actually admitted them.

In the 2000s, the real party, the place where everybody wanted to be, had disappeared from the map. The radically contingent destination, or RCD, existed only behind the speed-dial buttons on Nokia 8860s; coalesced only in the interstices of possibility between dreams and fabulousness. It's opening tomorrow.

Posted by Felix at 12:41 EST | Comments (1)

Friendly neighborhood shops

A few weeks ago, I rented a medium format camera and went out shooting bridges at the weekend. I was using slide film, and got the film developed that same weekend; a lot of the shots came out great. So obviously the next step was to get some prints made.

I could have gone back to the shop which developed the film; after all, they did a very good job. But they were expensive for R prints and even more expensive for digital prints, so I thought I'd give my friendly neighborhood photo shop a go. I went into this place on Grand Street, in between Doughnut Plant and Kossar's Bialys, and asked if they could make R prints from my slides. I didn't think that they would be able to do it in-house, but if they could that would have been great, and if they couldn't then they would certainly go to a reasonably reputable lab.

The shop is run by a father-and-son team. They're Jewish, but I'm not sure where they're from, probably Russia. The son, I was told by one of the regulars who happened to be in the shop when I went in, is a professional photographer, which put my mind at rest somewhat. The father's English is not very good, and he certainly had no idea what an R print was, but the son seemed on the case, and said that he'd probably wind up doing digital prints, which is fine by me. He quoted a very reasonable sum.

I didn't hear from them for a few weeks, so eventually I remembered to go in. The son wasn't there, but the father was, and eventually we found the prints. Immediately, my heart sank. My favourite photo, of the central span of the Brooklyn Bridge suspended over the East River with the Statue of Liberty in the background, was a greeny-grey mush, far from the electric blue in the transparency. The bridge itself was both blurry and out of focus, which surprised me as the slide seemed very sharp, and I took the shot in bright sunlight and focused on infinity.

We'd found the prints, but so far not the slides. I went looking for the slides, to compare them to the prints, and eventually found them; they were just as colourful and sharp as I'd remembered. But then the father pulled out a few 35mm negatives, and said that he'd found them. No, I said, it was medium-format slide film, I've got it right here, look. And then the father acted out what he'd done: he'd taken his little 35mm camera, pointed it at the slides, taken colour negatives of the slides, and then blown up the negatives into prints!

I think I must have looked at him like he was mad. I mean, this was a man who was praising my photography to the sky when i'd brought the slides in originally, and now he was trying to fob me off with enlargements from bad 35mm copies? I said no, that's most definitely not what I'd asked for, and said I'd just take my positives and leave. But the father persuaded me to leave them one more day, so he could take them back to the lab and see what they could do.

So I went back today to see what the situation was. The son was there this time, and basically said that the lab was not equipped to do either scans or R prints. At least I think that's what he said: he wasn't exactly crystal, but that was the message.Of course, I left with my positives, but not before the father laid a guilt trip on me by saying that he'd paid over $100 for the prints.

Then I got to thinking. When the father first told me what he'd done, I was furious. I mean, what could he have been thinking? Why on earth would I go to the trouble of taking 6x4.5 professional-quality transparencies if I'd be happy with a washed-out enlargement of a bad photo of a slide?

But then I thought that maybe he was just trying to help me out; he knew I wanted prints from these slides, and so he tried to provide me with prints the only way he knew how. Still, surely his son should have stopped him.

And then I thought I was being the worst type of yuppie invader, feeling angry at local businesses because they can't cater to my yuppie needs. A bit like that constant problem I had with the deli over the street which never, ever had tonic water. They would get, like, two bottles in, which would be snapped up in a matter of minutes by the yuppies in 203 Rivington, and then there would be nothing for weeks. Didn't they see? There was a demand for this! Just like whenever they got the New York Times in, it would sell out hours before El Diario. But they never did order more tonic water, or more of the New York Times, and eventually they went out of business.

I don't know what the moral of this story is, so please let me know if you do. But I do know that friendly neighborhood shops are often much better in theory than they are in practice.

Posted by Felix at 1:47 EST | Comments (1)

« May 2001 | Main | July 2001 »