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Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

Felix's First Rule of Movies states that "films are always better on their opening weekend". Well, if that's true, then maybe there's a case for adding Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle to the Ten Worst Films of All Time list. Because I went to see it this weekend, and it was really bad.

The good news, insofar as there is any, is that the gross for the sequel was lower than the opening weekend of the original – something which rarely happens with Hollywood blockbusters. This gives me some hope: that a franchise can't just exist in thin air, as it were, but actually needs some kind of structure behind it if it is to succeed.

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, you see, is a bit like the Scream films: its primary interest is in spoofing the competition. Unlike the Scream franchise, however, it seems to have forgotten that there has to be some substance to the film as well. The tipping-of-the-cap to just about every action movie ever made is all well and good, but ultimately only serves to remind us how good many of the referenced films are, especially in contrast to the incoherent mess we're currently stuck with.

The tone is set in the pre-credit sequence, which does a great job quoting everything from Raiders of the Lost Ark to three or four different Bond films, but which ends with a CGI sequence of such physical impossibility that the eponymous girls are essentially treated as superheroes. If they can do that, then to all intents and purposes they are untouchable, immortal, safe from any harm. Which, of course, makes the rest of the movie utterly pointless, since there's no dramatic tension any more.

I'm not sure this wasn't deliberate. Freed from the mundane necessities of plot, tension or character development, the director, McG, can indulge whatever visual fantasies he likes. Cameron Diaz doing a striptease with the aid of her two fellow Angels? Throw it in there. In fact, let's have all three Angels completely naked at one point, especially since we can do a bit of Terminator-quoting at the same time! Demi Moore in a swimsuit? And then later with Face/Off-style gold-plated handguns? Yeah, baby!

The worst thing about Matrix Reloaded was that the action sequences, although technically impressive, carried no emotional punch. Keanu fighting baddies isn't interesting, because we know the outcome in advance: he always wins. (Only when Keanu's quite literally out of the picture, during the car chase, do things really get exciting.) In Charlie's Angels, the goodies have a few more setbacks along the way, but there also aren't any really cool sequences, either. There's a very long motocross chase which even the insertion of bullet-time cinematography in the middle can't save, and by the time we reach the end of the film, we're bored stupid. Cheap jokes are only funny when they serve to defuse tension: without tension, they're just juvenile.

Although it has long been commonplace to pan the Hollywood blockbuster as brainless escapism, in fact the most successful films in the genre do have structure, plot, and even some semblance of a narrative arc. Part of the reason that The Matrix became such an important film was that it didn't shy away from big ideas; they added to the excitement of seeing action in a whole new way. Spiderman was a mess, but at least it told a story; dreck like Tomb Raider, on the other hand, is much less successful because it tries to replace plot with action sequences. And Charlie's Angels, with nary an exciting or memorable action sequence in the whole film, tries to replace plot with post-modern appropriation and pre-modern jokes.

What I'm hoping is that the disappointing box-office performance of Charlie's Angels will help drive Hollywood back to action-movie basics. Some of the greatest action films of all time (Die Hard, Speed) have actually had very little in the way of high-budget set-piece stunts: there are maybe one or two in all. What they have instead is a focused directorial vision, a taut structure, and a rapt audience. By contrast, you can wander out of Charlie's Angels and come back half an hour later without missing anything important: that's bad in any movie.

Indiana Jones and James Bond can be funny because they've earned it. For one thing, both heroes always suffer during the course of their movies; none of the Angels ever does. If Indy is a well-marbled steak, then the Angels are nothing but fat: all flavour and no muscle. I think I speak for millions of moviegoers when I say we want something meatier.

Posted by Felix at 19:01 EST | Comments (3)

Liberal journalism and the New York Times

On Sunday, the New York Times's dry-as-dust "Week in Review" section fronted a big article by David Rosenbaum headlined "Bush May Have Exaggerated, but Did He Lie?". The story looked at false statements by George W Bush, such as "my jobs and growth plan would reduce tax rates for everyone who pays income tax," or "intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Rosenbaum concluded, however, that " In fact, a review of the president's public statements found little that could lead to a conclusion that the president actually lied on either subject." It's hard to see how Rosenbaum managed to draw this conclusion, unless you take the stance that (a) you have to know you're lying for an untruth to be a lie; and (b) Bush is ignorant, and therefore can't be expected to know when he's lying.

Tim Noah, in Slate, convincingly argues that (a) Rosenbaum didn't choose the most damaging statements from Bush; and that (b) Bush should be held accountable for his statements anyway:

It's often said that Bush has the virtue of self-awareness, that he knows what he doesn't know. That's probably true. But if it is true, then Bush really oughtn't to go around making sweeping statements that he hasn't made any effort to verify. When these statements turn out to be untrue, Bush's feigned certainty alone justifies calling these statements lies. They may not be the sort of lies a clever person (say, Bill Clinton) would tell. But there's no reason Bush can't be thought of as both stupid and a liar.

There's a meta-story here, though, as well, which Noah touches upon when he says that "David Rosenbaum examined this question with a surfeit of post-Howell-Raines fair-mindedness." Raines, the New York Times editor who resigned in the wake of the Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg scandals, made enemies both in and out of the newsroom by going on liberal crusades, such as running dozens of articles on the fight to admit women into the golf club which hosts the US Masters. Raines took the top job after running the New York Times's op-ed page, a position which naturally increased the attention paid to his political views.

Since Raines's departure, it would seem, the Times has bent over backwards to be seen to be impartial, objective, and in general the opposite of a crusading newspaper. So when David Cay Johnston appeared on the front page of the paper this morning with a story headlined "Very Richest's Share of Income Grew Even Bigger, Data Show", he made sure to include this bizarre sentence: "Those numbers can be read to show that the wealthiest, as a group, carried a disproportionate share of the overall tax burden — 1.6 percent of all taxes, versus just 1.1 percent of all income — evidence that all sides in the tax debate will be able to find ammunition in the data."

Johnston was looking at the amount of tax paid by the top 400 taxpayers in 2000, before any of the Bush tax cuts were enacted, and still he wrote something that he surely does not believe, just to keep up the appearance of balanced reportage. Even the most diehard conservative would probably find it hard to assert that the very richest Americans were being disproportionately taxed if they paid 1.6% of all taxes on 1.1% of all income. After all, these people made an average of $174 million each in 2000, yet their overall income tax rate was a very reasonable – if not astonishingly low – 22.3%. That's much less than many middle-class taxpayers have to shell out every year, and that was under Clinton! Under Bush, the average tax bill for the top 400 earners would be more than 20% lower still.

But obviously, the New York Times is no longer the place to look for campaigning journalism, if it ever was. Its grand old franchise has been damaged, and it'll probably be a while before it once again allows itself to speak out on the news pages when it sees injustice. The idea that journalism should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable has no place on 43rd Street right now.

Seth Mnookin of Newsweek explained in an article yesterday that the Times cannot afford to go down that road:

When Raines pushed the paper to take a more activist stance on stories like the exclusionary membership practices of the Augusta National golf club and the march to war in Iraq, the outcry wasn’t just because a respected newspaper was seen as tilting its news coverage. Reporters felt their paper was being devalued. Readers felt their paper was deserting its objectivity.

Not all newspaper readers are media sophisticates, of course, so maybe it's understandable that some of them think that (a) there is such a thing as "objectivity" in journalism; and that (b) the New York Times was doing the wrong thing by deserting it. If such sentiments became widespread, then journalists could feel that their paper was being devalued in the eyes of its readers.

But Mnookin goes further:

There are places in which it’s appropriate for a newspaper (even the Times) to take an activist stand that has a real impact in the world. One of those places is the Op-Ed page, where opinion columnists are given wide latitude and leeway to obsess about and harp on whatever interests them that day, week, month or year. Over the past year, one of the Times’ least-well known Op-Ed writers has been on a crusade, and this month it resulted in an extraordinary correction to a horrible miscarriage of justice.

Mnookin is referring here to Bob Herbert, who played a major role in reversing a racially-motivated set of jailings in Tulia, Texas. What Herbert did was wonderful, and admirable – but why should such activity be confined to the op-ed page? Tulia was Herbert's story: he broke it in the national press, and hounded it incessantly until the falsely-jailed residents of that town were freed. But other reporters come across such stories too: should the fact that they write for the news pages rather than the op-ed section mean that their stories never get the same treatment? Why should only columnists be able to crusade? After all, as Mnookin notes:

Bob Herbert has been a Times columnist for a decade. He’s the only African-American writer on the paper’s Op-Ed page, and he’s charged with writing about politics, urban affairs and social trends. Unlike lightening rods such as William Safire, Maureen Dowd or Paul Krugman, Herbert doesn’t often engender virulent chat-room debates. And unlike Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman, Herbert isn’t flying to war zones and focusing on foreign policy.

In other words, if you want an op-ed columnist to pick up your cause, you don't have many people to choose from: Thomas Friedman certainly isn't going to do it. Or, to put it another way, Bob Herbert is the one-man liberal crusader on the New York Times. If he ain't on it, it ain't a crusade.

Actually, there are other crusading columnists on the Times: I approvingly blogged one such piece by Michael Winerip, who has the education beat, only a few weeks ago. But the broader point remains: columnists will badger their own pet stories, but they can't be expected to pick up someone else's scoop from the news pages. If the newsroom breaks something worth "flooding the zone" on, to use Raines's discredited concept, then the newsroom should at the very least be allowed to keep the pressure on. (That's something Raines was bad at, actually: he spiked some investigative stories on the subject of then-New Jersey senator Robert Torricelli, because he felt that the Times had gone far enough already. It was other news organisations who ultimately claimed Torricelli's scalp.)

The departure of Raines is not necessarily a bad thing. But it would certainly bode ill for American journalism if the new New York Times were to become an anodyne repository of blandly "objective" reporting. The Republican party has made a whole strategy out of spouting complete garbage with such volume and conviction that the news media feel compelled to report it as though it makes sense. Let us hope that the New York Times doesn't lose its respect for the facts along with its appetite for controversy.

Posted by Felix at 17:47 EST | Comments (5)

Harry Potter and the cover artists

After posting a query on Memefirst this morning about the different editions of the Harry Potter books, I decided to create a little matrix of them all, to see how they compared. Here it is; for the sake of saving bandwidth, I've used thumbnails for the first four books, and slightly bigger pictures for the most recent one.

UK edition	UK adult edition	US edition

It's clear to me that by far the best covers for these books are the last three episodes of the UK children's series. The first two are too childish: although I do appreciate that they're meant to appeal to younger readers, they don't feel like the timeless classics that they surely are. From the Prisoner of Azkaban onwards, however, we've got beautiful covers: magical and appealing, just like what's inside.

The UK adult edition was, I think, basically a response to the weakness of the first two children's editions in the UK. You could definitely feel like a bit of a willy reading those books in public, so Bloomsbury intelligently brought the same books out with smart and sober covers for those of us over the age of about 13. The first was better than the second, but by the time the third book came out, the adult covers weren't really needed any more, since the children's covers had grown up. Still, the series kept on going (once you've started, it's hard to stop) with a couple of rather peculiar dragons, which weren't up to the standard of the children's books at all.

The latest version seems to have given up entirely: they've dropped the standard design template for something which looks like a mass-market thriller: Robert Ludlum, perhaps, or Frederick Forsyth. And again, the artist is much worse at drawing phoenixes than the person who did the mainstream edition.

But the US editions, I think, are the worst of the lot. While the cover art on books one and two in the UK was not very good, at least the rest of the design was good. But the US publisher created a spiky Harry Potter logotype which they decided had to be used on all of the books, and it got less and less appropriate as the series progressed.

And while the UK editions only got better over time, the US editions got steadily worse. The Goblet of Fire cover, especially, with its inanely-grinning Harry, fails completely to convey the more grown-up nature of this book. With the Order of the Phoenix, Scholastic seems to have realised that the series is actually developing, and tried to reflect that by making the cover monochromatic! Harry's not smiling any more, but he seems to have fallen into a cheesy low-budget haunted-house movie by mistake. And, of course, he's still got his spiky logo, looking more and more out of place.

I'd be very interested to know if there's anyone who prefers the US covers to the UK ones. I can see why Scholastic might want to use its own designers, but does anybody think they actually did a better job? Vote now!

Posted by Felix at 14:04 EST | Comments (109)

The economic policy of John Edwards

Eagle-eyed William Saletan, at Slate, posted a very useful heads-up today about a key speech which Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards gave on Tuesday at Georgetown University. Saletan gives the Cliff's Notes version, full of paradox and "audacity", and says that "Edwards is trying to turn the traditional politics of left and right upside down".

I'm not sure that I – or, for that matter, the Edwards campaign – would completely agree with Saletan's characterisation of the speech, but he does perform a very useful précis, since the speech itself is long on standard stump-speech rhetoric and isn't that easy to read on screen (as opposed to listen to in person).

But after reading them both, I think I'm close to considering myself an Edwards supporter. Certainly, there's a lot more meat here than in any dozen Howard Dean speeches, which are full of grand phrases designed to fire up urban left-liberals, but which are ominously light on policy specifics.

The substantive part of the Edwards program is basically to cut taxes on earned income, while raising taxes (or, more precisely, repealing tax cuts) on unearned income. Here's an excerpt from the speech:

First, I will ask Congress to cancel the 2001 and 2003 income, dividend, and estate tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in the upper two brackets. In these times of national sacrifice, we should not be asking less of the most fortunate. I agree with Bill Gates, Sr., the father of the richest man in America, that in a world where taxes must be paid, the people who inherit massive estates ought to pay taxes too. I agree with Warren Buffett, the shrewd investor and another of America’s richest men, who said that something is deeply wrong when a billionaire has a lower tax rate than his secretary.
Second, I will give America a tax code that rewards work, not wealth. Today, middle-class families pay income tax on their earnings at a rate of up to 25%, plus another 7.65% in payroll tax. Yet under the law President Bush just signed, a CEO who pays himself whatever he wants can sell millions of dollars in stock and pay tax at a total rate of 15%.

It's hard to argue with that, although I'm sure that should Edwards get the nomination, cries of "class warfare!" will start ringing out from the GOP. Edwards is certainly going to have to make sure he's a lot more specific about who, exactly, "the wealthiest Americans in the upper two brackets" are, since vastly more Americans think they're in the top x% of the population than actually are.

So Edwards should be very specific, making sure that he's specifying incomes over $350,000 a year, and estates over $6 million. Even then, many Americans are going to be suspicious of such talk, since even if they're not in that wealth bracket now, they think (erroneously) that they will be very soon.

The key part of the speech which Edwards should concentrate on, then, is the bit where he's giving help and tax credits to the working poor and the lower middle class. A $5,000 tax credit towards buying a home? That's something people can understand. Likewise making the first $1,000 of capital gains and $500 of dividend income tax-free: an easy way of increasing the abysmally low (in fact, negative) savings rate of the working classes. Best of all, Edwards proposes a dollar-for-dollar match for retirement savings up to $1,000 a year.

I honestly believe that much of the Republican Party never even thinks about such policies, even to reject them, because they're in a comfortable middle-class mindset which considers $500 of dividend income or $1,000 of retirement savings to be negligible. Edwards should make them realise that there are millions of Americans for whom such sums are anything but negligible, and that those Americans are just as important and powerful as the richest plutocrats on one crucial day every fourth November.

Edwards is right to make people realise that while the Bush administration is passing enormous tax-cutting bills, most people aren't seeing any of it. Their federal income taxes might be down a little bit, but their state taxes are rising, their city, property, and sales taxes are rising, their health-insurance and college-education costs are rising: all these things mean that despite the tax cuts, they have less disposable income now than they did before the Republicans came in to office.

And it goes without saying that Edwards's emphasis on fiscal responsibility is a refreshing sign of sanity.

He's clearly got a pretty solid grasp of basic macroeconomics, too. His policies might well decrease investment from people with significant unearned income, but they will increase investment from working people, with probably a small positive effect on total savings. More importantly, while the big-picture numbers might not change much (GDP, inflation, that sort of thing), Edwards would be helping out the poorest members of society and giving workers much of the fruits of their productivity gains which have gone overwhelmingly to their bosses until now. That should help make America a more equitable, not to mention safer, place.

But while I agree with Edwards, I disagree with Saletan, or at least with part of his spin. Saletan seems to think that talk of the wonders of capitalistm is a naturally Republican domain, and that the Democrats are venturing into new territory by attempting to show that they're actually more capitalist than their rivals.

While this might have been true ten or 20 years ago, I can't see how it's true now. The past three presidencies have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that when it comes to government finances and the economy, the Democrats do much better than the Republicans. Just as Blair and Brown have been better economic managers than Major was, it seems completely natural to suppose that Bush's opponent in the next election – whomever he might be – will run America much more efficiently, on a purely capitalist level, than Bush is doing right now. It's hard to overstate the fiscal devastation that Bush is wreaking right now, and if he's allowed to carry on down this path for four more years, he could hobble the economy to a point where the best-willed successor in the world could not repair the damage.

Doesn't Saletan remember Clinton's famous slogan from 1992, "it's the economy, stupid"? That worked then, and it's likely to work again now. Americans like the idea of huge tax cuts, they just don't like it when they realise that most of the money is going to people who barely even notice it, they've got so much to start with. Let's direct tax cuts where the extra money will be spent, stimulating the economy, rather than directing them where the money will be put into Swiss bank accounts. Let's use tax cuts as a means to an end, and not as an end in themselves, and judge their success by how well they help achieve those ends.

And let's get the word out that it's not audacious or topsy-turvy to say that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for small business, private enterprise, and lower taxes on earned income. It simply reflects the realities of what Washington has become in the first years of this century.

Posted by Felix at 19:47 EST | Comments (2)

Paying friends

Back in my protoblogging days, in March 2000, I posted an item on the old, low-tech felixsalmon.com disagreeing with a certain piece of advice given by Slate's agony aunt, Dear Prudence. I don't know what it is about Prudence which makes me want to respond to her columns, but she's gone and done it again today, with an answer to a question about a couple who are starting up a B&B. They want their friends and family to come and stay – and pay; Prudie responds by saying that

As for what Prudie would do, she would try to arrive at an honest answer to the question of whether or not she wanted to help her friends, financially, without any ambivalent feelings. And if the answer turns out to be "no," they might catch on that the invitation didn't seem very friendly.

I'm not entirely sure I understand this, but the gist is clear: friends don't ask friends to pay for lodging. I disagree.

If you're going to spend money, say I, better you spend it on your friends. Let's say you need to buy a wedding present. You can bring up the wedding list online and order a china plate from a department store, or you can commission a painting from your talented artist friend Joanna Fox. No competition. One's personal, and the money stays within your circle of friends; the other is antiseptic and a little too close to simply writing out a cheque. (The dirty secret of wedding lists, of course, is that much of the time the gifts can be returned, unopened, for store credit or even cash.) To try to get out of paying for the painting would be cheap and nasty behaviour.

Similarly, if you're going to stay in a B&B, surely it's better to stay in your friends' new house than to give your money to someone you don't know and will never see again. Refurbishing old houses and operating them as B&Bs is an expensive and risky business, and it's good to support your friends when they embark upon such a venture.

People like getting things for free. If their friend writes a book, they expect a free copy; if they open a bar, they expect free drinks. It's as though they value the things their friend sells less than they value similar items from complete strangers. Why is that? People should actively seek out opportunities to spend money on their friends' products and services, not feel aggrieved at having to do so.

Moreover, in the case of a B&B, there's a real opportunity cost to putting your friends up for the night: if you're not charging them for their room, then you might be foregoing income from a paying guest. If your friends ask to stay over a certain weekend and they offer to pay the going rate, then you can accept them with open arms and have a great time together. But if they expect you to comp their visit, and then someone else asks to book the room for those dates, you're out some very useful cash.

In general, if someone makes money from a certain activity, it's verging on the rude to expect them to give it to you for free just because you're a friend. Some people get this more than others, of course: lawyers and computer technicians are always being asked for free advice, while court stenographers are very rarely asked if they'll do their friends a favour and sit down and take some dictation. At least in these cases, however, the person concerned isn't giving up income to help out a friend.

The fact is that when you turn your house into a B&B, the old rules of having people over to stay no longer apply. If a friend stays with me in New York, the cost to me is marginal; if a friend stays in my B&B, they're availing themselves of a valuable service for which I normally charge money.

But maybe some people feel uncomfortable paying their friends money: they think it might cheapen or commercialise the friendship. In that case, I would advise Mary, the person who asked the question, to see if the owners of the B&B have a favourite charity to which she could donate the cost of the room. That way, there's no implication that the hosts are being paid to simply do what friends normally do, but there's also an acknowledgement that a valuable service is being provided, and that the guest is supportive of the way in which her friends have chosen to try to make ends meet.

In any case, I think it's definitely stretching to accuse these B&B owners of not being good friends, just because they want to run their new business as a business. Especially considering that at the beginning, at least, most of their visitors will be friends and friends-of-friends, it could be financial lunacy to start giving away rooms which they need to pay the mortgage.

That said, there's a limit to spending money on friends. If the room rates at the B&B are exorbitant, and Mary would never normally spend that much on such a service, then she shouldn't do so just because it's her friends offering it. And if Joanna Fox started selling her paintings at prices I could no longer reasonably afford, then it would be perfectly reasonable of me to stop buying her paintings. But I don't get the impression that there's such a disconnect here: what we're talking about is the principle at stake, not the cash.

Posted by Felix at 14:43 EST | Comments (4)

Cryptic crosswords

Many months ago, my grandmother told me that I should read a short book she'd just finished. We were on the telephone at the time, and it took a while for me to get the title straight: Pretty girl in crimson rose (8) is pretty unique as the name of a book. The book itself is pretty unique, too.

I can tell you this now, because I've finally finished reading it. It's taken a long time, but not because the book is a hard slog. Quite the opposite, in fact: I brought it home from the library less than 24 hours ago. The problem was that so many other people wanted to read this book that I had to wait a long time to get to the top of the New York Public Library's waiting list.

I have a feeling that Pretty girl in crimson rose (8) is one of those books which is much more popular among the library-going population than it is among the general public. It's a memoir built around a theme of cryptic crosswords, and without that theme it would be thin and meaningless to the point of evanescence.

The author, Sandy Balfour, has certainly had an interesting life: after fleeing South Africa at the age of 21 in 1983 in order to avoid military service, he hitchhiked with his girlfriend to London, where he settled down, started a family, and became a successful producer of television news. He's travelled all over the world, to some of the most gruesome and interesting places imaginable, and has interviewed everybody from Congolese warlords to Tory cabinet ministers.

It takes some skill to turn such a life into little more than filler between meditations on the art of setting and solving cryptic crosswords, but Balfour manages it. Worse, he's constantly trying to draw parallels between crosswords and life, both in general and his own in particular. Occasionally, when he's not talking about crosswords, he can get things just right, as when he talks about "the number of times I have sat, half asleep, on the Tube from Heathrow airport, feeling the rhythms of the train, watching the ebb and flow of passengers climbing on and off, and taking a gentle pleasure from the familiarity of the way the people look." Much of the rest of the time, however, he will take advantage of a river trip in the Congo with a satellite phone to learn that "crossword puzzles hold us together just as surely as telephone conversations," or that

Although it is possible to move both ways within the river, the river itself flows only to the sea. I see now that this is how crosswords work. We worry back and forth amidst the clues, but in the end there is only one answer.
There is only one way to go, only one place to be.
In the end you are who you are.

Maybe Balfour should give up the TV day job and become a guru on Oprah: he seems surpassingly fond of such vapid and meaningless psuedo-profundities.

That said, inside this television producer's personal memoir lurks a great little book on crosswords. Balfour has spent a lot of time talking to crossword editors, compilers and solvers, and obviously loves the subject. Clues are scattered through the text, from the easy to the wonderfully hard. You start off by scoffing at the old women who can't solve "Country with its capital in Czechoslovakia (6)", but end up astonished that so many people can easily solve such wonderful clues as "Poetical scene has surprisingly chaste Lord Archer vegetating (3,3,8,12)".

The answer to the former is Norway, since "Oslo" is buried within "Czechoslovakia"; the answer to the latter is "The Old Vicarage, Grantchester" – an anagram of "chaste Lord Archer vegetating", and the title of a famous poem by Rupert Brooke.

As Balfour says, everybody has their own favourite clues. His, it would seem, is "Amundsen's forwarding address (4)"; his girlfriend's is "Bust Down Reason? (9)". Mine, I think, at least among those that Balfour quotes, is "Die of cold? (3,4)".

There's really nothing to compare to the feeling of realising you've got the answer to one of these clues: you want to kill the setter and garland him with laurels at the same time. The first, a masterpiece of misdirection, is Mush (clever, eh?), the second is Brainwash (which can be read two ways: to brainwash someone is to, well, bust down their reason, but also a reason for having a down bust could be "bra in wash"). The third is simply Ice Cube.

Of course, cluing "Ice Cube" in a cryptic crossword means something which people put in their G&Ts: it could never reference an American rapper and actor. That kind of knowledge is too specialised for crossword solvers, who are tweedy pipe-and-slippers types living in places not unlike The Old Vicarage in Grantchester. Yet Balfour finishes his book with a reasonably typical Guardian prize crossword, one which was published for him on his 40th birthday. It requires pretty extensive knowledge of Robert Louis Stevenson: not only his Samoan nickname, the answer to 21dn – "Bird on the wing captivating American storyteller (8)" – but also his fictional heroes: "...Breck, concluding 21's name (4)" and "21's David's a degree over 54 (7)". The answers, by the way, are Tusitala, Alan and Balfour, respectively.

Balfour (the author, not the fictional character) takes no small degree of pleasure in the arcane and specialised knowledge required of crossword-solvers: that, thanks to cricket, "leg" is "on" and "maiden" is "over"; that "Seaman" is AB or Tar; that "ay" means "ever". The English cryptic crossword, with the possible exception of Cyclops in Private Eye, is the last bastion of the Old England which John Major so hilariously thought immortal when he said that "Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county [cricket] grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist".

In other words, crosswords have always been provincial, in the sense that they're targeted squarely at a generation of people who might not have gone to university, but who certainly know their Dickens, Shakespeare, Bible and military rankings. Not to mention Robert Louis Stevenson and Rupert Brooke. Even Balfour was a little taken aback by one clue which assumed knowledge of the fact that King William II's nickname was Rufus.

For me, however, crosswords are – or should be – more cerebral than that, and when they range out of genuinely general knowledge and into Anglocentric trivia, they lose a lot of their attraction. Balfour, an ex-pat South African who uses crosswords to limn his attachment to his adoptive country, rather likes their Englishness. I find it stifling, off-putting: cricket, parliamentary democracy and even the Spice Girls are easier to export than cryptic crosswords.

Tina Brown tried them, towards the end of her time at the New Yorker; the cryptic crossword at the back was one of the first things to go once David Remnick took over. The Atlantic has been publishing cryptic crosswords since 1977. And clearly, among the patrons of the New York Public Library at least, there is quite a lot of demand for this book. So maybe there is some hope yet for the successful export of the cryptic crossword across the pond.

But one thing makes me think that it probably won't ever happen. Notes Balfour, upon observing some genteel women of a certain age failing to complete a crossword in early-80s Nairobi:

It is easy to make fun of the little old ladies in the twilight of their colonial experience. But I realize that it is not necessary for them to be good at crosswords for them to enjoy them. Being good is not the point. The point is the ritual.

The English are very good at rituals; the Americans much less so. Americans, I think, will only take to crosswords insofar as they can complete them. (Anybody who lives in New York will know what I'm talking about when I say "the only thing I enjoy more than doing the crossword puzzle is actually finishing it".) Cryptic crosswords have a steep learning curve, and Balfour, for one, had years of happy crosswording before he actually finished one on his own. That's not the type of thing which is likely to take off in an American culture of instant gratification.

Posted by Felix at 16:48 EST | Comments (0)

Simultaneous translation at BAM

I live with one of those arty-filmy types, who idolises Ingmar Bergman, and who forced me to get tickets to Ghosts when we were filling out our BAM subscription last year. Ghosts is a relatively minor Ibsen play which has been loosely translated by Bergman into Swedish (from Norwegian) and directed by him in a production for the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden, who John Lahr of the New Yorker calls "probably the best repertory theater in the world".

The five performances of Ghosts here in New York have been long-anticipated, and sold out for months. This is despite the fact that they're in Swedish. There were certainly a lot of Swedes in the audience, but most people were following the translation. Bergman obviously has a broad and deep following.

I'm no stranger to theater in a foreign language, even if you exclude opera. I once went to an all-day-long Russian-language performance of War and Peace at Tramway in Glasgow, and although it was incredibly boring at points (the political discussions did tend to drag a little) I managed to cope with the supertitles much as I would with the same thing at the opera, or with subtitles on a film.

So I was looking forward to this play. I'm a big Ibsen fan, and I'm always interested in seeing theatrical productions which are acknowledged to be among the best in the world.

I didn't make it past the interval.

The reason had nothing to do with the acting, the direction, the stage design, or the play itself. All, I'm sure, were first-rate. Even the costumes were great. But the whole theatre-going experience was destroyed by BAM's mind-blowingly idiotic decision not to use surtitles, like any other theatre would, but to use simultaneous translation instead.

It was just like when you go to an international conference: you walk up to the little man with the headsets, and give him a credit card, driver's license or the like in surety for your little piece of high-tech gadgetry. The headset itself was a bit like this one, but not quite as nice: the earpieces didn't have foam covers, which meant that – because the weight of the whole device was borne by the inside of your ears – you were definitely feeling it after more than an hour of usage.

Four translators worked on the piece, which had many more than four characters, meaning that sometimes you had the same person speaking two different parts in very close proximity to each other: weird, and disconcerting. What's more, because (I suppose) that it's much easier to find English-speaking Swedes than Swedish-speaking Americans, the translators sometimes got pronunciations wrong, or tripped over their lines. (The translation from Swedish to English, by the way, was beyond dreadful: cliché-filled hackwork at its very worst.)

The translators made what was probably a smart decision not to attempt to act their parts: the acting was on stage, and the translation was merely to keep us up to speed with who was saying what to whom. But when the characters are shouting and crying at each other, there's definitely a disconnect when what you're hearing is delivered in such a deadpan that often it was hard to work out whether a certain line was meant sarcastically or not.

What's more, Ghosts is a dialogue-heavy play, which means that a lot of the time the characters simply stand or sit on stage and have long discussions. Everything, here, is in the delivery – but we who were listening on headphones got none of that, since the translation effectively drowned out all of the audible information from the stage.

For me, choosing between simultaneous translation and surtitles in a theatrical context is a no-brainer. If the art resides largely in the text and the delivery, then we should be able to hear it; if you're listening to a bad translation, badly delivered, you're never going to appreciate the play. Surtitles do detract attention from what's going on on-stage, but most of the time, in this play, that was very little. And one of the great complaints about surtitles in the operatic world – that they steal attention from the music, which is what really matters – simply isn't relevant in the case of theatre.

What's more, surtitles are much more forgiving of bad translation than simultaneous translation is. With a surtitle, you're always aware that what you're listening to is a very loose translation of the original, there to provide an idea of what's going on. In films, most of the script is jettisoned by the time it reaches subtitles, without too much in the way of ill effects. You glance at the surtitle to keep abreast of the plot, and then refocus your attention on the action.

Simultaneous translation, on the other hand, offers no opportunity to concentrate purely on what's going on in front of you: it's impossible even to hear the actors. The whole theatrical experience is mediated through an uncomfortable headset housing uninspiring voices. (And which, incidentally, delivers hissing white noise when no one is speaking, especially if you turn your head away from the stage at all.)

I really can't imagine why BAM didn't go the surtitle route, and chose to use translation and headsets instead. Maybe some kind company donated the headset technology, and BAM felt that it had to use them. Maybe Bergman got full of himself, and decided that he didn't want surtitles bespoiling his perfect production. Maybe the cost of making slides for surtitles was a lot greater than the cost of hiring translators for the week. None of them strike me as particularly good reasons: if you know what the real reason was, do leave a comment below.

But at least there was a silver lining: leaving BAM early meant that we were finally able to try out Thomas Beisl, the hot new Austrian restaurant in Fort Greene. Great food, wonderful beer, very reasonable prices: all in all, one of the best places to eat out in New York, I'd say. If you have tickets to future performances of Ghosts, I'd recommend you sell them to the line of desperates wanting to get in, and go treat yourself to a delicious Viennese meal with the proceeds. You'll have a much more enjoyable evening.

Posted by Felix at 23:48 EST | Comments (3)

Malevich at the Guggenheim

Kasimir Malevich has long been one of my favourite artists, ever since I saw one of his great white-on-white paintings at Annely Juda as a teenager. There's a handful of paintings which seared themselves into my consciousness the minute I saw them: this was one, along with a Van Gogh in what was then Leningrad, and a Paul Klee in London.

If it was Annely Juda who first introduced me to Malevich, though, it was the Guggenheim who really helped me to understand his importance: one of the first big art books I ever bought was the exhibition catalogue for the enormous show which the museum put on to mark its new ambition after its grand bigger-and-better reopening in 1992. I loved reading about Malevich, and got very much into the photography of Alexander Rodchenko at the same time.

So I was very excited when I saw that the Guggenheim was putting on a whole show dedicated to Malevich. The Guggenheim knows how to mount well put-together exhibitions, and, considering its excellent connections in Russia, there's probably no institution in the world which could mount a better exhibition dedicated to Malevich's most important art.

I got to the Guggenheim, and it was still covered in blue astroturf. The Matthew Barney show, which I blogged back at the beginning of April, is staying up until June 11. And no matter how much you like Barney, you could never accuse him of being quiet and meditative. Malevich is relegated to a couple of rooms in the fourth floor of the annex, which are reached directly from the Barneyfied rotunda. No standard gallery hush here: blaring Barney video installations are never out of earshot. And I can't think of an artist who demands silence more than Malevich does.

For Malevich is not like the minimalists at Dia:Beacon, creating human-scale works which work on a purely physical level: for all his revolutionary avant-garde fervor, Malevich always remained something of an old-fashioned painter and artisan. His paintings repay studious attention, rather than hooking you with a conceptualist gimmick or bowling you over through their sheer scale.

What's more, many of the paintings are now historical artifacts more than they are the artworks Malevich intended to create. The single most important piece here – the Black Square of 1915, never before seen outside Russia – is cracked and damaged like a dried-out desert floor, with all manner of constituent colours visible amidst the decay. Malevich would be shocked at its present condition, and would probably have to be forcibly prevented from attacking it with a paint brush. So looking at this painting perforce involves a re-imagining of what it originally looked like, something made much easier by the presence nearby of the sibling Black Circle, which is in much better shape. So I would definitely recommend you go see this show; just wait until after the Barney has come down, so that it's easier to keep your concentration.

What you'll see when you get there is concentrated essence of Malevich: the show begins in 1915, with the quartet of abstract black shapes on white backgrounds, and ends in 1932, with the death of Suprematism. The four black and white paintings at the beginning (Black Square, Black Cross, Black Circle, and Elongated Plane) have not been seen together since 1920, which means there's probably no one alive who can remember seeing them all in the same place. It's a pity they're not shown together, then: the square comes first, with the other three arranged next to each other on a wall on the other side of the narrow gallery.

They're stunning, gorgeous paintings, well worth going to see, which lose a huge amount in reproduction. The brush strokes are thick and impassioned, much more like Jasper Johns's encaustic than the affectless monochromes of someone like Ad Reinhardt. This isn't the less-is-more philosophy of the late 20th Century; this is an attempt at a universal visual language, full of emotion and without representation. It's hard to see these paintings through pre-war eyes, but Malevich was not trying to emphasise the picture plane, or achieve some kind of ideal of "flatness". The geometric shapes were pure, for him, to be sure, but not in a cold, mathematical way: his squares weren't like Carl Andre's floor panels. Rather, the very universality of the forms was meant to allow the art to speak to all viewers equally: think Rothko, not Ruscha.

Most of the rest of the exhibition fails to live up to the four early paintings: as Malevich's canvases became more cluttered and colourful, they also lost a lot of their directness and power. There is one gorgeous red square, beautifully framed in heavy black wood, but after that one has to wait until the white-on-white paintings to really see what Malevich was capable of. In the meantime, there are not only dozens of paintings which are almost Kandinsky-like in their complexity, but also architectural models and even designs for tea sets (which, amazingly, are not available at the Guggenheim Shop).

Overall, it would seem that Malevich is one of those artists who is not particularly well served by a major exhibition. I'm very glad this show is on, and I'm sure it serves all manner of crucial art-historical purposes. But really I think a small, well-chosen exhibit at Annely Juda (especially in the beautiful, light-filled surroundings of her top-floor space on Dering Street) would have packed a greater punch than the Guggenheim's attempt at comprehensiveness. Everything you need to see here could really be encapsulated in a dozen small paintings: the rest is really just distracting noise, if not as unsettling as the Matthew Barney films banging away in the background.

All the same, I'll be going back. I think all art shows should be seen twice: the first time you walk around them dutifully, trying to see everything; the second time you can pick and choose and concentrate on the stuff you love. I'll be heading straight for the black circle, the red square, and the white cross. And in the background, Frank Lloyd Wright's pristine white spiral will add to, rather than detract from, the experience.

Posted by Felix at 0:42 EST | Comments (0)

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