The Evangelist

Sundance 2011 Roundup

2011-02-14T09:17:00.004-05:00

This year I’ve decided to do something a little different with my Sundance roundup. I’ve listed the films by day, and in the order in which we saw them. I thought this might give non-festivalgoers a sense of what our annual 4-day, 16+ film blowout experience is like.

Thursday, January 27th
Resurrect Dead ****
Have you ever been walking down the street in the city and seen a strange tile in the road, most often in a crosswalk, that reads something like, “Toynbee Idea in Kubrick’s 2001. Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter”? I have. Many times. And I’ve always wondered what the heck they were.

Filmmaker John Foy has created a captivating and scrappy documentary that solves the mystery. He followed three “Toynbee tile” enthusiasts for 5 years until they uncovered the secrets of the tiles’ creation, including why no one has ever seen one being placed into the tarmac!

Beyond its literal detective storyline, however, Resurrect Dead brings other, more subtle joys as Foy contrasts the personalities of the hunter and the hunted. His lead detective, Justin Duerr, turns out to bear many striking resemblances to the person he seeks. But rather than bang you over the head with the resonances, Foy is content to let the patterns emerge without stating them plainly, leaving attentive audiences to draw their own connections and conclusions.

The Lie ****
When chief Sundancer John Cooper introduced this film, he noted that director Joshua Leonard has quite literally been raised at the festival. Debuting in The Blair Witch Project in 1999, Josh has returned to the festival in many other films, notably in one of the most wonderful high notes of the “mumblecore” genre, Humpday (2009).

A young couple with an infant is struggling with what their lives are becoming. Clover (Jess Weixler) is an activist and community organizer who has gone to law school and now finds herself confronted with a plum job “working for the man”; and not just any man, a large pharmaceutical company who her youthful compatriots view as the problem, not the solution. Her husband Lonnie has sacrificed his rock ‘n roll dreams for a stultifying job editing bad commercials. In the midst of this existential crisis, a pressurized Lonnie tells a whopper of a lie to his screaming boss and thereby launches their safe making-ends-meet existence into a slow motion crash. That process occupies the majority of the film and it is drawn with extreme empathy and liberally salted with humor that is both au courant and extremely Chekhovian.

The Lie shows just how much the actor turned director has learned over the years. In addition to the technical details – beautiful crisp images, great sound design, tight editing - Leonard’s performance as an actor feels effortless and as a director he pulls strong performances from his entire cast; most notably a stunningly lucid performance from Weixler, quite possibly the best of her career to date. [Disclaimer: The director is a friend and I have a financial stake in this film.]

Gun Hill Road **1/2
Gun Hill Road tells pieces of a story that we’ve heard before, but we’ve never quite seen them assembled in this way. Enrique (Esai Morales) returns from prison to discover his only son is in the process of transitioning. Protected by his mother (a very grounded Judy Reyes), Michael/Vanessa has had the space to begin to find himself and a community. But Enrique is an O.G. and, despite the fact that his friends seem to accept Michael’s evolution, Papi understandably cannot get his head around the new configuration of his family.

What makes Gun Hill Road fly when it flies is the attention to the details of Michael’s transformation. What stalls it out is the attempts to give Enrique a justifiable backstory to motivate his homophobia. Nonetheless, this is a valiant first effort, lovingly and sensitively directed, and worthwhile viewing for anyone who is interested in the subject matter.

Another Earth ****1/2
There’s a remarkable Sundance story to be told about this film and its mate, Sound of My Voice. Brit Marling (remember that name) and two Georgetown University friends moved in together in LA. Marling co-wrote both screenplays, working with one director all day and the other at night. The product? Two very interesting, challenging, philosophical films.

In Another Earth Rhonda is bound for a full ride in MIT’s astrophysics program. After a night of partying, she heads home and hears on the radio that an astonishing discovery has been made. A planet that looks exactly like Earth has been revealed due to an axis shift of the sun. (It’s been mirroring our orbit and thus been invisible to us.) She leans out the window to see this surreal sight in the night sky and causes a disastrous car accident.
Another Earth charts Rhonda’s reentry into society after imprisonment and her subsequent unintentional embroilment with her surviving victim John Burroughs, a Yale professor and composer (the fine William Mapother) who lost his pregnant wife and child in the accident. Filled with twists and turns both in the lives of Rhonda and John, and in the unveiling of a small portion of the mysteries of Earth 2, Another Earth is a compelling exploration of the roles of sorrow, chance and forgiveness in our lives.

Friday, January 28th
The Future ***
If you enjoyed Miranda July’s Me You and Everyone We Know (2005), you will definitely enjoy The Future. Like its predecessor, The Future is a fragile, ethereal film full of moments of extraordinary poetry. Also like MYAEWK, it’s full of twee humor and odd sex.

There’s not much point in describing a Miranda July film. The plots are not literal and the logic is sui generis, but here we go: a young couple is about to adopt an injured cat (who narrates the film). They are concerned that the cat will dramatically change their lives and therefore they decide to abandon their current lives in order to explore as many possible options for their futures as they can before they have to take delivery of the adopted cat. Along the way, he stops time and carries on a conversation with the moon. She has an affair with a man she probably should never know. At the end, they have to decide what future they wish to have. Odd, right? Right. Yet, for some, this will probably be the most beautiful film they have ever seen.

Sound of My Voice *****
Peter and Lorna are following driving directions to a nondescript suburban house. Upon arrival they are stripped, made to shower and change into hospital gowns, and then transported blindfolded to another location and into the presence of Maggie (the superb Brit Marling once again.)

Maggie has a remarkable claim as to her origin and what she is teaching her acolytes reeks of EST. Her story is so very hard to believe, but her manner is so compelling. At some points you are sure you know the truth…and then not so sure. It will keep you guessing right up to the last frame.

This deceptively simple, well written, directed and performed tale has a hold on my imagination. I cannot stop thinking about it.

The Details ***
The Details is a gonzo black comedy that begins with an obsession with destructive raccoons and ends with murder. In between lies a plot of mayhem. Tobey McGuire stars with an underutilized Elizabeth Banks (will she ever get the script she deserves?) and a magnificent Laura Linney. Linney’s performance as a sex-crazed, cat-lady-next-door is simply not to be believed, even after it’s been seen. The rest of the film is pretty standard indie black comedy at this point and not at all special, but Linney is the price of admission. She simultaneously steals this film and any film screening in the same multiplex. Sheer genius. Somebody introduce her to Christopher Guest, pronto!

The Bengali Detective *1/2
The Bengali Detective is a documentary that sounded so very promising in the description, but which unfortunately fell flat in the viewing. In seeking to find someone whose own story and profession would branch out in ways that would help illuminate the story of a city, Philip Cox discovered Rajesh Ji, the titular character. Mr. Ji has a small detective agency which primarily investigates and shuts down the distribution of fake consumer goods. He also takes on the business of any PI in any city; the odd adultery, etc. More interestingly, he attempts to solve murders where the police are dragging their heels. What would seem to be the final ingredient in the mix (it’s not, but I’m saving you an exhaustive list of what is covered in the film) is the fact that Mr. Ji is also enamored of Bollywood and enters his detective force into a local TV dance competition. All of this sounds like the recipe for something fun, funny, and extraordinary. This is why it has already been optioned to be remade as fiction. The reality presented in the documentary itself is much less satisfactory and the film simply doesn’t gel.

Flypaper **1/2
*Sigh*. What to say about this one? This was the first spec script from the duo that went on to write The Hangover. It became clear during the post-screening Q&A that this script was more intended to show their writing chops than it was ever intended to be produced and it shows. Flypaper is nearly 8 movie genres mashed up. It’s a bank heist, a pseudo-Coen Brothers character comedy (including Tim Blake Nelson in one of his wacky hick roles), a romance, a whodunit a la Clue, and on and on.

Saturday, January 29th
Hot Coffee *****
Docs like Hot Coffee are part of why I go to Sundance. Made by a first timer attorney-turned-filmmaker, Hot Coffee will open your mind on a topic you only thought you understood: so-called “frivolous lawsuits.” Starting with the infamous McDonald’s coffee lawsuit in Texas, the movie explores how corporations have systematically removed your access to the courts. It’s enraging, remarkable and enlightening. See this movie! (HBO bought it.)

Win Win ****
Another well-made, character-driven feature from Tom McCarthy (The Station Agent, The Visitor), starring Paul Giamatti and the wonderful Amy Ryan. The accidental result of a desperate deception leaves a lawyer/high school wresting coach in loco parentis for a troubled teen. A terrific cast makes this well-worn tale new again.

Old Cats *
We did not enjoy this film. The dramatic climax of the film involves an elderly woman walking down 8 flights of stairs. ‘Nuff said.

Like Crazy **** 1/2
A bittersweet romance about the emotional scar many of us earn in our first significant relationship. Jacob, an American, and Anna, who is British, meet at college in LA and fall madly (and quite believably) in love. Visa problems thrust them into a long-distance relationship. Anton Yelchin and Felicity Jones are so committed and affecting that one wishes someone would give them a chance to star in Romeo & Juliet together.

Drake Doremus impressed with his Sundance debut Douchebag last year. Whilst being a vastly more commercial effort, Like Crazy manages to live up to the directorial promise he showed without selling out. It’s a heartbreaking film (in a good way) and I predict that some will put it on their list of all time great indie romances. It clearly ran away with the jury’s heart, earning it this year’s Grand Jury prize for US drama.

Sunday, January 30th
Being Elmo ***1/2
A very sweet bio-doc about Kevin Clash, the puppeteer behind Elmo. Thoroughly heart warming.

Kinyarwanda ***
The “first dramatic feature film conceived and produced by Rwandans”, Kinyarwanda educates us about the complexities of the genocide in Rwanda in a completely non-exploitative fashion. While not ultimately a great film, Kinyarwanda is still a very good film on several levels. An extremely worthy effort that should be seen by anyone who wants to begin to understand the pros and cons of being homo sapiens.

Buck ****1/2
The inspiration for The Horse Whisperer, Buck Brannaman travels the country most of the year teaching people how to engage with their horses in a completely new – and vastly more humane - way. Watching Brannaman with horses is indeed something to see. And he quite literally (and quietly) radiates good, solid American values of the kind that make myths. Spending time with Brannaman and listening to his gentle philosophy, born of years of private pain, is, if you let it truly sink in, inspiring. His demeanor is that of Atticus Finch, only looking out for the horses, not the people. His words are those of a Khalil Gibran of the American West. Watch, listen with your heart, and learn.

Project Nim ****
Another tale of people and animals, only this time without the redemption. In the 1970s (of course…) a bunch of feckless, self indulgent academics decided it was a good idea to try to raise a chimpanzee as a member of a family in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. Their alleged goal was to see if they could teach it enough sign language for an interspecies breakthrough. The result? Individual agendas clash, the convenience of the humans quickly supersedes any sense of moral obligation, and we are left with what is simultaneously a sad comedy of errors and a classic example of man’s inhumanity to animals. As a study in human fallibility, Project Nim is fascinating. As for the original wrongheaded experiment? Madness.

Sundance 2009 Roundup

2009-01-26T23:05:00.007-05:00

Overall, the quality of the films we saw at Sundance 2009 was quite good. While there were fewer lifechanging standouts than past years, there were fewer total stinkers and almost every film we saw was a worthwile investment of 90 minutes.

Feature Films
Humpday **** 1/2
You heard it here first: Humpday is the next Sundance comedy that is going to nail the zeitgeist in a big way. Two 30-something straight guys reunite after their lives have diverged and end up accidentally challenging each other to what is essentially a game of gay chicken. Verbal pyrotechics flare as they try to determine who's going to top whom, psychically and maybe even physically.

World's Greatest Dad ****
Bobcat Goldthwaite's junior directorial effort can be summarized as a cross between "Election" and "Pretty Persuasion" and it is a dark, transgressive, misanthropic comedy of the first order. I won't summarize the plot for fear of ruining any of its constant surprises. The film successfully keeps you off balance throughout with its combination of comedic and tragic shocks. But this is not Farrelly Brothers territory as Goldthwait's script has significant meaning woven intricately into it, although some viewers will be too freaked out to take those meanings on board. Unfortunately, as of the Saturday screening the film hadn't sold despite having Robin Williams in the title role.

The Greatest ****
The pre-title sequence of Shana Feste’s first effort as a writer/director features the best 10 minutes in film I’ve seen in a long time. Pierce Brosnan and Susan Sarandon play the parents of a family coping with an untimely death and the enchanting Carey Mulligan (who clearly made a Sundance breakout this year) plays the teenage girl who forces the family to collectively confront their loss. Feste’s debut is remarkably assured: well scripted, well directed, and beautifully lensed. She’s one to watch.

An Education ****
A well made Brit-pic scripted by Nick Hornby and based on a memoir of a young woman's youthful awakening in 60's London. 2009 Sundance It Girl Carey Mulligan illuminates the screen whilst Peter Saarsgard charms her and her parents into foregoing her potential for an Oxford university education in return for a life of seeming glamour. It's a modern day fable in the tradition of Austen and exactly the sort of film you'd expect Emma Thompson to be in and lo, she is.

Lymelife ****
The Martini Brothers' autobiographical tale of the dissolution of a Long Island family treads the extremely familiar grounds of suburban dystopia blazed long ago by "American Beauty," "The Ice Storm" and countless other indies in the last decade. What distinguishes this effort and makes it a four star flick, however, are the performances of a stellar cast that includes Alec Baldwin, Cynthia Nixon, Rory Culkin, Kieran Culkin (who given his repeated excellence on film and stage should be more appreciated), Emma Roberts and Tim Hutton, all of whom are very good indeed. The only person who struggles a bit is Hutton, but this is the challenge with having more of a plot device to play than a fleshed out character.

Paper Heart *** 1/2
A quirky exploration of what it means to give in to love. Nerd queen Charlayne Yi and a young director friend have done what may turn out to be the post-millennial version of “When Harry Met Sally," only this time there are documentary interviews not only with couples, but also with singles. To make matters even more au courant, the documentary exploration is paired with a parallel “scripted reality” plotline regarding Michael Cera’s attempt to win Yi’s heart. It has its own totally peculiar (and probably entirely unrepeatable) alchemy that somehow works.

Adam ***
A young man with Asperger’s is suddenly cut adrift in the world by the loss of his parent and simultaneously finds his first romance at the time when he most sorely needs it. A terrific performance by Hugh Dancy in the title role makes this film worth seeing, and the rest of the cast also acquits itself quite nobly: Rose Byrne does a lovely job as Adam’s love interest; Amy Irving is always compelling in a role of any size and her role as the mother is smaller than I’d have liked. Peter Gallagher does what Peter Gallagher does best: gently nibble some scenery in a role that suits him well. It is clear director Max Mayer struggled a bit with the film’s ending and even while it’s not quite perfect, it’s good enough and doesn’t compromise the movie.

Arlen Faber ***
Arlen Faber wrote a book that changed the world called “Me & God” and his life has never been the same. A philosophical romantic comedy quite well played by Jeff Daniels (in what would once have been the Albert Brooks role) and Lauren Graham (in the Lauren Graham role). Extremely enjoyable all around, although the largely zingy soufflé of a script falls in the end.

Push ***
Recipient of multiple awards this year, “Push” is something of a glorious mess, not dissimilar in its strengths and weaknesses to Spike Lee’s “Jungle Fever” (1991). “Push” tells the story of Precious, a teenage girl whose kitchen-sink full of dire circumstances includes poverty, pregnancy, obesity, and even incest. The film’s weaknesses lie in its structure (there is a fair bit of trite plotting and more than one false ending) and overly familiar characters, e.g., the saintly (albeit lesbian) teacher who saves the day. But there are remarkable performances here; most especially Mo’Nique whose rip-roaring performance as the Mother from Hell might do for her what the role of Gator did for Samuel L. Jackson. And newcomer Gabby Sidibe’s performance as Precious suggests she might have a long career ahead of her. (For the snarkiest of moviegoers, the most shocking thing in the movie will be Mariah Carey’s remarkably competent turn as a social worker.)

Mary & Max ** 1/2
This film’s style is greatly indebted to Hillaire Belloc, Roald Dahl, Edward Gorey and Tim Burton - all sources I enjoy. Yet I was quite conflicted about this stop motion animated pic about an unfortunate Australian girl and her adult American pen pal who has Asperger's syndrome. I enjoyed parts of it greatly, most especially Phillip Seymour Hoffman's voice acting, but nonetheless left the screening unmoved because the whole (five years in the making) enterprise seemed overwhelmed by a surfeit of twee.

Against the Current *
Joseph Fiennes mourns his wife and unborn child. So he decides to swim the Hudson River with two friends alongside in a boat before he commemorates his beloved’s death with his own. Veering between road movie, buddy comedy, and mumblecore, this is a total drear fest whose primary feature is that it refuses to sell out at the very end. There is also a superb cameo by Mary Tyler Moore, who just might be the patron saint of getting a handful of otherwise unproduceable indies funded.

Once More with Feeling *
Chazz Palminteri and Drea de Matteo star as father and daughter on the verge of breaking their respective marriage vows with the hope of injecting needed change into their lives. He is suddenly obsessed with karaoke as a proxy for the singing career he might have sacrificed in becoming a psychiatrist and she's consumed with the possibilities of recapturing her groove via lipo and the hunky cop who would like to collude with her in committing a serious moving violation. K. summed it best when she said, "I liked it better the first time when it was called 'Moonstruck'."

Documentaries
The Cove *****
A heartrending must-see that combines the best elements of “Mission Impossible” with Jacques Cousteau. A team of activists learns that the insane machismo of some powerful Japanese men is inspiring a small town to slaughter 26,000 dolphins a year. Their motivation? Apparently, largely because the West told them not to harm whales. Of course, there is also the fact that they can get $150,000 per dolphin caught for adventure parks. But that only accounts for a small number of the dolphins captured. The rest are herded into a secret cove and slaughtered en masse like a scene out of “Gladiator." (The mercury laden dolphin flesh having no real market is sold off as whale meat to an unsuspecting populace.) An A-Team of activists assembled high technology spy equipment and captured the horror on film in order to prove what is going on and to inspire us all to action. See it. Take action.

The September Issue ****
For many viewers this well-crafted doc will simply put proof to "The Devil Wears Prada." (And indeed, it is fascinating to see how well Streep nailed Wintour.) But the true value of this film lies more in its portrayal of the social issues universal to all human endeavors great and small. The struggle between creativity and pragmatism. The fact that those who display superiority complexes in one context (e.g.., the workplace) are inevitably prey to the inverse effect in another (e.g., their personal lives). And the need to create and find some form of existential meaning from our professional lives, no matter what it is we do for a living.

The Yes Men Fix the World***
The Yes Men punk corporations and government via brilliant hoaxes that demonstrate what those organizations should be doing if they had a moral compass. For instance, one Yes Man poses as a Dow Chemical spokesman and announces Dow will fund the eco cleanup and also pay reparations for (their Union Carbide subsidiary's) catastrophe they created in Bhopal. Piquant political fun for the Stewart/Colbert set.

Sergio ***
A great story and a good film, Sergio recounts the heartbreaking story of the fiendishly handsome, suave and charming UN diplomat Sergio Vieira de Mello. Killed shortly before he meant to remove himself from active nation-building in order to be with his lovely paramour, de Mello was a dashing figure targeted by al Qaeda for his role in freeing East Timor from Islamic Indonesia. Remarkably successful and abstracted recreations give an excellent sense of the dramatic and prolonged attempt to rescue him from the rubble of the UN compound in Baghdad.

We Live in Public ***
Call Josh Harris what you will: damaged sociopath, stupid idiot, vainglorious visionary, and/or full-blown narcissist. What Ondi Timoner’s “We Live in Public” (which won best doc) demonstrates clearly is that all of those labels apply equally well. Harris made himself a multimillionaire with his dotcoms and spent the money in strange experiments such as “Quiet” where he built a compound where everyone was filmed all the time doing everything people do and everyone was watching everyone else do those very things. Yet he also clearly predicted the power of the Internet in society and how we would collectively come to accept and willingly participate in the diminution of our privacy.

Big River Man *
Sherpa Dan and Chris liked this one. The rest of us DID NOT. It has so much promise. Martin Strel, the world's most successful long distance swimmer decides to swim the insanely dangerous Amazon. It sounds like a Herzog film, right? And, in many ways, it is. Strel goes nuts, along with some of his helpers. But in the end, too much goes unexplained (why does Strel connect his head to a car battery exactly?) and what we get is a maddening portrait of madness rather than a revealing one. Strel remains a cypher.

The Buddha Asked Me Where to Shop

2008-12-01T00:04:00.027-05:00

A number of friends and colleagues have asked me about where I shop for clothes. Finally, a lovely man who happens to share the Buddha’s name importuned me repeatedly and I began to assemble this information. Some of it repeats from older posts, but most of it is new.

The focus here is a shopping list for men, but I'm sure that an equally lengthy list of recommendations of places for women to shop will spring out of my head (like Athena, to mix metaphors and pantheons in the same post) eventually.

On Your Body

Bags
OK. Look. I’m a total whore for murses. (That’s a man’s purse, if you didn’t already know.) I have a ton of them and I have bought cool ones in several countries when I happen to have stumbled upon them: Spain, Japan, Italy, wherever.

Where to find one for yourself? Honestly, the easiest way to find good murses is to scan the coolhunting blogs as they show up there all the time under the guise of “messenger bags” or “laptop totes”. Check out Josh Spear, Cool Hunting, and Uncrate for leads.

Casual Shoes
There are so many casual shoe brands with style. Stroll into any Otto Tootsi Plohound (they have locations all over The Blessed Isle) and you’ll find at least 4 or 5 brands you’ve never heard of. I recommend taking a look at whatever you can find from Tsubo (for comfort and edge) or Mark Nason (for edgy style).

Dress Shoes
When it comes to dress shoes, if you want the traditional styles, shop the traditional brands. You don’t need me for that. If you want something that combines comfort, quality and has more style, then I recommend checking out the offerings of Donald J. Pliner. You should be able to find his product in boutiques, major department stores and online.

If you’re willing to pay for truly superlative comfort and style, then brace yourself and put on a pair of Michael Toschi. The technology in his shoes makes them insanely comfortable. There is no other description. But be prepared that even on sale, they’re going to set you back at least $250.

Eyewear
Hedda Szmuk at The Eyeman at 84th and Broadway is your answer. Hedda will find you an excellent pair of frames within minutes. And then if you want to continue, she'll spend as long as you like finding other truly excellent options. As you explore the spectrum of spectacles available, you will be treated to Hedda's saucy commentary along the way. You should be forewarned that if a pair doesn't look good on you, Hedda might just snatch them off your face and absolutely forbid you to buy them.

Fragrance
If it’s time to get educated about scent, then there are only two masters you must know: Chandler Burr and Luca Turin. Start by reading Burr’s biography of Turin (The Emperor of Scent) and then read Burr in the Times (he writes Scent Notes) and buy Turin’s book “Perfume: The Guide”.

Fragrances are a personal thing, so let me recommend fragrance houses to explore that you won’t find every guy wearing. (Remember Drakkar Noir and your college squash team?). First, go smell the scents at L’Artisan Perfumeur and Bond No. 9 (outlets available around Manhattan) for some excellent androgynous options. If you’re feeling like you want something edgier, drop into Bendels and check out the scandalously named fragrances of Etat Libre d’Orange.

If you want something custom, go to Le Labo on Elizabeth Street in SoHo and they’ll mix something up for you special.

Leather Goods
I think everyone needs a friend in the leather business. Me, I go down to see Memo at The Village Tannery on Great Jones Street between Broadway and Lafayette. If you want a backpack, a purse, a belt, pretty much any utility piece made of leather, drop in.

Shirts, Pants & Essentials
Keep in mind as you review this section that while I focus on shirts in my descriptions, each of these outlets also retails pants, sweaters, jackets and suits, etc..

My hands-down favorite place for menswear in 2008 has been Italian designer Eredi Pisano at 54th and Madison. It’s going to have the latest patterns, tailoring, collars…and price tags. Although, if you go during a sale, you’ll obviously be able to do better.

If Italian high-end is not your style, well, there’s no denying the influence of Jermyn Street on men’s fashion in the last five years. And it’s hard to go wrong shopping at Thomas Pink if you have the income. If you want to a lower price point with Jermyn Street styling, go for Charles Tyrwhitt. Both of these stores have retail locations near Eredi Pisano on Madison, as well as websites and catalogs.

The key with shirts, as with all clothing, is the fit. So if you want a more reasonable price point and a good fit, I recommend the Land’s End custom shirt process. You can input your measurements into their website and they will tailor a shirt just for you. It’s somewhat more costly than a standard Land’s End shirt, but you can be sure it will look great on you. And their customer service is to die for.

If you’re in NYC and you want to a boutique experience with multiple brands, I have three different recommendations, two are designer discount shops and the other is a boutique. Designer discount shops can be a hassle because these guys are out to move merchandise fast. On the positive side, you can haggle.

The first, relatively well known, shop is Riflessi, which has a shop on Madison Avenue and another on 57th Street. Long a staple of New York Magazine’s Best Buy column, Riflessi carried European and American designer brands a season or so behind the department stores and at a lower price. The less well-known shop is Valenti at 50th and Third Avenue. In addition to discounting designers, Valenti buys Italian fabric lots that European designers have elected not to use for one reason or another and they do their own private label shirts in the latest styles.

Finally, my favorite menswear boutique in Manhattan is Frank Stella. They have a store on 7th Avenue above 58th Street and another on Columbus and 81st. John Hellings stocks his store with a wide array of what’s hot, from the edgier brands like Ted Baker to more staid labels such as Tommy Bahama. Shop his seasonal sales and you’ll do very well indeed.

If you happen to be in Providence, Rhode Island, the only place to shop is Marc Allen on South Main Street. Marc moved north from NYC to raise his family and he’s got the best shop in town by a long shot.

If you happen to be in Los Angeles, you must go find menswear genius Marc Callo! For those of you connected to me on Facebook, Marc is the man who created The Jacket: my gorgeous platinum leather motorcycle-style blouson that magically elicits positive appraisals from peoples of all races, ethnicities, genders, and gender preferences when and wherever I wear it.

T-Shirts
We live in the age of the screen printed T-shirt. There are many sites that follow the Threadless model of having the public vote on the designs they would like to see produced. I happen to prefer Design by Humans.

If you're an NYCer, there are several local designers worth noting. My favorite is Severyn. If you go by his table in Union Square often enough, you'll eventually meet his whole freakin' family manning it at one point or another. (I'm particularly fond of his wife Natalie, who calls everyone "Babes".) And, although they're so hot they need no promotional support from me, it's also worth mentioning the guys at Barking Irons whose funky designs are all about forgotten elements of the history of our fair city.

In Your Home

Art
My personal philosophy is that there is nothing more important to me than ecstasy available through art. I really don’t think there are many endeavors that man engages in that matter more. I’m also a big believer in buying the work of living artists and I have met most although not all of the artists whose work I own.

Buying art is a very personal activity, so far be it from me to tell you where to buy it. If you’re already into buying art, you’ll have your own ideas about where to get it. If you’re new to buying art, this entry will hopefully provide you with a starting point for how to find art you might like at a price you can afford.

First of all, I’m a big believer in craft as well as art and you can find both at the best juried craft fairs: Lincoln Center has two craft fairs per year and Art Rider produces craft events nationwide.

Second, if you’re just beginning to explore buying art, I recommend buying the work of art students. There are two great ways to do this: 1) either attend the juried shows at a local art school or 2) go to Art Student Showcase on Lafayette between Prince and Spring. Art schools generally have an annual juried show in June and/or sometimes even a holiday art/craft fair for alumni (RISD has a fantastic holiday show!) in December. These are great places to go, meet young artists, and make acquisitions at any price point that works for you. You might find a lovely still life for $25 by a current student, a stunning pencil nude for $75 by a recent graduate or perhaps an oil landscape by an established alumnus for $7500.

Invitations
If you just want any old invitation, go to the stationer. If you have a significant event that you want memorialized in a one-of-a-kind way, I’m a tireless promoter of Ceci New York. Lisa Hoffman is truly brilliant and working with her and her team is like having any great graphic piece produced for your company. You establish a creative brief, likes and dislikes, key themes, and they’ll make magic. You’ll pay for the privilege, but I guarantee you that you’ll want to frame it when it’s done.

Furniture & Lighting
For me, there are always two places to start furniture shopping: Maurice Villency on 57th and 3rd and Lee’s Studi0 on 57th east of 7th (above Lee’s Art Shop). Both have highly opinionated help available (I recommend Ed Silverii at Lee’s and Norman Teitelbaum if he’s not yet retired at MV) and lots of high-end design.

Being the CFO of our family K. feels strongly that I have to include three less pricey options for finding contemporary furniture options: NYC's own Scott Jordan, Manhattan retailer Jensen Lewis and the national chain Room and Board. All of them are great places to look as you seek out just the right piece. If the piece in question is a sleeper sofa, check out this 2005 post.

I'm Big on (and in) Japan

2008-07-20T21:48:00.016-04:00

It's fun to be able to say that I am writing this from the Osaka Kansai airport business class traveler's lounge. Being able to say that means that I have now finally been to Japan!

I've wanted to to Japan all my life and I've finally had my first taste. My employer needed me to be in Tokyo and Singapore across two weeks. Now I've been to Singapore before, so that in itself was not so exciting a prospect, but Japan...that was something I got quite excited about.

My time in Tokyo was limited but very enjoyable. And the Tokyo trip had the added bonus of coinciding with a Japanese holiday. So I my concluded my meetings on Thursday, the office was closed on Friday and I bulleted up to Kyoto for a long weekend with my friend Jonah. He lives in Vietnam and flew in to meet up with me in Kyoto.

Kyoto is a great city and I look forward to coming here with K. (Jonah said the same thing about wanting to bring Phoung.) It has some commonality with two very disparate cities that I also enjoy: Amsterdam in that it has canals, geishas, bars and Siem Reap in that it has a truly profuse number of dazzling ancient temples and shrines. And like those cities, Kyoto also has great food at both high and lowbrow levels. (Come to think of it, I think that Siem Reap is actually only excellent at lowbrow/local cuisine as opposed to haute cuisine.)

I'm a little exhausted now, so I'm going to do a fuller post on Kyoto later. But for now I'll just share some fun images.

As you can see from this Buddha against a backdrop of power lines, Kyoto is a city where the old and the new sit side by side. You can be walking in a covered outdoor shopping passage in downtown Kyoto and you will suddenly stumble into a temple, graveyard or shrine. It appears that the modern city of Kyoto was simply built around the ancient city's constellation of sacred sites. So those sites site untouched, tucked in admidst the concrete sidewalks, endless storefronts and and high rise construction of downtown Kyoto. The next two images carry forward this theme of ancient and sacred side by side with the new, novel and profane.

Here's a shot from the wonderful Ryoanji: a Buddhist temple with a very famous Zen garden. This is a wonderful site to sit contemplatively. You may even begin to understand what a Zen garden is for because the scale and the arrangment of this extraordinary place cannot help to provoke some desire to look inward. Once again though, I found the sacred butting up against the profane at Ryonji because in order to contemplate the garden properly, you have to be able to ignore the constant chatter of your fellow humans who have come to pay the stones a visit.

Here I am with a Japanese soda. I'll have to post some photos of Japanese soda machines later. There are an endless variety of sodas with odd names and flavors that are extremely hard to discern from the bottles. Which of course means its fun to try them. This soda had an odd light green color. I can't recall the name. I may have simply chosen it for the image of boy and his dog in the style of Picasso 's Don Quixote. Anyway, I drank a sip. Jonah looked at me quizzically.

It wasn't bad, but it wasn't immediately clear what it was, supposed to taste like either. Fruit...hmmm....mild fruit....urrrr...slightly sweet without being overwhelming...huh...rather refreshing, I guess....familiar...but what IS IT?

And then, it suddenly dawned on me. And I was so glad that my darling K. was not present or she might have wretched being that this is her least favorite flavor ever. I was drinking melon soda. Somewhere between honeydew and cantaloupe, I think. Colored like honeydew, but the flavor was a bit more cantaloupe. Fascinating and nice on a hot day (if you're me). Anyway, more on Kyoto and Japanese sodas at a future date.

The Measure of America

2008-07-09T16:10:00.000-04:00

Through a happy accident, I had a very small role to play in the development of an exciting new book that will be launched July 16 in Washington. I was on a business trip and met an author who needed a special breed of partner to help her express some very important ideas based on research about the state of our nation. As it happened, I knew the good folks at Humantific who helped Kristin Lewis communicate her data through the design of a compelling and understandable book. Below is some information about it. I hope you'll take an interest.

The Measure of America is the first-ever American human development report. Carefully crafted by the authors to be nonpartisan, we are hopeful that The Measure of America 2008-2009 will become a significant catalyst for societal change in the United States.

You can see the announcement trailer on YouTube and you can become a fan of Measure of America on FaceBook.

Icoa: A Little Foodie Heaven on Grand Cayman

2008-05-20T23:45:00.000-04:00

We knew for certain that we had hit the jackpot when the beautiful little artisanal bread board arrived and practically begged us in audible human language to be savored immediately. A brief glance in its direction and we knew we would have to oblige it.

It all started back on Little Cayman at the Southern Cross Club. When we realized that we had no way to avoid a long layover on Grand Cayman on the way home, we figured we'd better ask Terry Thomson what to do about it. Terry is SC's masseur who also doubles as the bartender (and in earlier days was apparently also the boat captain and a divemaster). Having spent a little time at the bar with Mr. Thomson it was pretty clear that he's a very well rounded hedonist. So Terry gave us the eye, considered our foodie tendencies and spieled through a few options for lunch on GC. Watching our reactions carefully, he finally pronounced, "Yeah. You know, I think Icoa Cafe is the place for you. It's in the Seven Mile Shops strip mall. Don't be fooled by the appearance of the mall. The food is really good."

Now the strip mall is seriously unpreposessing, so the warning was very much needed. One would never imagine that there was a purveyor of food porn present given the humble setting, but as K. began using a cute little spoon to put some tapenade on the freshly baked bread, we were thinking that this was going to prove to be a serious find.

Because the appetizers looked so fabulous and because we had been eating and drinking a lot more food than we are accustomed to for the past week at Southern Cross Club, we elected to order a whole bunch of appetizers and forego the main dishes.

Dish after dish, we were not disappointed. Two tender scallops were in an unctous mushroom broth (definitely cream in that "broth!) with a few beautifully shaved pieces of parmesan. I honestly was a bit skeptical about the cheese in this context, but I loved it in practice. Or more specifically, in my mouth. And that bread basket required a refill so that we could sop up all that yummy broth!

A cylinder of chicken liver pate arrived with toasted pistachio nuts, fig compote and most interestingly a pot of honey and a honey dripper. Ohhhhhhh.....so unbelievably superb. I would have never thought to combine honey and pate myself, much less fig compote but it turned out to be an inspired combination.

After a sip of crisp Australian Pino Grigio, I would spread a little bit, consider whether or not with this taste I had accomplished everything I needed to in this world and whether or not I could depart with this swallow as my last deed on earth. I have to say that the chicken liver pate was truly unbelievable. I loved the texture and it's robust but not overpowering flavor. Both the honey and fig compote managed to be complementary without repetitive in the ways in which they added sweetness. And the simple, but inventive presentation of the honey in a shot glass with the mini-dripper struck me as delightfully pragmatic and still surprising at the same time.

After raving about the pate, I don't want to give too short shrift to the Blue Crab cakes with lemon verbena, sweet pea & mint "Gazpacho". It too was lovely and flavorful. Yet another win on the menu.

So the moral of the story here is:

a) Listen to your local hedonist when it comes to island food (which in the Caribbean is so often a crashing disappointment in comparison to the beautiful environs)

b) Never mind the strip mall because most of the islands are not generally known for their glorious architecture to begin with, right?

c) You dont need entrees when the appetizers rock the house. You have the advantage of being able to try many more items and see what the chef is all about.

The next time we're passing through Grand Cayman, we might just engineer a little layover at lunch hour on purpose!

Missing Robert Graham

2008-05-04T11:40:00.007-04:00

When we moved to NYC in the early 90's, K. discovered Fairway. Soon after, she bought our place on 75th Street between Broadway and West End Avenue to be near it. $185,000 for a 2 bedroom apartment? We were both starving actors at the time and I thought she was freakin' nuts. Could even our combined earnings for our entire lifetimes ever equal $185,000? (Thank god my advice was listened to and then completely ignored.)

Back then, Fairway was about 1/4 of the size it is today, which meant that the cheese counter was proportionally humungous. It took up the whole back corner on the northwest side of the store.

Now cheese is important to us. (So incidentally is pudding. At least pudding is particularly special to me, which prompted K. to have this t-shirt specially designed for me. If pudding is special to you, too you can order one for yourself here.) And as K. is of Dutch descent, she is particularly concerned with how cheese is sliced. (At least she tells me this is a Dutch thing, but maybe it's just one of her RULES.) A wedge of cheese you see must be turned so that the fat part sits on the counter and the thin edge stands in the air. You then take the cheese plane and shave off tiny slivers from the thin edge. To do this correctly, you want a cheese plane with the shallowest angle you can find so that your slides are wafer thin.

Having recently moved around in together and being in the process of stocking up on specialized kitchen utensils, we were in search of a cheese plane with the properly shallow angle on the blade. Given that Fairway had a cheese counter that completely blew our minds, we thought we'd ask for some advice there while we were shopping.

That particular day in 1993, there was an elfin man behind the cheese counter. He was bald, African-American, sparkling eyes and a smile that lit up the store. K. explained her quest and he said, "Wait here!" He bounded into the back for about 3 minutes and then darted out from behind the wheels of parmesan. With a flourish, he handed K. a cheese plane. K. looked at it, agreed it looked like a plausible tool for the purpose and inquired as to it's price. "Take it!" he said. Really? Us starving actors loved a freebie. "Sure! It's from one of my vendors. I hope it works out for you." He laughed with a tenor laugh that was sweet and infectious.

"Who are you?" asked K. of her cheese angel.

"Robert!" he replied and stuck out his hand.

For the next decade, K. always greeted Robert with a hug and a kiss. She loved to surprise him by sneaking up behind him and hugging him when he wasn't looking. Everytime we went shopping (and being NYCers we go the store nearly daily because it's so convenient), part of our consciousness was occupied with keeping an eye out for Robert.

We got to know Robert pretty well in the intervening years. Like all of Robert's customers, we became friends, too. We consoled him after the death of his wife and the mother of his children due to hospital malpractice. (Another customer provided legal counsel.) We left anonymous holiday gifts for the girls in the first year after that sad event. I dropped off research on therapy options for him in the hopes he could find the right support for his youngest. We asked after his social life, his girlfriends, his family every time we saw him.

For the last week or so, my consciousness keeps an eye out for Robert. But I know he's not there. As our neighbor and food critic Ed Levine noted, on his blog last week Robert passed away suddenly and unexpectedly.

It's a senseless tragedy and my world is smaller for his passing. My neighborhood is less for his absence. But my heart is full of gratitude for having known him for 15 years. For having known his smile, his greeting, and his heart. I didn't know it was the last time I would ever see him when I gave him a big hug a couple of weeks ago. But I'm grateful that was our last moment together. That is the way I will remember him.

"Porno Pie" Slices at Artichoke

2008-04-30T15:05:00.009-04:00

The pizza theme continues.

We went to see the Duplass Brothers' Baghead at the TFF tonight. We'd missed it at Sundance and both Sherpa Dan and Josh Leonard told me it was worth seeing. I was a bit concerned because I generally agree with Sherpa Dan, but Mr. Leonard and I seem to have completely opposite tastes in film (much to my consternation). Anyway, they were both right. It's a smart and nice little piece of film making that manages to be both a satire of indie films while staying totally within said genre.

Realizing that we were near the newly opened and much lauded pizza joint Artichoke on 14th near 1st Avenue. Pretty much every NYC cool hunting email (thrillist, urbandaddy, et. al.) has blurbed this place, so I've been itching to give it a go.

It's a tiny place where more than five people on line means the line stretches out the door. The line is also hard to gauge because you don't know if all of these people just walked in and ordered whole pies or only slices that need to be cut and/or heated. We stood in line, chatting with some other fun customers and eyeing the folks exiting to try to determine if this experience was likely to live up to the hype. K. noted that it looked like a pretty cheesy pizza. (Pre-WeightWatchers, this might have excited us.) There were only three choices: plain, Sicilian and the house style of spinach and artichoke. We opted for a slice of plain and one of the house.

We hopped in a cab and headed uptown while munching as neatly as possible. K. declared it "pornographic": super-cheesy and a volcanic explosion of rich flavor. I have to agree. In some ways, it's like an open faced calzone.

On both slices, the bread is doughy with massive bubbles, the sauce is strongly flavored and seems to be heavily dosed with some nice olive oil. The house slice comes across as if it's pizza that is actually made with bechamel sauce. (K. said it's like that artichoke dip you used to get when "white trash food" got trendy again at parties a few years back.) The plain slice is much easier to manage. In either case, I cannot manage anyone having more than one slice unless you'd just exited the Mojave and were starving...in which case these would be too rich for your stomach anyway. This video of the Artichoke gang making an "off the menu" broccoli rabe sandwich speaks volumes about their food ethos. If it were a piece of furniture, it would be shabby chic and overstuffed.

Bottom line: I'd have a plain slice there again but K. would rather go to a place with a more sparing approach to ingredients and where you don't feel the immediate need for a Lipitor chaser.

Slice of Life

2008-04-28T15:30:00.012-04:00

So last Thursday, K. said, "Let's take a walk" after we had dinner. I built on her idea and said, "Let's go to a wine bar!" So we hied ourselves over to Bin 71 on Columbus where we had a nice Banyuls and a very nice Auslese.

Dessert proved to be less nice. We ordered a molten chocolate dessert (what restaurant doesn't have one these days?) and it came burnt. Burning the chocolate cake did not enhance the flavor whatsoever. Now I should note that I frequently like burnt things (which seems to be genetic), but my beloved does not. And in this case, I had to agree.

Our waitress was rather shocked that we asked to return it. We had perhaps gone too far in sampling its burntness for her to feel it was appropriate. But she took it back and grudgingly brought another. Which revealed the problem. The center was cold, solid chocolate. And the bottom was only a bit burnt. Egads, Dr. Watson! They're making the cake, refridgerating it and then firing it when it's ordered! No wonder the bottom is burnt! They have to make the solid center turn liquid and they have to do it fast. So they broil that m*f'er until the bottom is charred. Ick. Unfortunate, because other than that silly dessert, the food at Bin 71 is quite good.

We left Bin 71 at about 10pm, feeling strangely unsated after our dessert failure and as we headed West back across 72nd Street, I noted that if Grandaisy were open I would actually opt for a slice even though we'd technically had our dinner. K. pointed out that our beloved City is the city of the slice. I agreed and said something to the effect of, "Some Saturday we should just wander around all day long splitting single slices from each joint we pass."

K. said, "Why don't we do that right now?"

We were just walking by City Pie which we've never actually tried before and I said, "Fine!"

We stepped in and looked over their selection. The plain in particular appeared to have an unusually thin crust. We ordered up a slice. Why haven't I tried this place? Is it the generic graphics? That thin crusted slice really rocked my world. It was one of the thinest crusts I've had that managed to be incredibly crisp, hold the pizza up just fine and was in no way charred. The sauce and the cheese were in terrific proportion. I found myself unexpected describing it as "a remarkably elegant slice".

From City Pie, we walked up Broadway a bit and then headed over to T&R on Amsterdam. Most Upper West Siders who grew up on the UWS are a bit religious about T&R. I've never been sure why because while I like it fine, it has never blown my socks off.

That said, we did have a bit of a fond NYC moment with with T&R when the blackout hit. T&R was furiously cooking off all of their ingredients because they had a working gas stove but no refridgeration. K. and I bought a pie and then trotted across the street to Nice Matin where they were only able to serve drinks (until the ice gave out) and had no food. Nice Matin allowed us to bring our T&R pizza inside and order up drinks.

We sat in the open doors of Nice Matin on that hot summer day watching the waves of fellow New Yorkers hoofing it uptown on foot the way we have to do when our beloved city breaks down. Suddenly, we heard what sounded like a parade and there appeared a few flatbed 18-wheeled trucks, giving a ride uptown to as many of our stranded denizens as would fit. Those folks standing up on the truck had taken to waving as if they were a parade and those of us on the sidewalks took to waving back and cheering. It was a strangely only-in-NYC moment.

Returning to our original story, the T&R slice was both enormous and workmanlike. It was of moderate thickness and pretty darn cheesy. I found it mostly impressive for its size, but perhaps I was just still flying from the City Pie slice. K. seemed to like it better than I did.

Now we were into double-dare-ya territory because there was still New Pizza Town between us and our apartment. Neither one of us was willing to back down and so our third $2.50 slice of the night arrived out of the oven just as my brother rang my cell. I explained what we were doing at what was now about 10:30pm and he was pretty amused.

The NPT slices are a sweeter sauce than most and thinner than T&R, but not qualifying as "thin crust" in the way that City Pie did. I like NPT a lot. There's something bright and happy about the sauce and it all comes together quite nicely.

All of this to say, we really need to do that wandering pizza walk one Saturday this summer. Anyone care to join us?

If there’s one thing I could happily eat every day it’s...

2008-03-16T23:13:00.011-04:00

...Pizza! I have been kookoo for pizza as long as I can remember. My sister worked at Vinne’s Pizzeria in Scarsdale when I was a kid in the 70's and while I have no idea if their pizza was any good (it’s long defunct so there’s no way to know), I thought that it was cool she worked there. Growing up, Pizza & Brew became the destination of choice for pretty much every birthday party in elementary and junior high. When I went to boarding school, Sunday nights were awaited with bated breath because that was pizza and Pepsi night. (I suspect that’s an unthinkable menu for a boarding school today.)

My pizza obsession came into full effect when I was released into the pseudo-adulthood of college where you can choose your own food night after night. Napoli Pizza in Poughkeepsie delivers so many pies to the college that the Napoli’s go on vacation when Vassar is on break (at least they did in the 80’s). And every year there’s an article in the campus newspaper about the extreme volume of pies ordered during exam week. For me, exam week was hardly an exception to my pizza consumption. There were any number of weeks that I ordered (or scrounged) pizza every night of the week. Ah, the metabolism of the young!

Fortunately, now that I am arguably in full-on real adulthood I have chosen to make my home in The City. Here there no reason to suffer bad pizza. The City has lots and lots of great pizza. (And a remarkable number of blogs devoted to purely to pizza!)

Since this is The Evangelist, this is yet another list of my highly personal and idiosyncratic choices…only with a twist. This is actually cribbed from an email K. wrote to her friend who was coming to town while we are away (I write this from the comfort of the Southern Cross Club) and that friend just happened to have a serious hankering for pizza.

So here is our list (I have embroidered on the original so consider this co-authored), working south from our nabe.

Upper West Side
If you're on the UWS, and want to drop in somewhere for a slice, we love Rigoletto on Columbus around 70th street. Our favorite kind there is called "Garlicki" which doesn't have cheese on top, just a chunky tomato sauce with garlic and stems of parsley. Love it. Their stuff is best eaten on the spot -- when you get it delivered, you always have to throw it in the toaster oven to crisp the crust back up.

Also on the UWS is Patsy's (Columbus and 74th), which also makes a damned good pie. You just have to time your visit to avoid the stroller set because this being the UWS, it can be overwhelming.

Lots of locals rave about T&R on Amsterdam at 80th, but frankly we just don’t get the appeal. It’s not bad per se. It just seems unexceptional. If you want a classic NYC slice on the UWS, we much prefer the unexceptionally named New Pizza Town on the corner of 78th and Broadway. Slightly sweet sauce with the whitest of white crusts.

Now the real excitement at the moment for us is that as of a few months ago, at 72nd and Broadway is Grandaisy Bakery! For some, Grandaisy may fall too far into the "fancy" category of pizza, but their little thin-crusted rectangles of Roman-style pizza are world-class and not to be missed. You can do the very simple, cheeseless pomodoro, or we also pine over the zucchini and the cauliflower. As a special taste sensation, go for the which is not pizza at all, but a kind of bread somewhere between a focaccia and a ciabatta.

In fact we first went to Grandaisy specifically because of the bianca con pecorino. We were staying in LA at a friend’s home while they were away. (Thank you Lee & Josiah!) Lee reads Vogue and we stumbled upon a Jeffrey Steingarten piece about his obsession with true Italian pizza bianca. He went to Italy to learn a whole historical baking tradition that includes baking the pizza on humongously long boards (nine feet as I recall). Of course, after failing to recreate this comically improbably experience in his tiny apartment he learned that the folks at Sullivan Street Bakery in SoHo had long ago mastered it. As soon as we returned to NYC, we hied ourselves downtown to check it out pronto. (The Sullivan Street partners split up into two companies, one of which is now Grandaisy.) We have been obsessed ever since!

Midtown West
At West 57th Street (and another outpost at 54th and Broadway) is Angelo's Coal Oven Pizza. Their pizza is an excellent exemplar of traditional coal oven pizza - we usually get one with sausage and olives which comes with nice big leaves of fresh basil on it. A perennial favorite and very satisfying. How it ended up on 57th Street is a bit of a mystery. It doesn’t seem to fit into the neighborhood exactly, but that’s New York for you.

Soho
In addition to the downtown outpost of Grandaisy (which is in the original Sullivan Street storefront), there is Lombardi's on Spring Street, reputedly the oldest pizzeria in the New World and considered by many to be the best in the city. Lombardi’s is a coal oven pie with a thin, slightly blackened crust. Oh, so delicious.

I'm on vacation in the Caribbean...and I can still find joy in writing about NYC pizza! :-)

Pluggin' for My Posse: The Back of the Napkin

2008-03-12T17:59:00.010-04:00

Dan Roam is one of my friends that I can easily refer to "totally frickin' brilliant." His excellent book The Back of the Napkin is available today on Amazon.com.

Not surprisingly, the book has been reviewed really well thus far. Business Week already did an article and an online slideshow about it and apparently the April issue of Fast Company will have an entire feature article on the book.

You will recall dear readers that I predicted that The Intellectual Devotional would be huge and then it became an NYT bestseller and since then has even had progeny!. So trust me when I confidently predict that you're going to be seeing and hearing a lot about Dan Roam.

Noodling in New Paltz

2008-03-03T18:28:00.004-05:00

So I was kinda freakin' out on the runup to President's Day weekend and desperate to get out of Dodge. K. realized that this is not at all like me as I love The City more than anywhere else and generally dislike leaving the Blessed Isle for short excursions. I'm great for longer term outings such as vacations, but otherwise I kinda like to stay put.

Our dear friend Christina decamped from the Isle for New Paltz some time ago in order to procreate. One of those weird things that people do. We hadn't seen her in an awfully long time so we decided to head up.

Among the little inconveniences that your lovely progeny bring to us non-breeders is often the loss of the guest room. So we set about using our favorite planning tool: TripAdvisor. In doing so, we discovered the glorious Maplestone Inn: a three room gem that's opened in the last 18 months or so. Sean and Patty Roche have done a gorgeous renovation to the property and our room (the Jenkins) was absolutely perfect. Patty's excellent cooking - the breakfasts were totally pornographic - was clearly not exactly WeightWatchers friendly, but who can resist a tasty egg concotion ON TOP OF A PANCAKE? I mean really now!

We did a bit of our usual vineyarding (a new hobby in the last year) and then discovered that all roads lead to Beso when it comes to dinner. Not only is it raved about online, but Sean and Patty recommended it and...so did Sherpa Dan. Turns out he discovered it a while ago (hence the Sherpa title). Given that convergence, we were absolutely determined to eat there. They have a New American menu utilizing in-season ingredients and a terrific wine list. It was a fantastic meal that included an onion and goat cheese tart (house specialty), a yummy beet salad with Humboldt Fog (there's never too much cheese!) We split unbelievable short ribs with braising greens and cornbread complemented by a very nice tempranillo. Dessert was an unusually rustic tarte tatin alongside a glass of poire William liqueur.

I usually order poire eau de vie and didn't realize that I was ordering liqueur as it just said Pear William on the dessert drinks list. K. can't normally stomach eau de vie but I bullied her into trying this and she was immediately obsessed. When we returned the following week I went to the source of All Things Rare: Park Avenue Liquor. It turns out that Massenez no longer makes the liqueur but they had a few bottles. Of course, I had to buy two.

Now despite all of this culinary goodness, K. has maintained that the highlight of the meal was...the cornbread. I know, it seems so pedestrian. But the butteryness of Beso's cornbread is simply not to be believed. We overheard our server tell another table that someone actually drove 2 hours and called first to be sure there was going to be cornbread. It is that darn good!

Grand Central Frozen: Poor Man's Time Travel?

2008-02-13T10:42:00.003-05:00

In the past, I've posted several times about my interest in time travel related fiction. This Improv Everywhere prank suggests Nicholson Baker's The Fermata. How surreal it must have been to be there in person!

2008-02-10T17:01:00.000-05:00

I have been getting regular complaints from certain parties for quite some time about the fact that The Evangelist became defunct.

This blog originally arose out of my fears of joining a large corporation some four years ago. I was concerned about a general lack of/loss of creativity in my life and I launched this site to keep a certain spark alive.

As it happens, I ended up enjoying both my corporate gig and keeping this site alive so both prospered together for quite some time. Then I accidentally got promoted two years ago. Being less interested in “tidbit blogging” and given to writing essay-style posts, I found it too hard to maintain the dedication required for keeping this site current. And – like going to the gym – once out of the habit, it became quite daunting to getting back in the game.

In any case, I wanted to share an update about this year’s Sundance pilgrimage and it seemed like this site is really the best place to do it, so I’m back for the nonce. We’ll see if any more posts squeak out of my brain in the coming weeks.

So on to the topic at hand. In the tradition of Sherpa Dan, I will force rank this year’s flicks from favorite to least favorite.

Young@Heart *****
This documentary is the rare film that runs the entire emotional spectrum: I laughed, I gasped, I groaned, and I sobbed. Quirky modern day saint Bob Cilman leads a chorus of 80+ year olds in renditions of songs by Sonic Youth, The Rolling Stones, James Brown and Coldplay.

It’s a tough repertoire that they don’t always relate to at first and Cilman gives no badges for showing up or for just trying. These choristers are made to work and work hard. He stretches their memories, their cultural boundaries and their minds; challenging them to stay vital members of the Y@H community of performers who tour in the US and abroad.

The documentary form is stretched a bit in fun ways by the inclusion of music videos where the Y@H team gamely showcases their theatrical skills in addition to their vocal ones. But truly the price of admission is Fred Knittle’s heartbreakingly gorgeous solo performance of Coldplay’s “Fix You”. I can hardly read what I’m typing through the tears as I recall it even now.

Man on Wire *****
“Man on Wire” is the compliant filed against Philippe Petit for wirewalking between the Twin Towers. This gripping, amusing documentary is pretty much guaranteed to be a crowd pleaser in the art houses. One of the few docs that have ever used dramatic recreations to brilliant effect, “Man on Wire” takes us from the early plotting of the caper through its daring and successful execution; a story combining artistic obsession, Keystone Kops slapstick, acrobatic talent, megalomania, and the blissful naïveté of the pre-9/11 world to unleash an extraordinary moment of breathless grace into the memory of the city hat never sleeps.

Traces of the Trade ****1/2
Brave documentarian Katrina Browne confronts her family’s legacy as the largest slave trading family in the history of United States and uncovers the implicit complicity of much of the population of the northern states in the process. Uncovering the uncomfortable truth about their past, Browne invited 9 members of various branches to join her in retracing the Triangle Trade from Bristol, Rhode Island to the slave trading ports of Ghana and the sugar cane plantations of Cuba.

This movie (and an accompanying book) will make great centerpieces for all American communities who wish to set up programs to actively discuss, explore and potentially redress the repercussions of human bondage in American history.

Towelhead ****
Alan Ball’s feature film directorial debut is going to piss lots of folks off. First of all, it’s going to annoy many simply by its content: a half-Lebanese tween discovers the power and perils of her emerging sexuality with the help of her mother’s boyfriend, her Army Reservist neighbor, and her more age appropriate African-American boyfriend.

Tackling teenage sexuality, racism, pedophilia, and misogyny in one blow is pretty much what we might expect from the screenwriter of “American Beauty” and the creator of “Six Feet Under”. And this leads to another group of folks who are likely to be annoyed: those Ball fans who feel he’s repeating himself here. While he didn’t write the novel on which the movie is based, it’s clear that he has favorite themes and he’s far from done dramatizing them. (I couldn’t help feeling that “Towelhead” represented Ball’s desire to have directed “American Beauty” himself.)

Those reservations aside, “Towelhead” is still a compulsively watchable film. There are standout performances from Summer Bishil as protagonist Jasira, Maria Bello as her mother, and Aaron Eckhardt as her neighbor Mr. Vuoso (and I’m not normally a fan of Mr. Eckhardt at all). I’m also a fan of quirky Peter Macdissi who plays Jasir’s father Rifat. He stole every single scene he was in on “Six Feet Under” as the bisexual Svengali art teacher Olivier. And I was thrilled to see him given a leading role here. (Now my friend Josh is an experienced Hollywood denizen and he not only walked out of the film, he found Macdissi to read as blatantly gay. I understand his take. But I find Macdissi’s energy to match with my experience of any number of Arab and/or Muslim men, who while may come from a macho culture, can still read as metrosexual or gay vague to a Western observer.)

Choke ***1/2
Choke is adapted from “Fight Club” scribe Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name and represents a solid debut directorial effort from Clark Gregg, one of my favorite unsung actors. Starring Sam Rockwell as a sex-addicted, historical recreator (think Colonial Williamsburg) who’s struggling with his oddball mother’s decline. Full of puzzling plotlines, chockablock with outré sexual shenanigans, and pulled together by a strong case, “Choke” is a very credible effort to bring a challenging script to the screen. While not ultimately moving in the way it had the potential to be, it’s still full of fun and interesting bits and pieces and I suspect that it may well find itself a cult audience amongst the Palahniuk and Nicholson Baker fans.

Sleep Dealer ***
In the near future, outsourcing is accomplished by importing foreign labor without the foreign bodies: Mexican laborers remotely operate robots performing blue collar work (such as construction) in the United States. Building on the cyberpunk concepts of William Gibson and others, writer/director Alex Rivera has crafted a really neat little science fiction film that manages to successful cram a ton of political questions between its opening and closing titles, including water scarcity, immigration, free trade, globalization and the visible imbalance of wealth between nations. While it ties itself up a little too neatly at the end, it’s still a valiant effort.

Be Like Others ***
“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” So speaks Fabian in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night” and so will you feel too when you learn about this peculiarity of the gay life in modern Iran: you may be stoned to death for being gay, but as the result of a fatwa made by the Ayatollah Khomeini himself you are allowed to have a sex change! Yes, indeed. This documentary takes us to a gender reassignment clinic in Tehran where hundreds of surgeries are performed so that homosexuals can continue to reside in their native country. Truly unbelievable until you see it for yourself.

The Black List, Vol. One ***
Elvis Mitchell interviews notable African American’s for Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ documentary. While not every interview is riveting, many of them are. Mitchell is off camera and unheard, but his probing questions brought some new and unexpected responses out of many familiar faces, including the Reverend Al Sharpton and Colin Powell. Highly educational on a number of levels and well worth seeing for those of us who enjoy the occasional festival of talking heads.

Phoebe in Wonderland ***
An unsuccessful effort overall, but full of wondrous elements nonetheless, not least of which is a terrific performance from young Elle Fanning as Phoebe.

A young girl struggles with an unnamed challenge that seems to incorporate hallucinations and compulsion. Phoebe is only “normal” in the context of rehearsals for a school production of “Alice in Wonderland” (presided over by the always wonderful Patricia Clarkson).

A talented cast that includes Felicity Huffman and Bill Pullman as Phoebe’s parents, Peter Gerety as her shrink, and Campbell Scott as the principal of her school, work very hard to try to string the pearls on the necklace of this fantastical script and often succeed. In the end, however, first timer Daniel Barnz resorts to some tired clichés in both script and direction that are overly calculated to pull heartstrings.

Sunshine Cleaning ** ½
Let me start by saying could probably watch Amy Adams read the phone book. She stole my heart in 2005’s “Junebug”(for which she won a special jury prize at Sundance) and I thought Disney’s “Enchanted” would have been nigh impossible without her miraculously transcendent and emotionally transparent performance.

“Sunshine Cleaning” allows Adams, partnered with the fine Emily Blunt, to do the thing she’s proven she can do well: present a vulnerable character struggling to make a life for herself. But beyond showcasing Adams and Blunt, it is simply yet another Sundance story of how people make sense of life when life doesn’t make sense. Nice enough if you happen to catch it on cable, but not essential viewing

American Son **
A young soldier is called up to Iraq and has 72 hours for a whirlwind affair and separation from his family and friends. Nick Cannon and Melonie Diaz as the star-crossed lovers acquit themselves adequately. But the overall effort has a workman-like aura and the story, while quite timely, still manages to feel somewhat shopworn. Quite watchable, just not extraordinary.

Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden? **
Morgan Spurlock’s sophomore effort, this falls far short of both “Supersize Me” and his also his strong docu-TV series “30 Days”. It’s a shame because it starts out very strong and then declines throughout the film. Part of the problem here is the premise: Spurlock decides that in the time that his long-suffering partner is pregnant (!!), he will run off to try to track down OBL. In order to forgive this blatant megalomania, he’d have to have come back with a much stronger film. Instead, we get a lot of what the choir being preached to already knows: man-in-the-street interviews that demonstrate they hate our government in the Muslim world and some of them forgive “the American people” for electing it; others do not. Duh.

Roman Polanski *
A documentary on the case that sent Polanski out of the US forever, this film is primarily of interest for revealing how peculiarly the wheels of justice turned in this instance. Polanski, while guilty of having sex with an underage girl, was clearly also himself the victim of judicial misconduct. Given this revelation, this could have been a fascinating movie, but I found it shockingly bland.

Savage Grace
I have rarely seen such a beautifully photographed failure. I think this script wanted to be something along the lines of “The Talented Mr. Ripley”, but instead the best that can be said for this truly awful film is that it does stand a chance of becoming a camp classic.

Based on a true story, this Julianne Moore feature is overrun by Kabuki-style acting and a plot bloated with sexual misconduct. Jacobean dramas were noted as bloodbaths where most of the characters murdered each other in the final moments. This overwrought misadventure is some sort of nihilist Jacobean sex drama where most of the characters fornicate with each other in various combinations until the increasingly frenzied plot climaxes (pun intended) with mother-son incest on the living room couch.

The audience I saw this with laughed in all the wrong places. Enough said.

Greendimes: How We All Can "Put Out for the Planet"

2006-11-01T19:42:00.000-05:00

So way back in the early summer of 2005, I fell into a depression about the state of the planet and took a hiatus from The Evangelist.

After a restorative Memorial Day weekend with close friends on Nantucket, I wrote a (rather dark) post titled Putting Out for the Planet in which I discussed my dispair and described New Yorker journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's role in my falling into that mental black hole.

Towards the end of that post, I mentioned that K. and I have a lovely friend named B. who was then being courted by a rich enviro. I had hoped that via B's romance, we might influence said enviro to save the earth and thereby redeem our otherwise not-nearly-green-enough existence. (Although interestingly enough, recent studies indicate living in NYC is actually a surprisingly green move! So we got that part right.) Well, B. did put out for the planet for some period of time, but alas that strategy ultimately did not come to fruition and she and the enviro parted ways.

Determined to do her part however, B. recently emailed me to let me know that she took a job with a very cool, very green organization called Greendimes. They stop your junk mail, protect your identity AND plant trees in your name. HOW COOL IS THAT?

I signed up immediately!

TID Hits the NYT Bestseller List!

2006-10-29T20:42:00.000-05:00

It's official! David's book is #6 on the NYT Hardcover Advice list! What else are people reading? Apparently, lots of folks are getting their advice from Donald Trump and Suzanne Somers. Yikes!

Going Undercover Part II

2006-10-26T21:00:00.000-04:00

This is a long overdue post for my colleague, Christine. She has a thing for spies. We were talking at the beginning of the summer and I mentioned some of my undercover experience. When I went to send her the link to the Going Undercover post I wrote way back when, I realized that I hadn't really given the whole story. You see, I've actually been paid to go undercover in an investigation.

Way back in my acting days, not too many months after I moved to The City, I was contacted out of the blue by a woman who called herself Eve. She was very mysterious and wouldn't tell me how she'd received my name and number. She said something to the effect of "I guess you have a friend who wants to help you out." Mystified, I asked what this call was all about. Eve said she had heard that I might like to have access to a certain kind of information valuable to actors. Information known as "breakdowns".

Suddenly, I felt like I was in a Hitchcock movie. An innocent man receives a call from a stranger who claims to know who he is, claims to have something he wants. She spoke to me in that kind of spy patois, a code that I couldn't understand. What were breakdowns? How would having them benefit me?

Eve explained in a very seductive way that once I had this information, I would have the inside track on which casting agents were working on what projects and I could submit myself for their consideration. There was a cost for obtaining this information, of course. And that cost was a lot of money to a journeyman actor.

As it happens, I had just heard the word "breakdowns" in passing from a lovely woman named Lynne. We'd been cast in the same show. I remembered that at the first read through of the play she'd said something about working with breakdowns being her survival job.

To be honest, none of the details of what I'd learned that night stuck with me. It was a crazy situation and I couldn't focus. I'd been cast in an autobiographical show - primarily because I looked like the director/playwright as a young man - and suddenly I found myself rehearsing this off-off-off Broadway show in a townhouse that belonged to Mike Nichols (!) because the auteur in question was dating Nichol's personal assistant. It was weird. But somewhere in the back of my head, I remember Lynne saying something about "temp job" and "breakdowns".

So the next rehearsal during a break, I said casually, "I got this odd phone call and I wondered if you had something to do with it." Lynne looked at my quizzically and said, "Not likely. What about?"

"Someone called - said her name was Eve - and said I could buy breakdowns. I remembered that you said...."

"WAIT. DON'T SAY ANOTHER WORD TO ME." I was completely shocked. "You don't necessarily want to tell me anything else about this phone call."

"I don't? Why? What is this about? What are breakdowns really? The first time I heard of them was when you said at our first readthrough that you worked for some company that did them or something like that." Lynne must have looked at me for a full minute with her piercing blue eyes and then I guess she realized that I wasn't putting her on. I really had zero idea what we were talking about.

"Okay. Look. That woman. What she's doing is illegal. Breakdowns are the intellectual property of the company I work for. Actors want the information because they think it will help them. But really it won't. It's a scam.

Breakdowns are sold to agents and certified managers so that they can submit their clients to casting directors. If you send your headshot in to one of the casting directors for one of their projects and your headshot doesn't have an agent's stamp on it, they just throw it out."

"Uh. Ok. But what exactly IS a breakdown?"

"When someone wants to cast a film or a play, they send the script to Breakdown Services. Breakdown Services reads it and writes short summaries describing who the characters are that need to be cast. Then they circulate the breakdowns to agents."

"Got it. But it's not helpful to actors?"

"Look at me. I read breakdowns every day. I'm in the same off-off-off show you are."

"Right."

"Look. If you want, you could get hired to help Breakdown sort this out. I mean, if you're willing to...um...help catch these guys."

"Really?" My head started to spin. My father was a prominent intellectual property attorney. I knew enough about IP that once I understood what breakdowns were, I understood that what I was being offered was stolen IP. "Ok. What would I have to do?"

"Let me talk to the folks at work. I'll get back to you."

The next thing I know, I've been hired to subscribe to breakdowns. I call Eve back and now that I have more information, I can speak spy patois, too. We arrange "the drop". Breakdowns will be delivered for me to a Mailboxes Etc. in my neighborhood. I will leave an envelope with cash each week. I will get a drop every week. Secret agent that I am, I bring my weekly drop to my new employer. They're furious. These are very current breakdowns. This week's, in fact. And they're on the street within 24 hours of their release.

Within weeks as they are trying to crack this case, the team pulls me into a second investigation: a manager who has lost his license still seems to be getting breakdowns. And he's showing them to actors - a big no no. Is his source Eve? Or someone else?

I get sent to sign up with the manager. He's such a loser manager, he'll take pretty much anyone. Even me. (Sadly, I think I had to pay him to sign me.)

Anyway, now I'm seeing breakdowns from two angles, the "Eve subscription" and my new crooked manager. I have mixed feelings about my manager because he IS sending me out on auditions, after all. Actors love that. However, the auditions he is sending me out on are pretty low rent. (I may or may not have made the final cut in Vampire Vixens from Venus. I've never had the courage to watch it to see if my little bit as an extra made it in or not. If you watch it and there's a bit in a restaurant with a flying fork and Detective Oakenshield, I'm the one who launched the fork.)

What had started oddly, became increasingly odd. This creepy manager is representing me and every week he's letting me comb through breakdowns, asking me what I would like him to submit me for (this is not the way a legit agent or manager works). And meanwhile, I'm combing through them looking for dummy breakdowns that will tell my employers where the leak is coming from. I'm wondering if the manager is on to me. He's constantly emphasizing the need for secrecy (as is Eve) and I'm doing everything I can to play along.

As time goes on, I am starting to feel uncomfortable in this game. I'm using my real name (unlike the other gig), but in both cases my objectives are not what I am claiming they are. And in both cases, I'm looking to shut down my source. While I'm sure I'm doing the right thing from a legal perspective, I am fascinated by the breakdowns and I can understand why actors want them. They definitely make you feel in the know, even if you can't get any closer to a real job than by reading them and imagining yourself in all the cool parts that will eventually go to Brad Pitt or whomever. But there isn't too much time to think about all of this, because soon enough we shut down both leaks and my job is done.

Next, "Eve" and her husband (I've forgotten his code name if he had one), they get detectives combing through their garbage, a cease and desist order, and a court case. I retire as a spy at this point and exit the picture. Finally, I exit acting altogether. At which point, I'm sure I thought that none of these people would ever intrude on my life again.

But apparently Eve and her husband, they decided to get out of the acting biz, too. Neither of them was working as an actor, hence the thievery to make ends meet. So what do they do? He decides to get out of acting and goes on to reinvent himself as one of the founders of one of the seminal web agencies in Silicon Alley.

Me? I got out of acting and two years later, where am I? Competing with him at another seminal web agency in Silicon Alley.

I swear, we must know about 200 people in common. But to this day, we've never met.

The last post finished by offering the "Double Life Film Festival". Since Christine is particularly a lover of books, here we have the Breaking the Code Book Club wherein we explore the eternal saga spies and their codes, mostly through the lens of WWII.

Breaking the Code
This was my introduction to thinking about spies and codes. Derek Jacobi starred on Broadway. I saw it twice and met him briefly once. (He was delightful.) Alan Turing was the genius of the famous UK code breaking facility at Bletchley Park during the war. Breaking the Code is a bioplay about Turing, a man who not only cracked both the German "Enigma Code", but also broke Britain's social code by accidentally outing himself. (Being homosexual was a punishable offence at the time.) Another tremendous performance of a character who stutters by Jacobi.

Between Silk & Cyanide
Most books about code breaking tell the story of Bletchley Park. This is the opposite story and by far my favorite book on this list.

In addition to being the scion of the Marks family of Marks & Spencer bookstore fame, Leo Marks was the head code maker for the Brits during the war. When he appeared on the Leonard Lopate show promoting this book, he told a story about falling in love with a beautiful female spy during the war that so broke my heart that I went straight to Amazon to get the book as soon as I was near my laptop. Marks' story is one that defies all expectations: it is chock full of poetry (literally), humanity, comedy and ingenuity. Read it.

The Code Book
My brother in law Charlie turned me onto this one. A layman's primer on the history of making and breaking codes from the dawn of time. The Code Book somehow manages to weave in history, philosophy, political science and quantum mechanics and keep you interested all the way through. A lovely micro-history.

The Weight Loss Revolution and the Resistance

2006-10-21T17:30:00.000-04:00

I've lost 33lbs and I'm down to 190lbs this week.

I think perhaps the beginning seeds of my undertaking this was when I saw Super Size Me at Sundance 2004. (Yes, I know that's a looong time to incubate an idea.) It's not so much that I ate fast food much. Just that I began thinking about what I wanted to eat and what I wanted to weigh.

The other thing that began to get into my head was Bill Maher's constant ranting about America's obesity issues being driven by the kinds of food we now eat: overly processed, fully of corn syrup...crap, basically.

As I've been both thinking about the issue and subsequently taking personal action, I've been interested to note that there's clearly a building cultural trend evidenced in the popular media.

It probably kicked off with the publication of Fast Food Nation got larger with Super Size Me, Jamie's School Lunch Project, and it's built to a head with the nutty Honey, We're Killing the Kids on TLC, where frighteningly nutrionally uneducated Americans are given rather tacky kind of shock therapy help them reform their family's eating habits. (You have to watch it to believe it.)

Perhaps most inspiring sign of the trend, however, is chef Jamie Oliver's campaign to reform school lunches in the UK. It is a laudible, remarkable project where maybe Sisyphus may actually get the rock up the hill. In a similar vein, the September 4th issue of The New Yorker contained an article titled "The Lunch Room Rebellion" profiling Ann Cooper, an American chef attempting to revolutionize school lunches in California.

For me, these are hopeful signs that perhaps we might migrate our culture's eating habits towards something more healthy (just in time for global warming to wipe away all evidence of humanity). But for every step forward, there's always some folks determined to take ten steps backwards. This is highlighted this week the New York Times article discussing the ongoing controversy in the UK over Oliver's program, including rebellious parents actually vending junk food through the school gates to the children! Yowza. We humans really are hellbent on making our lives harder, aren't we?

Julia Sweeney’s "Letting Go of God"

2006-10-17T23:44:00.000-04:00

I can't believe how long ago it was that I originally began to author this post. Probably eight months ago, honestly. Actually, I think it's more because I remember when I went to Sundance I read Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven and I made all these connections and...wait, I'm getting way ahead of myself.

So here's the deal. A while ago, K. and I went to see Julia Sweeney perform at Ars Nova. Ars Nova is a great space over on the West Side of The City, slightly north of Hell's Kitchen. It's a really intimate venue and we've seen someinteresting folks like The Petersons and Sarah Silverman perform there. We also saw Julia Sweeney workshopping the piece that became her one-woman show "In the Family Way" there a few years ago for something like $10 and we loved it. So when we saw that she was trying a new show out called "Letting Go of God", we thought we should check that out, too.

Sweeney's fascinating because while she's in the confessional vein of Spalding Gray, she really has her own voice and it's a very human and very humble voice. It's less about verbal pyrotechnics (Bogosian) and character work (Leguizamo) and more about vulnerability and the voyage of self discovery. And given that her life has been quite tragic (she and her brother were both diagnosed with cancer and only she barely survived), the healthy does of comic timing she brings helps mightily to leaven the proceedings when her real life drama heads into the territory Aeschylus preferred to trod.

"Letting Go of God" picks up after the cancer story ends off and focuses on her subsequent quest for a better spiritual understanding of herself. The events of the show are set off when two Mormon missionaries show up with the news that God has a message for her. When she learns the Mormon's version of history, she begins to question her own Catholic faith because - let's face it - pretty much all religious stories strains the credulity of modern humans.

And so Sweeney set off to do some real research and decide for herself what she believed. It's an amazing story and, perhaps most importantly, an intellectually honest one.

I don't want to give to much away about the show. Except to say that while it's not perfect, it's pretty damn good. And her story is really worth hearing. No matter what your faith is.

So if you're in The City, go get yourself some tix to see her reprise it at Ars Nova this weekend. It's 9 performances only!

For those readers who are out of town or can't make it, you can listen to a clip of it here in the most popular episode of NPR's This American Life ever. (NB: If memory serves me correctly, I think you want to go to 38 minutes and 45 seconds into the broadcast. Their site is down right now, so I can't confirm that.)

And if you do go, you might be interested to read the Krakauer book afterwards since it was the Mormon theology that set her on her quest...

TID is Going to be Big

2006-10-16T17:30:00.000-04:00

So I have this amazing friend named David Kidder. When we first met, he'd recently sold his first company. He was 23.

Since that time, David has done any number of amazing things (including selling other companies), but his most recent accomplishment is a wonderful side project called The Intellectual Devotional.

I think it was about 18 months ago and K. and I were last at Castle Kidder and David was showing us this prototype for a book that he was thinking about creating. The idea was compelling: a simple way for those of us who love knowledge to fill in the inevitable gaps in our educations...one day at the time.

Based on the concept of the relgious devotional (a prayer book with a new piece of scripture to be meditated on each day), The Intellectual Devotional pulls together information from seven "fields of knowledge", to wit: history, literature, philosophy, mathematics & science, religion, visual arts, and music.

I've been buying lots of copies for my friends, and after David and his coauthor Noah were on The Today Show, it seems that others are turning on to it as well.

Maybe it's your turn?

www.i_lost_24_lbs!.com

2006-08-05T09:47:00.000-04:00

I'm a pretty big guy. I'm 6'3". And for something more than the last decade, I've weighed anywhere between 215lbs and 230lbs.

Now I knew I was fat when I was up to 230lbs. That was somewhere back at the end of my career at my first startup and I immediately dropped 15lbs when I left the company. (In fact, I was so happy at my next employer that I dropped those 15lbs in about 3 weeks.) But I've basically hovered around 220lbs, plus or minus five pounds ever since. And if you asked anyone (other than my mother), they would have told you that I wasn't fat. Because when you're my proportions, you can haul around a fair bit of weight - as much as 20 pounds in my experience - without the average person really noticing the difference. But I knew my weight was not a good thing and I would never own up to the fact that often I weighed over 220. I would just round it to 220 if the subject ever came up.

Back in April, Sherpa Dan suddenly began shedding pounds. Now I've never thought of Sherpa Dan as needing to lose weight. At all. But as the weight fell off, it was undeniable that he looked better and better. K. took a look at this and asked him, "How the heck are you doing this?"

Now Sherpa Dan always has a system. Always, always. (That's what makes him such a good sherpa!) And he replied, "Weightwatchers.com."

K. wondered, "Are you going to those meetings?" Her distaste for the meeting concept was evident.

"Nope," he said smiling.

"Do you buy their food?" We both knew there must be a catch. Sure you lose weight, but you have to eat icky food, right?

"Sometimes. Not much."

"So you don't buy their food and you don't go to meetings? What exactly do you do on this website?" We were mystified.

Well, we now know the answer. Because shortly after that, K. signed up for the site. I watched the pounds fall off her for about six weeks and I caved, too. I signed up in the beginning of June.

It's now exactly eight weeks after I started and as of yesterday morning, I weigh 199lbs. I started at 223lbs. (Of course, I did my usual fibbing and listed my weight as 220 when I signed up.)

So....what's the secret to this website? Here's how it works: you sign up, you use it to track what you eat. It assigns a number of "points" worth of food that you can eat each day (daily points) and it also allots you points you can use any time during a given seven day period (weekly points).

Often you won't know what the value is of a food you are considering eating or have already eaten. The site has a searchable database that enables you to determine the "point value" of most foods that can think of. If you can't find it, a Weightwatchers devotee named Dottie usually has the answers on her "Weight Loss Zone". (DWLZ is perhaps one of the least navigable sites on the Internet, but she's a dear for putting it together and the information she provides fills in critical gaps in the WW site's database.)

Here's what I've learned in this process:

1) I consumed way more food in any specific meal than I could ever have needed.
It's astonishing to me to think about it now, but if K. and I ordered a regular pizza, I usually made sure there was nothing left. Now I eat two pieces and I'm happy. I cannot imagine eating four or five pieces of pizza, especially given that that would have been only part of what I ate for that particular meal. Honestly.

2) It's much easier to do this as a couple.
It's hard when only one of you is changing their eating habits. K. and I find it's so helpful to have your partner doing it at the same time. Your expectations of the answer to the fateful, "What's for dinner?" question are synchronized. And you have someone to keep you honest, help you remember exactly what you ate. (K. has what must be near photographic memory for meals. It's insane. She can remember where and what we ate in whatever city we might have been in - going back years.)

3) Balsamic vinaigrette is a highly deceptive thing.
Remember Clinton's "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is?" Well, "I'm eating healthy food" turns out to be a similarly complicated issue. Seriously. So many foods you think of as "healthy" turn out to be tricksters.

Balsamic vinaigrette has become the poster child example for me in my newfound understanding of good eating habits. Formerly, I would douse a salad in balsamic vinaigrette as a "light and healthy" option vs. say blue cheese dressing. All good. Except balsamic vinaigrette (if it's not going to be inedible) needs to contain a LOT of olive oil. So you slather it over your salad greens and you've just created a pretty "pointy" meal out of a simple salad.

Often it comes down to a matter of volume; of portion size. You say to yourself, "I'll put olive oil on my bread because that's a healthier choice than butter." And perhaps that's correct. (Who knows? Every year they decide something that was bad is now good or vice versa.) Except that I know that in my case I would then proceed to happily ingest a tablespoon of olive oil soaked into each piece of bread...and clean out the whole darn bread basket in the process.

Here's another example: I love Pret. There's one downstairs in my building and I think their food is great. And it's all fresh, organic-y goodness, right? Sure. But find me a lo-cal sandwich there. Good luck with that. No problem, get a salad, right? How about some balsamic vinaigrette with that?

You see how easy it is to eat yourself into a doughball if you're not paying attention? And that's what this whole Weightwatchers.com phenomena comes down to for me: it helps me stay awake, to stay conscious of what I'm eating. Because if I know, if I'm conscious of the fact I'm about to make a bad choice, I won't do it. Logging what I eat into the site helps me to do just that.

So - in case you hadn't noticed - that site is the new thing I'm evangelizing. Because it's the first tool I've ever found that has made achieving my goals in this arena so easily achievable. (Now I just hope I never have to eat those words.)

Jamie Cullum Rocked Montreal

2006-07-13T11:45:00.000-04:00

K. and I have a thing for Montreal. Even though the exchange rate is not what it was, Montreal is such a great deal for those looking for a long weekend away from The City.

What makes Montreal special? First of all, it's only a 50-minute flight to what is, for all intents and purposes, a European city. Given the power of the Euro and the time required to jump across the Atlantic, Montreal is a much more reasonable destination.

In terms of feel, there is Old Montreal which, while a bit touristy, looks and feels like the older sections of any number of European cities (say Barcelona or Basel) and it has newer sections which feel like the more modern sections of the European cities that have managed to steer away from clustering their skyscrapers and instead spread them about amongst buildings of a more human scale (again, Barcelona and Basel are good approximations). Most importantly, Montreal has great restaurants, cultural offerings and...I must admit...fabulous shopping. While the exchange rate no longer makes an American feel that Montreal shopping is pillaging St. Catherine Street Viking-style, the summer sales do make it hard for someone of my acquisitive nature to leave the city empty-handed.

We have been to Montreal over the Fourth of July weekend before and this trip was something of a dare. The last time we were there was the summer of 2002. We had just wandered out of a terrific bagel brunch at the famed St Viateur when my cell rang. It was a friend and colleague warning me that executive management had just decided to declare a “pre-packaged bankruptcy” and that if I wanted to stay employed during the transition and sale, I had best call in any favors I had left. As it turned out, my favor currency must have run out because I was laid off shortly after my return.

Returning to Montreal then, was something of a superstition-buster. Thus far, it seems to have worked as I put in a three days of work last week and Wile E. Coyote did not appear to drop an anvil on my head. We’ll see how this week goes before we declare the 2002 event a one-time happening and not having been the fault of the Canadians; neither French nor Anglophone.

We had some great meals on St. Laurent at two places we have frequented on other trips: Med, and Globe. Med has received a bit of a makeover in décor, but mostly in name (it used to be Mediterraneo) and maintains its beautiful, underdressed servers and outstanding menu. Globe does great food in an ambiance I could really skip (I abhor restaurants with DJs), but at the hour we wished to eat (after 10 on a Monday night), only the in-crowd places were serving.

The reason we were eating so late on Monday is that Fourth of July is Montreal Jazz Festival and we had just come from an unbelievable three-hour tour de force by brit-jazz/pop wunderkind Jamie Cullum.

I had no idea what to expect when we bought the Cullum tix. Mark and Cory had turned us on to Twenty Something, shortly before Catching Tales was released. I liked some of the tracks (the purer jazz ones). But, as you know if you read the Thomas Dolby post, I’m not much into pop or rock music and some of the songs are much more in those genres than jazz. Nonetheless, the majority of it won me over.

As we were planning our trip a few months ago, I was scanning the list of performers for the Montreal Jazz Festival and most of it didn’t interest me. But then I saw that Jamie Cullum was performing. I said to K., “Whaddya think?” She said, “Let’s give it a go.” So I booked a pair of what appeared to be the worst possible tickets: in the last row of the orchestra. It was all there was without heading up into balconies and I couldn’t remember what the Place D’arts theatres were like well enough to risk going upwards. (If you go upstairs at The Beacon, you can end up fainting from the altitude.)

When we arrived, we happily discovered that there really isn’t a bad seat in the orchestra of the Theatre Maisonneuve. We were fascinated to see that the audience ranged through a remarkably broad set of demographics” from eighteen year old women to groups of retirees. (The young women obliged their stereotype during the show by throwing their underwear onstage. The retirees blissfully restrained themselves from breaking any stereotypes.)

So things looked pretty promising as the opening act came onstage. A few songs later, K. and I simultaneously turned to each other with variations on “If I’d wanted to see Sarah MacLachlan, I would have bought tickets for her.”

Fifty frickin’ minutes later, she finally left the stage. She seemed nice enough, but she left us cold. Then there was a 20 minute intermission.

Finally, Jamie Cullum took the stage. And I mean took the stage. From the moment he came out, he was in control. He launched into “Photograph”, a song whose lyrics I’d never listened to that closely, but he articulates clearly. And through the power of his performance, what is essentially a juvenile pop effort suddenly became compelling.

From there on out, it was a wonderfully unpredictable affair. He continually varied the pace and the instrumentation. He played piano for some songs, only sang on others, got out an acoustic guitar for another. For one song, he looped himself live in front of the audience; laying down a beatbox rhythm like and then several vocal harmonies with the élan of someone like Kid Beyond. He then played piano live and sang against the tracks we’d just seen him loop.

There were guests partway through the show. He brought his older brother Ben (whose written some of Jamie’s hits) for a duet, and he even generously brought Sonia Kitchell back out to do an unrehearsed duet of “What a Difference a Day Makes”. (She apparently started her career as a vocal jazz performer and I thought she was far more compelling in that genre.)

Now it’s about 2 hours into the show, and we’re wondering, “How much has he got to give?” Because he had spent almost every minute bouncing about 3 feet off the floor. His energy was boundless. It got him jumping on the piano, off the piano, over the amplifiers. He’s a little jumping bean – in a fun way, not an annoying one.

But he kept delivering song after song, style after style in endlessly creative ways. At one point, he grabbed his bassist Geoff Gascoyne and jumped into the audience. Gascoyne played a stripped down electric bass while Cullum sang “Nature Boy” – without a microphone - from the center of the house! He wandered down a row halfway back into the orchestra seats, hands cupped as an impromptu megaphone, and sang the whole damn song. It was nuts.

At about 2 hours and 30 minutes into the show, he taught the audience a three part harmony and had us all singing along in a way that actually felt additive to the performance instead of awkward and stagy.

By the time he shut the show down, he had rocked the Montreal Jazz Festival for three hours in what is one of the most generous displays of natural showmanship that I think I will ever see. Old and young, everyone left feeling high. In fact, coming near the end as it did it colored our entire trip with a positive haze. If there was anything we hadn’t enjoyed before that Monday, it was entirely eclipsed by the experience of Cullum’s performance.

P.S. – Speaking of fun shows of a different kind entirely….For those of you who missed [Title of Show], it is back at The Vineyard for a limited 8-week run!

Shopping Sherpa Update

2006-07-03T17:15:00.000-04:00

Back in '04, I posted about Shopping Sherpas. I'm always on the lookout for them, and they are truly hard to find.

A few weekends ago, K. and I headed down to Soho to The Original Leather Store. They used to have a store on the UWS, but it closed about 18 months ago. At their closing sale, I picked up a great Seraphin shearling at a shockingly good price. In addition to its style, it's a great quality coat. In fact, every time I have walked into any other leather store, the salespeople have remarked on what a great product Seraphin makes. (Several of them have explained to me that Seraphin is the manufacturer for Hermes leather coats.)

I'd put some wear on the Seraphin and it needed some minor repairs. So we headed down to the Soho store as part of our weekend errands.

I should confess at this point that any day of "running errands in Soho" is usually our great excuse to drop into a few favorite places. Most frequently, we find ourselves drawn inexorably to Sullivan Street Bakery for a slice of their special Roman style pizza. If it's winter, we can usually be counted on to be magically transported to MarieBelle for some of their high quality heroin...I mean crack cocaine...I mean hot chocolate, for goodness sake. But it might as well mean some other more devilish substance because MarieBelle hot chocolate is (to date myself and quote the long defunct Crazy Eddie) INSANE.

Given the warm weather, we just did Sullivan Street Bakery and managed to avoid MarieBelle. Ah, Sullivan Street, how much do we love thee? If you are a foodie and want to get a sense of why we love it so much go here and click on the link that says "Pornography". These are people who really understand K. and I.

So, the main point of this piece is really our experience at The Original Leather Store. Sated by Sullivan Street, we went to drop off my coat for repairs. But once there, we fell under the spell of Indira Heffner. An exotic woman of West Indian heritage with cafe au lait skin and butterscotch tresses, she engaged us immediately with her extremely sociable manner. Without being pushy - or even directly engaged in selling - she led us on a romp through their leather collection. It was fun trying on the various things she found to show us. Some of it was just to goof around trying things on we weren't ever likely to wear in real life. OL sells to many celebs and rock 'n rollers, so some of it is more over the top than you or I might desire. Some of it was to appreciate the workmanship of OL's own line of goods, which is quite high.

We must have hung out with Indira for over an hour. She was charming, we had fun, and...it may not surprise you to learn (although it certainly did surprise us at the time) that we walked out of OL with more than one new acquisition.

So I am officially adding Indira Heffner to my list of NYC Shopping Sherpas: those amazing folks who can help you find the things you want as well as the things you didn't even know you wanted.

Christa Kirby: Giving an Actor Her Due

2006-06-25T20:50:00.000-04:00

I opened up Time Out NY late Thursday night and read the following:

"...Kirby may be the best NYC actor that almost no one has heard of..."
The actor in question here is my friend, Christa Kirby. She is indeed a brilliant actor and I was certain that I'd already blogged about a mind blowing performance I saw her give in Burning Habits back in 1993. In fact, I was 100% certain I had covered it in The Price of Admission because it was a moment that entirely changed my perception of what I like about theatre; indeed it changed my perception about what is possible in the theatre. So when I read the review, I thought, "HA! I am two years ahead of Time Out!" But if I ever Evangelized Christa's brilliant performance, I myself cannot find it amongst my posts. It's high time I corrected that.

Christa and I met back in the hot, steamy summer of 1991 at The Astors' Beechwood. We did "living history tours" together. We spent day after day pretending to be robber barons from the 1890's; giving tours of one of Newport, RI's mansions on Bellevue Avenue.

It can be a dizzying experience spending your day as someone else, not breaking character for hours at a time. But we pretty much thrived on it, especially Christa. (For careful readers, this was the same summer I ended up pretending I was someone else for money during my off hours, too.) She was great at deep character work and frighteningly daring. She really loved to push the envelope.

In fact, I always knew if we were at a party and someone was referring to her by any other name than her own (most often she went for the stupendously unlikely name of "Bathsheeba"), that she hadn't liked them and decided to "enjoy" their company by pretending to be someone else. (I don't want to give the sense that Christa was kooky. Just too smart not to seize the opportunity to goof on a drunken oaf trying to pick her up and to use it as a chance practice her acting skills at the same time.)

We were both young and inexperienced actors, but I had a lot of work to do on my craft. So I went to spend the next two years at Trinity Rep Conservatory and Christa was drawn to the actor-magnet that you call New York and I call (with as much joy and pretension as all of the millions of thronging co-habitants call it) The City.

By the time I arrived in NYC, I was a competent actor. Not brilliant by any stretch, but given my past history as a yawner, a vastly improved actor thanks to Conservatory. In the meantime, Christa had flourished into a force to behold onstage. Agents weren't flocking to her door, but her choices weren't likely to allow that. She was doing very downtown theatre and agents don't generally have much interest in that. There's no percentage for them in it.

During its original run, Burning Habits was being performed at a tiny gay bar called Crobar (or maybe Crowbar). Young actors generally flock to each other's shows to be supportive, and so I trekked from the Upper West Side down to the Lower East Side and then walked East for blocks into Alphabet City. The decor of Crobar, like many gay bars that I recall from the era, consisted mostly of black paint. There were never enough chairs for Burning Habits and I recall sitting on the floor for at least one performance, maybe several.

The night in question - the night that should have been hallowed in The Price of Admission post - was a night where Christa was forced to switch back and forth between her evil nun character (Sister Godelieve Machiavelli) and her sweet Southern housewife character (Thelma D'Gretts).

If it isn't plain from this introduction that Burning Habits is a campy soap opera, I think the character names spell it out pretty plainly. In fact, BH is performed as a serial every Monday night. (Monday nights are when most theatres are dark, which means that actors can do labors of love - e.g., perform in shows like BH - and the rest of the theatrical denizens can go see them. If you have any interest in seeing "insider" performances, find shows that only run Monday nights.)

So...returning to the performance. I cannot give you all the plot details. But I will give you a summary of what I recall and tell you why it mattered to me.

The parts of the show where Christa was performing as her evil nun character were raucously funny. I recall hooting and hollering until I was in a sweat. And the crowd was going nuts in response.

In a scene immediately following the mayhem, Christa came out as sweet, loony Thelma. In a typical plot twist, her no-good husband Otis began to brick her into the basement. At first, this nonsense was funny. Thelma was standing still. In her childlike way, she had fallen under some simply ruse of Otis' and was simply standing still while he began to build the brick wall.

As the wall came higher, it began to dawn on Thelma that she could not escape. And suddenly, the room lurched from comedy to deep tragedy. Thelma began to cry and I found myself weeping for this poor imaginary character standing not ten feet in front of me. To make matters more interesting, my memory says that there was in fact no wall being built on the stage. The wall getting higher was represented by a spotlight that got smaller and smaller until it was only on Thelma's face.

I recall leaving the performance that night with a sense of catharsis I'd never experienced before. Something about ricocheting back and forth from hysterical laughter to crying left me feeling free and alive. It had never occurred to me that these states could be created in such close proximity by a stage performance. It opened up my eyes to a whole new variety of theatrical possibilities.

Soon after, I rushed off with my friend Robin to see her friend Sturgis Warner in Jeff Weiss' Hot Keys after it moved to PS 122 from Naked Angels. Talk about pushing boundaries! From a description in the New York Times in 1993:

In Jeff Weiss' "Hot Keys," recently reopened in the East Village, a father and his teen-age son, both amateur wrestlers, strip off their shirts to debate the need for brutality in their incestuous relationship. They also reminisce about the various boys -- schoolmates of the son -- they have raped and murdered.

And by the way, the scene is played for laughs, as this continuing soap opera -- with a new episode presented each weekend -- spoofs the stuff of tabloid headlines and the outlandish daily parade of confessions on TV talk shows that are no less disturbing for their ludicrousness.

I recall that Weiss ended each performance of Hot Keys that I saw by singing "Where or When" with a ferocity of raw emotion that poured out over the audience and left everyone in tears. It was truly shocking.

In any case, this all started as a paean to Christa's remarkable talent. She's turned it into a true force for good. She rarely acts in public now. Instead, she does drama therapy in war torn lands, helping to heal individuals and society.

I know this is a higher calling, but I can't help hoping that the current slew of positive notices for the Burning Habits revival will attract the attention of the right kind of producer. Someone who will find a great piece for more people to experience Christa's talent on stage. Because I know that for me, ever since I saw what she could do in that 1993 performance of Burning Habits, I go to the theatre in the hope of feeling the unexpected. A possibility I had never considered until that time.

More Fun with the Web

2006-06-18T12:00:00.000-04:00

Way back when, I wrote a post titled The Oracle is In, which detailed some of the sites I file in my bookmarks under "Utilities". These are sites that I use to save time and money and make me marvel at the usefulness of the WWW.

Here are a few more I've added since the last post:

Kayak
Kayak aggregates pricing from the major online travel sites, so you don't have to check them individually. Call it a "mega-aggregator" for travel prices.

It also has one of the tighest interfaces in the online travel space. Checkout the cool functionality that allows you to give a price range and then use sliders to broaden or narrow it. (For our dweebier readers, Kayak is a smokin' example of a Web 2.0 AJAX application.)

Next time you're doing travel planning, try taking Kayak out for a spin.

TripAdvisor
There's nothing new about Trip Advisor. It's been around for quite a while. But the truth of the matter is, no matter how much similar functionality seems to get duplicated in other online travel sites, Trip Advisor seems to provide just a little bit more of what I need both when I'm in a purely speculative mode, i.e., "Where might we go?" and when I'm trying to select an accomodation on a site like Kayak.

Trip Advisor aggregates newspaper articles about a destination, major guidebook information (i.e., Fodor & Frommers), and independent user reviews. There seem to generally be a greater quantity of reviews on Trip Advisor than on other sites, too.

I also enjoy that reviewers can post their vacation photos on the site; showing you what the location in choice looks like without any of the misrepresentations often generated by a professional photo shoot. For instance, check out the latest review for my friend Robin's nifty French hideaway, complete with a recent visitor's pix. That's definitely high on my list of places I need to get to!

RedRoller
My friend ShawnBoy just told me about this site. It's very cool. RedRoller does price aggregation for shipping services, e.g., FedEx vs. UPS. And hardcore eBayers will be glad to know that RedRoller fully integrates with eBay. How cool is that?!

HopStop
As a long term denizen of The City, I hate to confess that I use HopStop. *sigh* But I do. It's not a frequent thing, but you know when your friend invites you to her cool comedy club down on Essex and you just don't hang in that 'hood much? ("Essex? As in Henry V?") That's when you need HopStop.

Lee Evans: Gracious Monkey Boy

2006-06-11T22:00:00.000-04:00

A week ago on Friday night - a particularly dark, rainy night - K. and I went to see Lee Evans perform down at 37 Arts.

Most Americans know Lee Evans as Tucker from There's Something About Mary, but I got interested in him when I originally caught the strange little gem that is Funny Bones. Directed by Peter Chelsom, it seemed to herald the arrival of a truly original writer-director. Chelsom did nicely on his follow-up with another little-seen film, The Mighty. Unfortunately, it was pretty much downhill from there.

(I must confess, however, a weakness for Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack and therefore follows an unpardonable weakness for Chelsom's saccharine Serendipity. It's chockablock with awful and out-of-place performances - e.g., John Corbett and Eugene Levy - but...well...*sigh*...I'd watch it again anyway in a heartbeat.)

Evans' Funny Bones performance is truly offbeat. I immediately wanted to know, "Who IS that guy?" Is he retarded or a genius? (I famously remarked to K. about Benecio Del Toro after seeing The Usual Suspects, "There's this guy I've never heard of in the movie and if his character is not really who he is, he's amazing." It's since been established in my mind that he's the latter, not the former.)

So I went out and began to research Lee Evans and discovered in watching videos of his live shows that he is a kind of physical genius - more an heir to Jerry Lewis that even Jim Carrey in that Evans' lines can be irrelevant to the plot or story he's telling. It's his physicality you cannot forget, nor help but respond to.

So when he scheduled some dates in NYC recently, I got tickets. I wanted the live experience for myself. What I got was the kind of singular experience that live performances can bring, but that no performer can truly plan to provide.

It started something like this: K. and I were in the third row. The curtain was delayed because of the torrential downpour. As we sat waiting, we were observing the audience around us. Arriving very late was a couple who sat in the front row center. I pointed out the female half and remarked rather mindlessly to K. "Well, obviously she must be lucky." The woman had a tiny clover tattoo on her back. K. responded, "Is that a liquor bottle?"

The gentleman had some kind of clear-necked bottle in his hand, but I couldn't tell the scale of it. The theatre has a open bar and allows beverages of all kinds to be taken to your seat. There were lots of folks with beer bottles around us, but we couldn't make out what he was drinking.

Before we could learn anything more, Evans kicked off his hyperkinetic performance. It was maybe 3 minutes into it before he needed to swab himself down with a towel. Seriously. You have NEVER seen anyone sweat onstage like Lee Evans. He flings himself with abandon, his comic patter sometimes highbrow, more often pedestrian, but always accompanied by remarkable, high speed feats of transforming his rubbery body and face to suit his purposes. Given his animated physicality, it's not too surprising that Evans often refers to himself as "Monkey Boy" during the show.

I think one of the moments I prefer most is his impersonation of his grumpy suitcase going around on a carousel. Bizarre, original and wonderful. In fact, in the midst of rather standard bits about coming home drunk and trying to be quiet, Evans throws in conversation between himself and inanimate objects, such as a creaky door. I think he might be one of the best impersonators of inanimate objects with personality in this or any other time. (Perhaps this is a sense of humor peculiar to the U.K. Think of T.H. White's description of Merlin's walking mustard pot in The Once and Future King which was always "giving itself airs".)

Partway into the show, the man in the front row took a photo of Lee Evans with a digital camera and full flash. Evans was unperturbed and continued. But after a while, a security guard stood at the end of the row and motioned the front row patron to follow him out the side door.

Evans seemed to have missed the crucial part of why the man was walking out. He stopped his bit and turned to the woman. "Where's he off to?" Evans asked and began to work with the woman in the front row. She was unresponsive. Evans played the bit solo for a while and when the man came sauntering in, it seemed apparent that the guards had made him delete the photo. Evans inquired, "Where did you go? Is everything alright?"

Trying to make some humor, the gentlemen responded in a thick Liverpudlian accent that he had "the runs". Evans gingerly stepped around this, playing it only slightly and then diving back into his material.

About 10 minutes later and apropos of nothing in particular, the man suddenly yelled out, "Superstar!"

Evans responded, "What?" It became apparent at this point that the guy was completely blasted out of his mind by now. Drunk Guy blurted out some unintelligible phrases and Evans decided to work with it. Mr. Evans began asking questions, "Where are you from? What brings you to New York?" And so on.

Drunk Guy claimed that he'd come from Las Vegas, where he's just married his girlfriend of eighteen years. Evans was a genial interlocutor, but Drunk Guy was suspicious: "You're taking the piss."

"I'm not!" exclaimed Evans. "That's not the kind of show I do!" Evans then used Drunk Guy's recent travels as a way to seque back into his routine. "So that's how you got here, let me tell you about my trip over." Quite a graceful transition and the audience was grateful for it.

So back into his spastic routine then when not another 15 minutes later, Drunk Guy yells out something else. Once again, Evans decided not to ignore him and requested some help from the tech crew. "Let's get the spotlight down on this gentleman, shall we?" Rather gently, Evans explained to Drunk Guy that he was going to allow him some attention since he clearly craved it. Evans said, "Here. You want to say something?" He handed Drunk Guy the microphone and once it was out of his hand, Evans said, "I need a break." And he skipped off stage left, leaving Drunk Guy with the microphone.

At this point, Drunk Guy was out of his depth and he climbed on stage protesting, "Lee. No. Lee. Go on with your show. LEE." As soon as he was onstage, two security guards came hustling down the aisle, jumped up onstage, dragged Drunk Guy down and walked him out the side door.

Evans was quite perturbed and protested all the while. "No! Hey! We were only having a bit of fun. He didn't mean any harm. Hey! Don't! That's not necessary!" But it was too late. Evans turned to the audience and said, "Look. I can't live with this. He's not harming anyone, is he?"

"I'm from the British Consulate, Lee!" volunteered a woman sitting two down from me. "If he's really in any trouble here, I can help."

"Ooooh! Great!" Evans cheered up. And he chatted with her and made light of the situation. But clearly he was unhappy with Drunk Guy not having been returned. "Look," he said to us. "I can't have this. I won't be able to sleep tonight." And so he put down the microphone, jumped off the front of the stage and zipped out the side door to intervene.

Moments later, he returned escorting Drunk Guy back to his chair. The audience made approving noises for Lee's gracious behavior (at this point, we all felt on personal terms with him, so here on out I shall call him "Lee"), although some of us were not sure how great an idea this was.

Suddenly, Lee reaches down by Drunk Guy's seat and pulls up a nearly empty white wine bottle. "Here's the problem then!" Now K. and I finally understood both the size and the consequences of the bottle we'd half glimpsed just before the lights went down.

He put the wine bottle out of reach onstage. "You have to be careful with this. This will get you every time. I know. I'm Irish. My mother used to finish one of these before breakfast." This was said matter of factly in a direct address to Drunk Guy, not at all for laughs and not lecturing. Rather kindly said, in truth.

He continued, "Seriously, friend. You have to watch out now, haven't you?" Then turning back toward humor, he said, "You can't muck about like that in New York, right?" And he picked up a comic theme he'd been following earlier in the evening about the size of New York police officers and similar observations about New Yorkers, crime, and terrorism.

Lee continued on through the evening and when it was time for curtain, he thanked everyone, reached over the edge of the stage to shake hands with all comers and made a special point to sincerely thank Drunk Guy and shake his hand, too. "You've had an real New York experience now, haven't you? You'll remember this night."

I think many of us will. Not because of Drunk Guy's behavior, but because of Lee's grace under pressure. Most comedians would have let Drunk Guy spend the night in jail. (Personally, I wouldn't have minded.) But it was clear that Lee is a surprisingly gentle soul and he couldn't live with anyone having a bad experience - even of their own making - at one of his performances.

Raul Midon: A World of Music in One Man

2006-05-29T17:45:00.000-04:00

I mentioned last week that I was fortunate that my friend Jenn got me invited to see Thomas Dolby perform two sets at Joe's Pub. Thomas is the music director of the TED conference and the first set was actually a "salon" for TED members in NYC. Thomas was showcasing a few performers who might be invited to perform at future TED events and one of them was Raul Midon.

For those of us who had never heard of Midon, his introduction was an odd event. The woman from TED introduced him with effusive praise and then disappeared. The stage darkened to a spotlight. And then a stagehand came onstage carefully wending his way through amplifiers and cords carrying a guitar. It slowly became clear that his caution was due to the fact that he was leading a hiply dressed man onstage in the near darkness. As they entered the spotlight, suddenly a different version of the truth emerged: Mr. Midon is blind.

We watched curiously as the stagehand strapped an acoustic guitar onto Midon. I noticed that on each finger of his right hand was a plastic finger pick. Once everything was in place, the stagehand graciously crept away and Mr. Midon took command of the room. He announced, "Usually I talk a lot more, but I have to catch a 10pm flight to Paris, so I'm just going to get right into it."

The next thing is that Midon starts singing and playing. First of all, it must be said that the closest and easiest reference for Midon's singing voice is Stevie Wonder. That immediately makes everyone sit up and take notice. A blind man singing like Stevie Wonder? Is he going to be original?

After a few seconds, I get past the voice and am drawn to the energy of his guitar playing. As the first few minutes of the song go by, I begin to observe that he's getting every damn sound out of the guitar that might be possible. He starts by playing somewhat flamenco-style, courtesy of his flying finger picks. In another section of the song, he strums it folk-style. He starts adding drum beats by banging the face and the sides. Suddenly, he's playing it slap-style and I find myself thinking about Jaco Pastorius on "Heavy Weather". I'm reminded of Tom Dowd in The Language of Music saying of Clapton and Allman's playing during their "Layla" duet, "Those notes aren't even in the instruments...they're only in their fingers."

As if this were not enough, all of a sudden I find myself hearing Herb Alpert-style trumpeting. I start scanning the stage. I thought this was a solo act? I squint. It dawns on me. He's mimicking trumpet...with his mouth. And playing, and singing. Needless to say, the crowd went nuts when the "trumpet" solo peaked.

As soon as I got home, a hazy memory emerged of having heard something about Midon last summer on NPR. So I went back to the site and - sure enough - I found a handful of his appearances on a range of shows.

Here's where you can learn more:

1) World Cafe: Start here because here Midon is playing live. You can get a sense of why I was so amazed when I heard him performing solo.

2) Tavis Smiley: If you're interested in his blindness, his twin brother who is a rocket scientist (!), and how he came up with his sound(s), this is a good clip.

3) Weekend Edition: This is a good clip if you are interested in buying the album. You can listen to three studio tracks.

Check him out.

Laura and the Pirate Twins

2006-05-22T20:01:00.000-04:00

One of my best friends has become very close friends with Thomas Dolby in the last year. She didn't even realize who he was when she first met him. For me, that seemed inconceivable.

For those of you who haven't known me for longer than a decade, it may seem strange that Thomas Dolby would mean so much to me. That's because about fifteen years ago, I stopped listening to any music outside of classical and jazz. But it wasn't always this way. I simply returned to my roots, you see.

I started listening to classical music as a child because I studied classical piano until I was 14. I wasn't interested in rock or pop because it was patently obvious to me that none of those people could really sing or play instruments. I felt like an outsider with my peer group. But what could I do?

I cast about for some cool band to like, but I hated them all. The first band that caught my ear was Jethro Tull. They weren't exactly mainstream, especially not on the first album I bought: "Songs from the Wood". It was full of flute and guitar and pretty darn folky. But it wasn't classical and I could finally say I "liked a band". It took me a while to graduate from "SFTW" and to get used to the brash sound of "Aqualung". But there was enough melody on the rest of that album that I gradually found my way into it.

Over time, I got hipper with the music I listened to, but I was still playing classical and I was terribly jealous of one particular classmate, Barney Silver. He could do jazz improvisation and he sounded cool. Breaking into Bach at a party didn't exactly gather folks around the piano, you know? So I tried switching from classical to jazz piano, but that switch also coincided with my leaving home for boarding school. And given the volume of new things coming at me during that transition, it's not surprising that I stopped playing piano altogether.

It was during 8th grade (still at home) and continuing into my freshman year (1980-1981) that I started paying attention to what my older brother was listening to: Devo, The Cars, and The Clash. When I arrived at boarding school, I learned that my freshman year roommate was an American named Ike who'd been in school in the UK for a number of years. He turned me onto Adam Ant, Madness, Bow Wow Wow and Malcolm Maclaren. My tastes began to evolve quickly.

Later that year, I began to D.J. school parties on the weekends. I had to learn about a lot of different kinds of music that I had been ignoring, including classic rock and dance pop. This lead to an extended love affair over the next two years with Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall". But other than that aberrant classic rock affair, my personal preferences settled largely into the New Romantic offshoot of the New Wave movement and remained there.

This was the result of my junior year (1983-1984) roommate Bill. Yet another American roommate who'd been holed up overseas in the UK. But whereas Ike had been at an American School, Bill was a product of the brutal British public schools. (NB: you call this private school if you're American.)

Bill returned to the US steeped in knowledge of the mystical Peel Sessions, with tons of bands no one had ever heard of in the US: Joy Division ("Unknown Pleasures" and "Closer"), Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark ("Organization" and "Architecture & Morality"), Stiff Little Fingers, The English Beat, Echo and the Bunnymen ("Crocodiles", "Heaven Up Here" and "Porcupine", The Cure ("Boys Don't Cry" and "Japanese Whispers") and perhaps the most influential but not frequently credited enough New Romantic band: Roxy Music. (I must also own up to a deep love of the Thompson Twins at the time, but Bill can't be faulted for that.)

During these years, Thomas Dolby released "The Golden Age of Wireless" and then "The Flat Earth". People who didn't buy the albums (fools) associated Dolby with the hit singles: "She Blinded Me with Science" (one of the most influential videos of all time) and "Hyperactive". But those of us who bought the albums were released into a dark soundscape that encompassed everything that had come before and that presaged much of what was to come in the following decade.

The singles represented the more accessible side of Dolby and contained all of the essentials: the strong sense of story (although told obliquely if not poetically), sampled spoken words (e.g., "Good heavens Miss Sakamoto - you're beautiful!"), synthesized sounds of a wide range of instruments (often including brass and woodwind instrumentation) and an underlying driving rhythm (again synthesized).

But to me, a moody and imaginative teenager, it was the rest of his albums that I was drawn to. The stories were strong and full of moonlight. They were somehow filmic. Each one told a story or multiple stories. They felt full of intent. And while there was a lot of ephemeral electronica sounds, there was also clear melody.

An example of what I'm referring to is "Europa and the Pirate Twins".

I was fourteen
She Was Twelve
Father travelled - hers as well
Europa
Down the beaches
Hand in hand
Twelfth of never on the sand
Then war took her away
We swore a vow that day:
We'll be the Pirate Twins again, Europa
Oh my country, Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain, Europa
Ta republique...

Nine years after, who'd I see
On the cover of a magazine?
Europa
Buy her singles and see all her films
Paste her pictures on my windowsill
But that's not quite the same - It isn't, is it?
Europa my old friend...

We'll be the Pirate Twins again
Europa
Oh my country.
Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain
Europa
Ta republique...

Blew in from the hoverport
She was back in London
Pushed past the papermen
Calling her name
She smiled for the cameras
As a bodyguard grabbed me
Then her eyes were gone forever
As they drove her away...
We'll be the Pirate Twins again, Europa
Oh my country, Europa
I'll stand beside you in the rain Europa
Ta republique ...

I can't tell you exactly what the story is here. But for me it's like watching a good actor at work: you feel the subconscious motivation of their character's behavior even if you can't articulate it precisely. It just makes sense to some deeper part of you.

Seeing Mr. Dolby perform this song at Joe's Pub (twice - Thomas was kind enough to invite me to stay for the second set) hit some inner emotional time machine. I had forgotten, but suddenly remembered through my emotional memory (vs. intellectual memory) that somehow "Europa" was somehow associated in my mind with my now missing high school girlfriend Laura Duchnicki. As I told Thomas, "When I heard 'Europa', my heart just exploded."

When I wrote the last post about her, I had yet to hear from Laura's sister. But recently, Robin and I connected and she wrote me that Laura vanished some five years ago from a bed and breakfast in the UK, leaving all of her belongings behind.

Hearing "Europa" made some internal connection for me and somehow further processed the information Robin had shared with me. Like my teenage years themselves, Laura's really gone. I reflect gratefully on the friendship we had, but like Thomas says, "...that's not quite the same - It isn't, is it?"

[title of post]

2006-03-09T23:26:00.000-05:00

Sherpa Dan took us to a double last weekend. Only this time it was theatre and not film. We did Judy Gold’s 25 Questions for a Jewish Mother at Ars Nova and then [title of show] at the Vineyard.

I’m a big fan of Ars Nova and the shows they do there. It’s a hep little joint that’s practically brand spankin’ new in NYC theatre years located over by The Daily Show on West 55th. I’ve seen lots of nifty and edgy performances and shows like the wacky variety show Automatic Vaudeville (which featured god’s gift to pop performance art, The Petersons! If you’re not cool enough to have seen them yet, to listen to Ethan Hawke is Gayright now! NOW!); a couple of great shows by Julia Sweeney; and Seth Rudetsky’s indescribably educational and funny performances of Deconstructing…, where alternately savages and praises singers famous and unknown.

25 Questions, while quite watchable, was not my favorite Ars Nova happening. It really needs some editing and a bit stronger direction. That said, the audience totally ate it up so who am I to say?

Our second theatrical event was also a bit raw, but I loved it. [title of show] is both easy and hard to describe because it’s a meta-musical. It’s a show created by two guys (Jeff and Hunter) for a New York City musical theatre festival seeking original submissions. So these two smartypants decided to write a show about writing a show for a musical theatre festival seeking original submissions. Following me?

The storyline follows the twists and turns of Jeff and Hunter trying to write their show. And it also details how they are aided, abetted and occasionally in conflict with their friends Heidi and Susan who are both their personal friends and their fellow performers.

The net result of this moebius strip of a show is a comedic treatise on the nature of individual creativity, creative collaboration, friendship and the struggle of trying to be successful in the arts. As a failed actor myself, my heart went out to these young artists because their travails, while partially presented in Kaufman-influenced (Charlie, not George) farce, ring all too true.

In particular, I found Susan Blackwell’s sharply felt performance to be deeply affecting. It’s not her expert deadpan delivery that gets to me, such as when she describes her day job as starring “in a little play called Corporate Whore where I play the role of the office manager”. It’s the heartfelt tears welling up in her eyes as she sings so transparently about being what it feels like to be crushed by the ordinary demons of everyday life.

While it’s not without flaws, the authors have clearly given it their all. The line "I'd rather be nine people's favorite thing/Than a hundred people's ninth favorite thing" sums up well their commitment and I was impressed. So you’ve got thirty more days to get yourself down to the Vineyard Theatre to figure out whether you’re one of the nine or the hundred. In either case, I think you’ll safely be able to say someday, “I saw their first show and I knew there would be more to come.”

Tears for Danny

2006-03-01T07:56:00.000-05:00

How do you properly pay tribute to a man you have never met? It’s one thing if the man is someone like Viktor Frankl. You can refer to his remarkable history of having survived a concentration camp and emerged a positivist; an optimistic force for good in the world whose work and writings have helped countless people learn to live in optimism or at least to find hope for humanity.

But what if the man is a humble betting clerk? A face behind a counter at OTB. A place you never have been to in your life that you shun when you walk by, that you associate with a society of losers? How do you pay tribute to a man who never preached, never wrote, and never evangelized publicly a philosophy that one might adopt for oneself?

I did not even know of Danny Perasa’s existence until early last Friday morning and yet I’ve hardly stopped thinking of him since. I was taking a shower and getting ready for work when NPR’s Morning Edition aired a StoryCorps feature.

StoryCorps is a program that sets up booths across the country to record and archive people’s personal stories. Anyone can sign up and bring a friend, lover, son, daughter, parent and interview them, have a conversation; anything to get a story or stories out and into a record. NPR highlights certain stories that have resonance beyond the storytellers and Friday morning’s story was about a couple so remarkable that they were naming the StoryCorps booth in Grand Central after them: Danny and Annie Perasa.

Danny and Annie visited the StoryCorps booth many times. Mostly so that Danny could talk about how much he loved Annie.

Listening to Danny is a shock to the emotional system. His ethos is a remarkable collision of the real and imagined; the mundane and the mythic. Listening to Danny, you discover a philosophy that is a wondrous amalgam of Viktor Frankl and Don Juan de Marco spoken by Mike Hammer in a voice that is a blend of the Danny Devito and Archie Bunker; a heart that is both very human and somehow angelic.

I was so moved by listening to Danny that I couldn’t wait to share the clip of him with K. that evening. I got out a big tissue box because K. is a serious gold medal crier. (The folks who made the early 90’s AT&T commercials could always count on my dearest to unleash Niagara for their 30-second nostalgiafests.) And I knew that listening to Danny talk about how much he loved Annie and how concerned he was about her future now that he was terminally ill was going to completely undo K. And it did.

What I was not prepared for, however, was the little notice on the side of the page on NPR.com titled, “A Sad Note”. And when I read it, I began to sob. (As I must confess I am again now as I write this.) Having only just met Danny Friday morning, I learned Friday evening that he had died earlier that afternoon.

Listen to Danny for yourself. Listen to his last recording and how his only thoughts are for Annie. For obsessing about whether or not he could help her to be all right after his passing. And this was only hours before he left her. I marvel at his selflessness, the depths of his passion for his partner, and the completeness with which he seems to have loved and lived. I only hope to live up to his example.

Today is K’s birthday. I love you, K!

Go Forth and TiVo!

2006-02-15T18:15:00.000-05:00

Yes, yes, I still owe you a final comprehensive Sundance roundup. But in the meantime, it's worthwhile to point out that TheOnion.com has started a new feature in their AV Club section called "TiVo This Now!" with recommendations of shows to consider getting season passes for. In the spirit of this new offering from our friends at TheOnion, I thought I would take a moment to point out a few of my own suggestions.

Slings & Arrows
First up on the list of recommendations is Slings & Arrows which returns to the Sundance Channel on Sunday. This wonderful, literate dramedy features The Kids in the Hall's Mark McKinney (who also writes and produces) and a cast of brilliant Canadian actors. It's a shame we've never heard of them before - with the exception of Rachel McAdams (hubba hubba) - because they are excellent to a (wo)man. Detailing the day-to-day, behind the scenes drama of the New Burbage Shakespeare Festival, Slings & Arrows is full of biting wit, human foibles and tons of heart.

Theatre insiders will immediately intuit that the Stratford Shakespeare Festival is the company on which the show is based; right down to season one's storyline about an American action hero hired to play Hamlet (and sell tickets). Those of us "in the biz" way back when remember Keanu's fabled trip north to do the very same. (S&A writers are kinder in granting their action hero greater acting capability than history judged Mr. Reeves to have displayed in his Hamlet.)

If you missed the first season, set your TiVo to record the first six episodes on Saturday! They're airing them all back to back. Then jump on board for second season's premiere on Sunday.

My Name is Earl
Are you watching My Name is Earl yet? It's a half hour of vintage Coen Brothers, Raising Arizona-style comedy each week. Jason Lee leads a cast of unbelievable redneck farceurs in the craziest combination of Buddhist philosophy and Married with Children slapstick since I don't know when. Call it Waiting for GodIDIOT.

O'Grady
I wrote in November of 2004 about the best TV show you'd never heard of: O'Grady. According to an inside source, Nickelodeon has seen the wisdom of commissioning a second season of six episodes for it's nighttime lineup on their Noggin channel - which strangely switches to an older demographic and changes its nom d'air to "The N" during the night. O'Grady is starting up again on Monday March 3rd at 9pm.

Apparently, the premiere episode features special guests Conan O'Brien and Amy Poehler. I'm told that guest appearances in the new season will include Will Arnett, David Cross, Rachel Dratch, and Rob Corddry.

I'm more than ready for some more doses of this wonderfully original, half-hour animated show. And I'm very frustrated that there are only six new episodes!

Unknown White Male
I've been waiting to tell you when Court TV would air one of my fav docs from last year's Sundance called Unknown White Male. I just discovered that while it will air on Court TV in June, it will have a limited cineminatic release first. It will open in The City and in L.A. on February 24th and then go to selected cities nationwide in March. So you can either set your TiVo in advance for its eventual air date in June or go out and see it in theatres this month. Personally, I am tempted to do both if K. will let me.

Sundance Post V: Closure, Anyone?

2006-01-29T21:03:00.000-05:00

We spent time in our little festival-going team last night debating which of the award winners to see. We weren't all that psyched for any of them, but we remained hopeful. Ultimately, K. and I chose Special Dramatic Jury Prize for Independent Vision winner In Between Days, Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award winner Stephanie Daley and World Dramatic Jury Prize winner 13 Tzameti.

Just before In Between Days started, I glanced at an email review which predicted it would not find an audience beyond the festival circuit and I have to concur. The story of a Korean girl struggling to assimilate in either the U.S. or Canada (we can't tell exactly where we are), the film falls into the deadly category of "slice of life" filmmaking. The trap here is that naturalistic slice had better be damn interesting. In this case...not so much.

Tilda Swinton, the British Meryl Streep of her generation, is the reason to see Stephanie Daley. There are other great actors on hand: Denis O'Hare, Tim Hutton and the very promising young Amber Tamblyn among them. But it's Swinton's film and she always delivers. The story follows a pregnant, court-appointed psychologist as she evaluates a high school girl who may have murdered an unwanted, premature child. Many plot details swirl, but at heart its the examination of the ambivalence and fear that some women may feel as they are pregnant. It's refusal to give an "all ends tied up" denouement is the only thing that makes this an "independent film". Beyond that it's simply a very well acted retread of such classic "What made them do [insert unimaginable crime here] and what does it mean" investigative dramas such as Equus, Agnes of God, etc.

13 Tzameti has been called Tarantino meets Hitchcock. Unfortunately, it's not up to the standards of Hitch, but it's an understandable comparison. Stylishly shot and over-scored within an inch of it's life, 13 Tzameti is something like Stephen King's "The Running Man" melded with John Woo's most famous signature shot on shown on repeat. If you'd like to see lots of guns pointed at lots of heads, this is the flick for you.

All of the films today suffered from an inability to provide satisfying endings. I'm hoping that our dinner tonight at the Blind Dog will provide one for our little Sundance team.

Sundance Post IV: Saturday in the Snow

2006-01-29T02:30:00.000-05:00

Before I go into Saturday, I need to recap LATE Friday night. I'd like to have a word with the GENIUS scheduler who decided to put a 2.5 hour doc about Ralph Nader on at 10:45pm, An Unreasonable Man. Of course, we're the smarties who got tix for said showing. At any rate, it had a terrific first half recapping Nader's early years and then strangely loses its way during Nader's presidential forays. Given an editor, it would be a pretty good flick.

After getting home at 2am, we decided to bail on the first Saturday timeslot and we started with a noon screening of Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner. A workmanlike piece of doc-making, it flies purely on the strength of its brilliant subject. It was a joy for me because I would happily see/listen to anything Tony Kushner said, wrote or had produced.

Our second flick was a pure crowdpleaser. Kinky Boots is The Fully Monty crossed with La Cage aux Folles. As K. said, "Any film where drag queens save the day is a winner in my book." Ditto.

Right as we went into Kinky Boots, it began to do a proper Utah snow. So we were trekking about in the soft stuff for the rest of the day. It is something I appreciate as global warming seems to have denied The City any real snow this year.

We caught our first big ensemble piece next. Nicole Holofcener is a Sundance fave and her latest work is Friends with Money. Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, Scott Caan, Simon McBurney (Artistic Director of Complicite), and Jason Isaacs (Harry Potter's Lucius Malfoy with an American accent!) all deliver great performances in Holofcener's well-observed dramedy.

Award winners are announced and start to screen Saturday night. So tonight we saw the Dramatic Grand Jury Winner, Quincenera. And Sherpa Dan and I have been arguing about it ever since. The story of the clash of cultures both within generations of Echo Park Latinos and between the Latino community and the largely gay entreprenuers who are gentrifying this neighborhood of L.A., Quincenera has a number of problematic elements. I thought it was good watching overall, but not the sort of integrated work one expects from an award winner. Sherpa Dan thought that it needed a significant subplot excised. K. sided with Dan.

Sundance Post III: Doc Day

2006-01-27T23:40:00.000-05:00

We dragged our sorry selves out of bed with five and a half hours of sleep to kick off a day full of documentaries.

We got off to a very strong start with So Much So Fast, the story of a young man who developed ALS and his remarkable family; most remarkable are his brother and friends who founded a foundation to challenge the rules of clinical science in order to race for a cure for their loved one. (For those of you who know Lawler, this is the foundation he worked for at one time. He appears briefly in the background of one scene.)

Next up was I for India, an autobiographical documentary about an Indian family's generational diaspora from India to Great Britain. While there are some great elements to it due to the extensive Super 8 film reels that the director's father shot over the years, it was not overall a tremendously engaging film and I admit to taking a brief opportunity in the middle section to work on repairing my sleep debt.

Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris is an interesting tale about a jazz singer lauded as a "singer's singer" who never achieved the public notice his peers expected, despite his having toured with Charlie Parker and having been Ella's favorite male vocalist. Captured just before his death, the film untangles his odd history and suggests that for every Frank Sinatra that receives critical and public acclaim there are probably 99 serious artists like Jackie Paris who do not.

We just came from God Grew Tired of Us and my eyes are still tired from weeping. It follows the "Lost Boys of Sudan" from their 1000 mile trek through the desert to three remarkable souls relocated to the United States. Totally ripped my heart out.

Now we're off to see our final film of the day and it's yet another doc. This one's 2+ hours on Ralph Nader. More on that one either late tonight or tomorrow.

Sundance Post II: Strong Start & Finish, Middling in Between

2006-01-27T04:27:00.000-05:00

So we've just gotten back to our condo at about 2:30am Utah time.

Despite having Paul Giamatti and Michelle Williams in the lead roles, Hawk proved to be a dud - as Dan and others predicted. The only reason I can imagine that Giamatti agreed to do the flick is because like all formerly geeky young men, he still has a fascination with falconry.

We followed that with Viva Zapatero, an Italian documentary about a comedienne who did a show so bitingly satirical that Berlusconi had her kicked off the air after a single episode. She herself was terribly charming. The documentary itself was probably more engaging for Italians, but it had frightening resonance with our American state of affairs nonetheless.

We concluded Day 1 with The World According to Sesame Street, a doc of particular interest to K. as she used to work at the Sesame Workshop. It is an extremely engaging exploration of how Sesame creates foreign co-productions with local content and production teams. The film covers three efforts, South Africa, Bangladesh and Kosovo.

So the day started and ended strong. The middle was not so impressive. Ah well, tomorrow's another day. Plenty more films to redeem ourselves with. First one's at 10am...

Sundance Post I: Schedule Shuffling

2006-01-26T16:07:00.000-05:00

As regular readers know, I normally only publish on a weekly basis. (Yes, yes. I know that I missed last week. Those of you who know my professionally know that things are pretty busy for me at work.) But we're at Sundance again for our annual pilgrimage and I'm going to try something new: blogging closer to real time.

We arrived on last night (Wednesday) to learn that two of our party had already seen and hated The Darwin Awards. We had that scheduled as our second flick for today (Thursday) and we were being advised by our little movie mob to ditch our tickets.

Linda had lasted 15 minutes and Sherpa Dan had watched the whole thing and declared it beyond redemption. I was conflicted about not seeing it because last year, Dan desperately hated Brick - which I loved.

K. fell asleep for Brick, but it was flick six for that day and one could hardly blame her. She claims to have hated what little she saw of it, however. So when Dan panned Darwin without reservation, K. was inclined to ditch our tix in favor of something else.

So we dumped the Darwin tix first thing this AM in favor of a doc called Small Town Gay Bar (which we're headed off to see momentarily).

Additionally, the advance buzz on The Hawk is Dying is more of a ZZZZZ. Variety hated it, Dan thought it was blah, and the people behind us at our first film complained about Hawk from the moment they sat down until the our film began. *sigh* Our whole Day 1 schedule is feeling kind of risky. We're going to take our chances with Hawk anyway.

In the meantime, we've seen our first film Word Play which we really enjoyed a lot. It was a great way to start our festival. I don't have time to do a full-on review yet. But we both thought it was exactly the sort of doc we love to see at festivals: fun, warm, articulate and engaging.

More later...

Pondering All the Pixels

2006-01-11T23:59:00.000-05:00

I've never seen CSI: Miami until our dear friend Amy guest starred on it this week. I loved David Caruso back in the day when he was the original star of NYPD Blue and I pretty much lost track of his career when he left that show prematurely - like many of the original NYPD Blue fans, I suspect.

Watching CSI, I thought to myself, "Wow, he's doing classic Shatner-style, American Kabuki. I thought that style of acting could only be seen in its pure form in syndicated episodes of the original-flavor Star Trek and old VHS copies of TJ Hooker. I had no idea that a new master had emerged to take the mantle from the originator." (The originator having moved on into his lovable, crazy coot phase.) Unfortunately, K. is not an appreciator of Kabuki acting on the small screen and she was unable to stop herself from jeering during "dramatic" moments.

As the show moved forward, K. turned to me and remarked that one of the women had clearly had a terrible blemish the day of the shoot. I had noticed this, but had not commented.

(In fact, this is one of the key departures in our respective TV-watching styles. I watch largely in silence. If a comment is burning a hole in my head, I pause the show with the TiVo remote. My dearest K. must comment in the moment lest her
head explode. This is particularly true if W. comes on the screen, in which case she entirely forgets my presence altogether and simply yells at the helpless box directly with no intermediary.)

These normal flaws in actors' visages are largely hidden from the viewing public on a day-to-day basis. But in this case, even more than the blemish itself, it was the makeup artist's hand that was clearly on display. Smack in the middle of the lovely actor's cheek was what looked like an amateur artist's attempt to repair the canvas of her face.

I observed more closely after that and it seemed to me that the clarity of the broadcast image of CSI: Miami was of a higher resolution than our normal digital cable signal. I'm not too geeky about broadcast signal, so I'm not sure if this is true or if it was an artifact of the show being shot in hi-def video or what. But it simply wasn't fair to this woman. She was being upstaged by the flesh colored spot that didn't match her flesh. And we don't even have a new-fangled HDTV.

This got me to thinking about what technology lets us see in images of female beauty. The invention of the airbrush has ensured that as legions of New Yorkers walk by ubiquitous kiosks each day, they are bombarded by fraudulent masterpieces.

There's a great web demo of just what airbrushing really means in terms of how fake these images really are. Decades of this fakery has raised male expectations as to just what they will see the morning after, but I began to wonder of HDTV was not going to begin shattering the unfair myths of body image.

I noticed in the last year that TV writers have begun to publish lists of who looks good and who does not on an HDTV signal and it began to occur to me that perhaps, just PERHAPS, HDTV might begin to inject some sense of reality into the world through its falsely hyper-real signal. I say falsely hyper-real because when I see an HDTV signal, my first thought is that my own vision cannot see the world that clearly and in such bright colors without the aid of this TV image. When I see butterflies in a meadow they are not nearly as brilliant as the HDTV nature shows I've seen demo'd my friends' homes.

But then reality set in. And I realized that given human nature HDTV is more likely to do the worst. HDTV is more likely to increase the caste system, not shatter it. Because some people apparently DO look flawless on HDTV. So these millions of new pixels are far more likely to further raise expectations as to what's possible - for a short time. Because even Catherine Zeta-Jones will not remain wrinkle free forever.

Then what will happen? How much makeup can be slathered on without making your average actor LOOK like a Kabuki actor, even if they are performing in the most naturalistic acting style possible? And what about the so-called reality shows? How will real people fair in the increasingly challenging war of pixilated expectations?

This line of thinking led me to the most far-out image yet. What happens when an American Kabuki actor like Caruso gets has his makeup brilliantly exposed in the HDTV closeup of the future? Then there will be no 'American' needed before the word Kabuki. 21st Century technology will have effectively transported us back to 17th Century Japan!

Passion at Work

2006-01-04T23:00:00.000-05:00

While hosting the Oscars many years ago, Steve Martin did a fantastic routine about what to say backstage after a show to a friend whose performance was no good. With tremendous sincerity, he offered “Only you could have done that!” With great seriousness, he intoned, “Fascinating choices you made.” My favorite, which he delivered with joyous enthusiasm, was, “I saw you up there!”

So it was with some trepidation that I sat down to read my dear friend Lawler Kang’s new book, Passion at Work over the holiday break. I have to confess, I’m not a big fan of business books, nor the category most commonly referred to as “self help”. Being a failed actor myself and having attended (and caused friends and family to attend) many less-than-thrilling evenings of “showcase” theatre, I’m guiltily gun-shy about reviewing friends’ creative output. What if I have to steal a line from Steve Martin? Eeek.

What a relief it was to be only a chapter into the book when I found myself stopping and saying to K. “Hey! I think I’m really going to like Lawler’s new book!” I immediately read her a few sentences that had resonated for me with some much-needed and timely insights.

I’ve always found Lawler to be a very inspiring person, so on an elemental level it was no surprise to me that he could deliver on the premise. But in addition to being a good and useful read, for me there was another deeply personal element that came into my experience of the book.

Lawler and I met at Vassar in 19*cough cough* when we were freshmen. Lawler was a strapping young dude with a penchant for skateboarding across campus with no shirt on. Given his totally ripped physique, one could hardly blame him for forgoing appropriate sun coverage. I was not built like a god and in addition was what now might be called a Goth, so I was clad pretty much in black denim, leather and silver metal.

Seeing him cruise about one could also not fail to notice the significant scar moving up the front of his body. It seemed evident that a disciple of Dr. Frankenstein had unceremoniously cut Lawler from his guggle to his zatch and stapled him shut in haste. It is not an elegant scar. Being a studied dark little soul at the time, I was of course jealous.

We got to know each other over time and I learned that the scar was only the tip of the iceberg. He’d already survived a neural aneurism long before the stomach adventure. I won’t go into all the details here, but suffice it to say that Lawler arrived in college with a carpe diem attitude born of two seriously close encounters with his mortality. He had been paralyzed, blind and comatose. He had rehabbed himself with surfing and skateboarding. On top of all this, Lawler was an able academic, relentlessly sunny and an extremely proficient party animal. What couldn’t he do?

Cut to ten years later. We’d lost touch. A colleague swiveled in her chair and handed me a piece of paper. “You know this guy?” I looked down at a resume.

“KNOW HIM?” I yelped. He was one of my best friends in college!”

“We want him. Can you help close him?”

“Set me up!” I crowed.

And so it came to be that ten years after college we reconnected. A wonderful thing. But in reading the book, I realized I had blanked out some of the serious drama of our college experience. I found myself tearing up as I read Lawler’s description of how his insides had come undone partway through college and they’d had to open him up two more times to repair the damage. I had forgotten about sitting around with our friends shell-shocked wondering whether he’d come through it.

Strangely, while I’d blanked all of that, I had always remembered one emotional encounter between us where I berated him because I thought I was noticing his recovery lagging. I believed he was not keeping up with some of his exercises.

All these years later, I remember feeling so upset, but not what set me off. I’d often wondered when I'd pondered that moment as an adult, why I was being so emotional about it. Was it really any of my business? (No.) Going through the chapter on his brushes with death, I realized that my memory must fall somewhere around the time of these sudden surgeries that'd I'd forgotten; with their concomitant weight loss and our group’s communal concern for his recovery. I’m sure my own predisposition to see the glass half empty enhanced the concern I felt. Somehow, the strength of the emotion burned that moment in, but something else erased the context. Odd how memory works, isn’t it?

Now, I have seriously digressed here on my own memories and foibles and I don't want that to be distract from the overall wonderfulness of the book. So let me return to its real content and tell you who I think will find value in it. Passion at Work is a book for people who love business but feel that they have not properly aligned their work efforts with their passions. Lawler has created a simple framework for doing the work to figure out how to accomplish this. Interestingly, he has chosen to use business language and consulting frameworks to help readers design an action plan to achieve the goal of finding and doing work they are truly passionate about.

While he has made a serious attempt to avoid tribal jargon in writing the book, if your not comfortable using the concepts of startup funding and venture captalism as metaphors for career conceptualization, this is not the book for you. If, however, you are a dedicated business person who feels a lack of passion for your job, your industry, and find yourself dreading the alarm clock, then this is DEFINITELY the book for you.

In fact, a colleague wandered by my desk today. I have displayed the book proudly and prominently. He looked it over and we talked about it for a while. “It’s quite timely, isn’t it?” he said. “So many people our age have gone out there and jumped into business and everyone’s working 24/7. Now I think people are starting to ask, ‘What for?’”

I agree. I think Lawler may catch the zeitgeist on this one. And the neat thing is, this is a book that only Lawler could have written. It's truly born of his own experiences as a human and as a business person. So I find myself using a Steve Martin line with no regrets and zero sarcasm: "Lawler, only you could have done that!"

European Escape Part II: SerendiParis

2005-12-26T22:30:00.000-05:00

I arrived in Paris on Thursday to find that the Ambassador Opera, the hotel I'd booked on Expedia, had no room at the inn. Apparently, they had a tour group extend their stay and were all booked up.

As skeptical as I was at this excuse, they told me they were sending me to a sister property that was two tiers up in quality. I wasn't much in a mood to complain when I found myself at the Hotel Lutetia in the heart of the ritzy St. Germain-du-PrÃ© district.

I called K. to let her know that her end destination had changed. She, Koert, Kecia and baby Chiara were coming in on the train from Amsterdam.

After everyone had gotten their various acts together, we headed to Chez Omar for dinner. The Moroccan staff was completely smitten with Chiara. Every single waiter had to make a pilgrimage to our table, ask how old she was, make faces at her and grab her little hands. It was cute. After gorging ourselves on couscous, we sent the Amsterdam crew back to their hotel to put the baby to bed and K. and I set out on one of our many city walks.

We love walking about foreign cities, learning the local transport and rarely take taxis. In fact, when we're on vacation, we generally lose weight because we love to see cities on foot. Perhaps it is because we're New Yorkers. (According to Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, the average American walks less than 2 miles a day. New Yorkers walk a lot more than that. Heck, K. beats that just walking to work.)

In any case, we set off down the Boulevard Sebastapol for a two to three mile jaunt back to the Lutetia. Being that it was about 10pm, most things were closed. So it was hard to miss the fact that as we approached the Rue de Cygne there was light flooding out from the windows of a corner storefront on our right. It was an art gallery and its door was standing wide open. We peered in and saw what at first glance seemed to be something like a show devoted to either outsider art, primitivism or both.

Primitivism is not normally something that I have much interest in and outsider art is something I have little experience with; but I think both K. and I felt a potential adventure coming on and so we took an extra long look in the window. As we scanned the room, both of our gazes alighted upon one corner where there were works hanging on the wall that appeared to be some sort of mosaic or collage. They also had a metallic gleam that might have been the result of using metal or possibly glass.

We decided to take a closer look and so we entered the gallery and began to scan the walls and as we approached, the pieces were quite odd and also alluring. I could see that while his work was totally original, I felt underlying it were traces of Giotto's geometry, a sense of Munch's figures, the movement of Van Gogh's landscapes, and a sui generis cosmology akin to that of Blake.

Now that's a lot to lay on someone, but the point is I could sense in the work that this was someone who was doing his own thing, but with a strong knowledge of the masters who had come before.

As we spent time with each piece, we both ended up gravitating back to a particular piece: a tree of life simply titled "arbre", which sat on a lovely midnight blue background.

I found the artist's name, Thierry Martin, on the wall and a price list nearby, but I couldnÂt figure out which price matched the work in question. It was clear that the works on the wall were no longer in the order in which they had originally been hung, presumably as the result of some recent sales.

As I cast about to figure out how to sort out our quandary, I noticed that the back section of the gallery contained a table and a group of men, women and children socializing. Pistachios were being eaten, beers opened and it felt as though I had chanced into the "family meal" amongst the staff of a French restaurants after service has ended.

I approached a woman and asked if she could tell me anything about Thierry Martin and his work. She looked at one of the men at the table, smiled and said, "You can ask him. He's Thierry Martin!"

An elfin man of about 50 stood up to greet us. He had cropped graying hair, a stubbly beard and smiling eyes. Since K. speaks French and I do not, we moved fluidly back and forth between English and French. Thierry spoke French which Kat translated for me I responded in English - which he understands perfectly - and then Thierry would respond in French again.

Our first question was what was the material from which he was fashioning the pieces? Having seen them up close, we had settled on their being collages, apparently from metal. In response, Thierry grabbed a backpack and pulled out a work in progress. It was indeed metal scraps that he was alternately gluing and nailing to the wooden surface on which he works. Then he reached into his bag for the real surprise. He pulled out an aluminum can of Bavaria beer which from which he had cut the top and bottom and flattened it into a rectangle. "This is what I use," he explained. "This is what the tree is made from."

Wide eyed, we walked with him over to the work we had been admiring and he showed us which parts of the Bavaria beer can he had used to make each section. A red dot had become abstract fruit. Sheaves of wheat around the logo had been made to resemble leaves. A motif of alternating silver and gold lines had become, artfully torn and placed, variegated tree branches.

K. and I looked at each other and found ourselves giving each other Âthe nodÂ. For those of you who have been in long relationships (we are pushing 14 years), you know what the nod is. For those of you who have not, it works like this. You have decided something. You look to your partner to see if they are at that very moment looking at you to determine if you've reached the same decision. If your glances meet at exactly the same moment, you exchange the glance that you've established which means, "Yes". In our case, especially when it comes to art acquisition, this is a time honored practice.

Thierry, sweet man that he clearly is, began to well up. He had his daughter photograph us together (the children scooting about the gallery turned out to be his) and then gave us a photocopied book of some of his recent works that also included an image of him in his studio. "I only have this one copy," he said. "But I want you to have it. I will make another." He said he was proud to have his work traveling to New York City and we told him we were delighted to be offering it a home there.

With many handshakes, smiles, goodbyes and waves we completed our transaction and sauntered out into the cool evening Parisian air with our new purchase wrapped up in bubble wrap and firmly tucked under my arm.

We sauntered home, admiring various buildings and glowing from our happy, chance encounter with the nice people at the gallery. When we were a few blocks from the Lutetia, we hit a point where I was forced to take out the map and navigate. We seemed to have two equally good paths to the hotel and I couldn't easily reckon which was preferable.

It was at this point that a night denizen of the city spotted us. "Where are you trying to go?" he asked in a friendly way. I looked him over with a New Yorker's suspicious eye and pegged him as a gay hustler. I was certain he was looking for a few bucks (or francs, or I guess Euros, really) and that there was some sort of a scam about to issue for from his mouth. He was fashionably dressed and looked like heÂd just popped out of a nearby club.

I did not want to answer, but K. said, "Rue Raspail."

"Where on the Rue Raspail? It's just over there, but you could go either way." I was feeling frustrated because I COULD SEE THAT ON THE MAP and was feeling unusually proud of my navigating skills and his input seemed both unnecessary, unwanted and maybe cheating to be told the answer to the problem I was on the VERGE OF FIGURING OUT FOR MYSELF.

"Hotel Lutetia," K. told him. He proceeded to explain that we could, in fact, use either route; and that it was roughly the same distance, regardless. I KNEW IT, I thought to myself. He bid us a loose and cheery goodnight, having done his good deed without requesting any money. I was thinking all of a sudden that I had misjudged him when he turned around and said very loudly, "WAIT!"

We turned and he zipped back to us excitedly and said, "If you go take the left here and go on the Cherche Midi you will pass the best boulangerie in all of Paris!" K. and I looked at each other in shock. We asked him what it was called. He stood there for a moment racking his brain. "Oh, what is it called? It's this place. The prime minister used to buy his bread there. It's very famous. It's It's POILANE!" He looked at us victoriously, wished us a good stay in Paris and set off again on his way with a proud stride.

I had horribly misjudged this man. He was clearly an avatar of the boozy Patron Saint of Foodies. While we don't know this saint's name, we've met her prophets before. Once in our neighborhood on the Upper West Side, a drunken woman overheard us discussing hamburgers and marched up to us - as much as one can march when one's feet are arguing with each other over which direction is straight ahead - to declare that the best burger in The City was hidden in the Parker Meridien on 57th Street. "It's haaaard to fiiiiind," she slurred. "It's hidden behind the front desk. You pretend you're going to walk by the desk and then you look left and you;ll see a dark passage with a neon sign at the end. Best burgers in New York. The Best. Abso-fuckinlutely. Ya." And then she stumbled off. We were skeptical that Burger Joint existed. But it does. And indeed, as the prophet foretold, it rocks.

So realizing what had just befallen us, we followed the angel's directions to Poilane and noted its exact location so as to return with Koert and Kecia. Oh, the wonders of Poilane! Rustic apple tarts that completely exploded my prior definition of the item in question. Pain au chocolat that was just unfair to its American relatives of the same name. It was wondrous.

Our Paris weekend included other adventures: trips to the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay (one of my all time favorites); crepes and hot chocolate hither and thither; a late night screening of the disappointing Corpse Bride that was chockablock with American students; and lots of great conversation and visiting with Kecia & Koert. But these are the gems of serendipity that I most treasure in my travels.

European Escape, Part I - Basel, CH

2005-12-14T23:58:00.000-05:00

Last July, my friends at NextD asked me if I would be interested in teaching in Switzerland in the fall. NextD is an organization devoted to teaching designers leadership skills and I teach the platform courses there not because it pays, but because I love the opportunity to teach. I used to teach this work when I had my own consulting practice, but since I sold myself into one of my client organizations, I’ve been doing very different work.

Normally I teach for NextD here in the City and it doesn’t require me to take time off work because we do the majority of our workshops on the weekends. But NextD has been getting more and more attention from the international design community and so increasingly the requests for our attention come from overseas.

Given that I’d have burned through my vacation time before November I knew I would need to take the time unpaid. Additionally, late October/early November looked like it might be a tricky time at work.

But the fact is that I love to teach, I feel that the NextD mission is important, and it’s rarely a “good time” from your employer’s perspective for you to take a vacation, paid or unpaid. So I said yes to my friends at NextD.

Between the day in July when I agreed to do the gig and the day I finally got on the plane, the trip was alternately not a problem at all, potentially a problem, no problem and finally a significant problem again from the perspective of my day job. But I’d committed and things were nutty enough at work that I was very much looking forward getting away and figured the work issues would sort themselves out one way or another.

For years now, I’ve had a lot more vacation time than K. but all of a sudden things flipped around this year and she’s got more time than I do. So she was psyched to take the time and figured she’d occupy herself with friends and family while I was in Basel.

So Elizabeth (from NextD), K .and I hopped on a plane on a Friday headed to Zurich. When we landed there, K. hopped a plane north for Amsterdam and Elizabeth and I were chauffeured off by Sandra, NextD’s liaison at the Hyperwerk School in Basel.

I had no idea of what to expect from Basel. I’ve spent time in Lucerne and Geneva, but never Basel and I’d had no time nor given any thought to researching Basel. It’s a lovely city and Sandra and her boyfriend Simon turned out to be fantastic hosts. On Sunday, we had a partial day to see Basel before we began our preparations for three intensive days of teaching. Simon and Sandra lent us their bicycles and Elizabeth and I hied off to the Foundation Beyeler.

Basel turns out to be a great bicycling city. Unlike my beloved Amsterdam, an American can actually use a bicycle in Basel without getting killed. We followed the Rhine and then took a right and followed the Wiese River up around the city through a lovely park. It was unbelievably gorgeous weather, sunny and in the high 60’s.

We arrived at the museum after a gentle forty-five minute ride. It’s the first Renzo Piano structure I’ve been in. I can’t say that the structure lived up to Piano’s hype, but the collection is terrific and there was a great Magritte exhibit on. I have only seen one prior exhibit of which took an entirely different angle on his work. Whereas the SF exhibit ignored Magritte’s relationship to Surrealism, the Beyeler show focused entirely on his relationship to Surrealism. Strangely, both shows entirely ignored the fact that the man was a mystic and that his work is riddled with mystic Christian symbolism. The curation for his tremendously personal manifesto The Magician actually wondered in print why Magritte might have chosen to paint himself eating bread and drinking wine. Honestly. The mind boggles.

Anyway, moving on from the fact that the curation was poor, the show was tremendous and the Beyeler’s holdings are fantastic. It reminded a lot of the great Kroller-Muller in the countryside outside of Amsterdam. Both collections are like an art history survey course, with at least a few great paintings from every master in the periods collected by the patrons.

As it turned out, we were in Basel during an annual fall festival. So we also wandered the streets and peered into the stalls. It was an odd pastiche of things you’d see at a street fair here in The City and things peculiar to Switzerland. For instance, you know the guy wearing a microphone headset who hawks his AMAZING cleaning products by getting a piece of carpet dirty and then scrubbing it with his miracle cleaner? They had that too, only he was doing his pitch in Switzerdeutsch.

Basel’s old city is fantastic to walk around in. Situated on the banks of the Rhine, it’s full of old cobblestone streets and fabulous window shopping. The fall festival added a certain element of tacky surreality, however. It was odd to enter into a quaint plaza to find the four story buildings dwarfed by a 10-story Ferris wheel or to encounter a huge mechanical slide sitting alongside an ancient church.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday I spent teaching the design students of the Hyperwerk School. Despite some linguistic challenges (to which I’m somewhat accustomed as I’ve taught this work around the world in the last 5 years), we had three energizing days together. The Hyperwerkers were eager to learn and apply the tools and techniques Elizabeth and I brought and it was so much fun to be teaching the work intensively again. It’s been a while since I’ve done three solid days of workshops and it was great! For those of you who are curious for some visuals, there’s a Quicktime movie slideshow here.

Thursday morning Elizabeth and I set out for France, she to visit friends and I to meet up with K. and our friends Koert and Kecia from Amsterdam who elected to join us for a long weekend in Paris. Some of you may remember that K. and I met Kecia on the plane coming home from Sundance 2004 and promptly adopted her. Since then, we’ve spent time with her and Koert in Amsterdam and The City, so we were looking forward to doing a new locale and to seeing how their daughter Chiara was getting along at six months.

I’ll save Paris for the next post. That tale includes a terrific encounter with a talented artist, a movie theatre full of expat Americans, and the best bread in Paris.

Little Giant Serves Deviled Eggs

2005-12-07T23:30:00.000-05:00

Film Festival Sherpa Dan took us to Little Giant at Orchard & Broome last Saturday night. This joint is an advertisement for the Lower East Side. A shabby chic interior, it almost felt like the set of the current production of Sweeney Todd. A vaulted exposed brick ceiling hovers over a handful of tables. Behind the bar, a set of open shelves is filled both with bottles in the work zone and bric-a-brac beyond it. An open kitchen off to the side warms the room up, an absolute necessity in winter given the volume of air breezing through the leaky street front windows. Somehow all of this seems to balance things just right.

A quick spin of guy-in-the-street reviews on the web reveals that Little Giant got off to a rough start last year and seems to have pissed a number of folks off with its inconsistent service. As of this writing, the service was fine. While not speedy by any means, we were there to spend time with friends and had no issues with the timing of our entrees’ arrival.

We over-ordered....as we tend to do when trying a place with an interesting menu. Plus, Dan was equipped with many suggestions. We began with some delightful deviled eggs. “Who serves deviled eggs in a restaurant?” I wondered beforehand. They were scrumptious. At Dan’s behest we also ordered the chicken liver mousse, served with an onion compote and toast. Fabulous!

Having earned several prescriptions for Lipitor between us during our appetizers, we continued our cholesterol festival with a wonderfully spiced pulled pork dish (the “Swine of the Week”), a cavatelli with a pumpkin pesto, an arugula, goat cheese and bacon “flatbread” (read: “pizza”), and I threw in an herb salad for some semblance of reason. With the exception of the cavatelli, which was nice but not brilliant, everything was terrifically tasty. We felt obliged to share a chocolate cherry bread pudding as K. makes a mean bread pudding and needed to check out the competition. Little Giant’s was so good that K. is contemplating adding cherries to her recipe.

I highly recommend giving Little Giant a try. It’s worth a trek to the L.E.S.

Sweeney Todd Unplugged

2005-11-30T23:31:00.000-05:00

John Doyle’s stripped down production of "Sweeney Todd" has arrived in NYC from London (recast with local talent, of course). This show is known for being prodigiously expensive and difficult to mount due to the requirements for a multilevel set complete with a barber’s chair, a chute for bodies to slide down into the basement, and a prop razor that can be used to slash throats in a bloody and convincing manner. Oh, and a nearly thirty-piece orchestra.

While other directors have done away with the orchestral requirements (as Circle in the Square did in their strong revival starring Bob Gunton, Beth Fowler and a very moving Eddie Korbich as Toby), Doyle’s conceit is to do away with everything except the actors, some chairs and a coffin on sawhorses. The actors double as musicians, which gives ten instruments for the composer to set the score on, although only eight are likely to be used at any one time (since at least two actors are usually occupied acting at any one time). No one leaves the stage and the actors move the set pieces, such as they are.

This removal of distractions drives the actors towards a naturalism that I’d wager has before been seen in a production of this work. "Sweeney" is typically described as “Grand Guignol” and the current version running at the O’Neill Theatre is anything but. Michael Cerveris, surely the strongest interpreter of Sondheim since Patinkin, is truly chilling through the first half of the show. His Sweeney is so….angry. And psychotic.

As any theatre textbook will tell you, Western theatrical tradition changed post-Freud and post-Ibsen. Psychological reality replaced melodrama and symbolism. Yet Sweeney Todd has always been a throwback. An understandable temptation given that our anti-hero spends the play slaughtering customers and letting his girlfriend cook them into meat pies. Who wants naturalism with that subject matter?

But Cerveris doesn’t go to the usual places. This is typified by his rendition of “Epiphany” with a raging repetition of the line “They all deserve to die” that is truly bloodcurdling and clearly conveys that his Sweeney is completely unhinged. Cerveris projects his anger so forcefully that - for the first time ever during a production of this show - I was truly afraid of the man on the stage.

This is a dangerous choice. Sweeney is an antihero to be sure, but we need to find some way to like him, to empathize with how he has been wronged. The answer to this problem is neatly solved by Cerveris’ connection to co-star Patti LuPone.

LuPone has never been a favorite of mine. And the thought of seeing a woman famous for poor diction mumble Sondheim had me quaking in my boots before the show. But LuPone delivers the goods in a way that I could never have imagined. It is an improbable and real victory. Despite the fact she flies through eighteen different accents and misses as many notes during the show, LuPone is still a revelation.

Angela Lansbury’s Lovett was a witty, clever and comparatively chaste for a murderess. This Mrs. Lovett is a slut truebred: ragged fishnet stockings, coal-ringed eyes, and a walk that says “for sale” from ten blocks away.

And it is Mrs. Lovett’s deep desire to win Benjamin Barker, the man Sweeney was before his deportation and whom she could never get, that brings out a form of humanity in Sweeney that enables us to connect. When Cerveris and LuPone sing “A Little Priest” it is the most nuanced and improbably sexy rendition of the number I’ve ever seen (for reference, I’ve seen three prior productions). In this number, Mrs. Lovett regrounds Sweeney with sex, humor and a vibrantly shared misanthropy and allows the audience to laugh with Sweeney and find a man inside the monster.

The production also manages to work without any of the traditional staging. That said I fear that the lack of staging (it’s almost a concert version in places) leaves some real gaps for those who don’t know the show extremely well.

There are other nits to pick. The direction saunters off into unnecessary symbolism (how many coffin symbols do we need?); the actor playing Anthony sings beautifully but reads as gay; and bad seats render parts of the show invisible (from house right we couldn’t see Anthony at all during “Johanna”(!).

Nits duly picked.

Overall it’s hard to shake the effects of this minimalist production. A deeply scary Sweeney with no bloody razors is no mean feat.

I may have to go again!

Vacation, Baby, Vacation!

2005-09-28T17:50:00.000-04:00

K. and I spent the five days preceding the Toronto Film Festival in on Bar Harbor, Maine. It was a great vacation and we’ve been enjoying our memories of it ever since.

Vince Vaughn’s character in Swingers is known for the phrase “Vegas, baby, Vegas!” It refers to all the great things he’s going to do there. He’s going to have fun. He’s going to break rules. Well, for us married, non-gambling, non-carousing types, the cheer might as well be, “Vacation, baby, vacation!” Vacation is where you do all the fun things you like to do. And even if they don't work out perfectly, in the stressless, anti-gravity zone of vacation, they can still be great.

For us that generally means lots of leisurely strolling, lovely views, good food and art. Based on that premise, Bar Harbor was a bit hit with us.

Vacation Planning, K-Style
As Toronto was the impetus for our vacation and we decided to take some time in front of that to do a lengthier trip of some sort, K's original idea of going to Bar Harbor was predicated on the idea that Mt. Desert is roughly parallel with Toronto, geographically speaking. So she thought we'd fly up to Bar Harbor (Bangor, really) and then across to Toronto. She's a serious optimizer, so progress must always be made in the predetermined direction of your final destination.

While we were still in this phase of planning, a further enticement tilted the scales towards Bar Harbor when we chanced upon a New York Times "36 hours" column via tripadvisor.com that bewitched K.

You see the Times piece mentioned a place called Reel Pizza Cinerama, a movie theatre that serves gourmet pizza. Its description mentioned couch seating and a bingo board that alerts patrons silently that their order is ready. Ooooooh.

You might wish to ask, "Can't you just do that at home?" Well, yes. And you might then remember the chronology of our vacation and note, "And weren't you going to a FILM FESTIVAL in just a few days anyway?" And we'd have to agree that you are - again - correct. We're just a little goofy, ok? We like movies. We like pizza. We like couches. There's no other defense forthcoming.

In any case, hypnotized by the Reel Pizza Cinerama concept we continued our Bar Harbor research and learned about the wonders of Acadia National Park. Acadia sounded like the perfect national park for couch potatoes. Lots of beautiful, relatively easy hikes. (A national park famous for a popover restaurant, for chrissakes.)

We set about trying to figure out where we should stay. Somewhere along the way, we became aware of The Bayview. A helpful visitor had posted a review on tripadvisor complete with photos. It looked quite promising.

Finally having committed our hearts, we began to look into booking our travel. Funny thing that. So yes, you could say that Bar Harbor is on the way to Toronto in that both are far north of The City. But when you go to book flights, it turns out that - as they say in various jokes - "Yah can't get theah from heah." You have to fly NYC to Maine. Maine back south to Boston. And Boston to Toronto. Oops.

Given that from an airtime standpoint it wasn't much of a hassle, we ignored our original premise and we went.

Bar Harbor Proper
We arrived at The Bayviewto fresh cookies. A recent hotel trend in the last few years that we enjoy and encourage. It was dark, so we had no idea what the view was like. When the sun came up, we were thrilled. The hotel is right on Frenchman's Bay and every single room faces the water. It is a terrific view. (This is the view from our room.)

We decided to spend our first day exploring the town of Bar Harbor. We located Reel Pizza Cinerama and checked the movie schedule. Natch. And we noodled around. As K. says, "Bar Harbor is a dopey little town in many ways. Lots of junky shops."

Which is true. There are a few art galleries, however. And me, being me, insisted that we enter nearly all of them. Good thing we did.

In the Cygnet Gallery, we met Ryan. Cygnet turns out to be a side venture of the Swan Agency, a local realtor, and Ryan is Swan's newest hire. As he is settling in, he is also working in the gallery. Ryan turned out to be a goldmine.

In addition to having an adorable dog that K. immediately adopted, Ryan has been wandering around the globe for eight years as an itinerant extreme sportsman. So he's hiked every last trail in Acadia and knows more about the park than anyone who works there.

He is also the sort of connector and maven who has learned pretty much all there is to know about the island. He was able to tell us what trails to do (given our sordid, slothful lifestyle), what restaurants to each in and generally everything we needed to know about the lay of the land.

We went back to visit Ryan several times on our stay, reported in on our successes, hung out...and, of course, bought a lovely little oil painting by Holly Ready. (My theory was that I was going to take it to work for my office, but K. became enamored of it and it's ended up on the walls at home.)

Annals of Acadia: Our Poor Sense of Direction Induces Unnecessary Exercise

After having dedicated the first day completely to being in town, we spent large parts of our subsequent days hiking in Acadia and returning to town for dinners.

We did a number of the recommended Acadia activities. We hiked along the shoreline around Thunder Hole (the hole itself being a non-event, as Ryan had warned us) and across Sand Beach to the Great Head Trail.

The Great Head Trail was our first serious hike and our navigational skills completely betrayed us. Minutes from the end of our adventure, we strayed from the Trail to skitter out to one of many cliff views. We knew we were close to the end because the trail is a circuit and we were facing Sand Beach where the trail began. On our cut back into the trail, however, we accidentally crossed paths and ended up somehow totally reversing our direction and doubling the length of our hike!

We hiked the Jordan Pond Trail - which is pretty easy, gorgeous and by far K's favorite trail. And no wonder as our hike there ended perfectly: with popovers at sunset at the Jordan Pond House Restaurant; sitting at a table on the lawn along the pond's shore.

We also walked the Eagle Lake Trail, which is very rocky and not for the weak of ankle. I felt terrible for the older folks we saw on the trail coming in the other direction. I’m sure had no idea what they were in for.

Another directional miscalculation extended our Eagle Lake adventure by several miles, but it was fun. We ended up hiking up onto one of the Bubble Trails which connects to the Eagle Lake Trail - where I snapped this 360 degree plus panorama.

Finally, no trip to Acadia is complete without a sunrise and a sunset on Cadillac Mountain. This is where the sun first rises on the eastern shore of the U.S. and it's a stunning view. After getting up for the sunrise, we decided to go back and do a sunset, too. Well worth it. Can’t you tell by our glowing faces?

Northeast Harbor: Gardens & Acquisitions
We ventured over to the town of Northeast Harbor, which is much smaller than Bar Harbor and thankfully without the touristy t-shirt shops.

Just before we left Northeast Harbor, we chanced into the two lovely gardens that we would absolutely have passed on were it not for a strange and garrulous clerk in the town bookstore. After she had been burbling on nearly schizophrenically for a good eight minutes, I thought my head might explode. We desperately tried to pry ourselves away. As she finally acknowledged our need to leave her presence she unexpectedly blurted out that there were too terrific hidden gardens we needed to see before we left. We weren’t sure if she was trustworthy as a tour guide, but thought there would be no harm in confirming a) their existence and b) whether they were worth seeing.

The first garden was the Asticou Garden and the other was the Thuya Garden. Asticou is a Japanese style garden with lovely details like this stone path through a stream. Thuya is also lovely little gem of a garden and it has some great views out over the harbor.

I have a thing for dragonflies. And at each of these little pastoral hideaways, I encountered a dragonfly of a different hue. The one in the Asticou was tiny, trim and had lovely blue eyes. The Thuya was heavier set and bright red. Both were kind enough to pose for my nifty, new Nikon.

Also in Northeastern Harbor, we discovered the Shaw Gallery. In addition to snagging some ear bling, the discovery of this store also led (after days of mulling) to our second painting purchase of the vacation. (Honestly, that’s an all time vacation record. I love buying art, but two in one vacation was really a fluke. I have to say that or K. will kill me.) It's a gorgeous piece by David Vickery (a rising Mohegan Island painter) which is very appropriately themed based on our time spent worshipping Maine sunrises and sunsets and which is now prominently situated in our living room.

Food & Flicks
Dining around Bar Harbor is pretty good. It's chock full of restaurants, given its size. Although a number of them seem overrated. I found the well reviewed Cafe Bluefish, for instance to be big on homey ambiance and a real dud on service and very disappointing in terms of the food itself. The same was true of the famed brunch at 2Cats. Hands down the best restaurant we found was Havana. Great food, great ambiance and - for those who imbibe - a great wine list. The other place worth noting for brunch is Cafe This Way.

By now, you're wondering what happened to Reel Pizza Cinerama. Seems like we did an awful lot of hiking, eating and purchasing, right? Well, we did finally make it to a flick at Reel Pizza. The movie was pretty good (The Beautiful Country) and the BBQ chicken pizza was also pretty good, although the BBQ sauce was sweeter than I like it. But did that slow me down? Nope. Not for one second. Vacation, baby, vacation!

Ear Bling

2005-09-21T23:30:00.000-04:00

I pierced my ear in early 1984. It was kind of a kooky thing at my high school. There was this tradition that only upperclassman were supposed to pierce their ears. Somehow it was disrespectful to do it before you were a junior. Don't ask me why. If I ever knew, I've certainly forgotten by now.

I waited my turn then. And in junior year, I began seriously considering when and how to get it done. I mulled and mulled and finally a went into a classroom with some friends and one of the girls (Laura?) pierced it by hand. Using a safety pin as I recall.

Somehow, I neglected to mention this fact to my parents. When my father met me at the train station at my next vacation break, we hopped into a cab together and he was seated on my left side. "I see you've pierced your ear," he commented drolly. I kicked myself silently. I knew I had forgotten something.

I have to say, all in all my parents handled it quite well. Certainly better the mother of one my best friends who refused to actually speak to me for several years until the fact that we were roommates freshman year in college made it impossible to keep the cold war going.

I suppose I have to give her a break on that one. It was a bedroom community in Westchester County, NY in the early 80's and I was the first and only one of my immediate crowd from home to grow a tail and pierce an ear; then cut the tail and spike my hair. And finally to add the de rigeur leather and spikes. Damn I wanted to be Adam Ant. And then Billy Idol. And then Prince. But perhaps that's another post.

In any case, my earrings kept pace with my evolving style - from my original Idol-style dangling silver cross through a thousand different shapes, sizes and stone colors...that is up until about 10 years ago.

Sometime around 1995 - as I entered the corporate world - I gave up and went to one of three choices: nothing (i.e., the weekday choice since the bursting of the Internet bubble), a diamond stud Laura gave me (a year following the piercing ritual), or a small silver hoop. Recently, I decided that I wanted to investigate getting some groovier ear wear. But where to start? I'm not looking for a rock 'n roll style so the racks of cheap-o earrings on St. Marks street no longer hold any attraction.

Not surprisingly, I started with Google. But the vast majority of what I found was pretty similar to the generic silver stuff you find on the street. The only stuff I found in the "serious" ear wear for men category was in the U.K. Hmmmmm...

So then I thought to myself, "I know! I'll ask some cool hunters." So I pinged Josh and Josh. No dice.

Having failed online, K. and I went to 47th Street (The City's diamond/jewelry district) to saunter about and see what we could find. I found nifty single white gold hoop with diamonds up the front. Turns out that another guy had bought the first one, breaking the pair. I guess there are some guys are out there buying serious earrings besides P. Diddy. So that was officially Purchase #1 of the New Collection.

During our recent vacation on Mt. Desert we chanced into the Shaw Gallery where I snagged some more nifty earrings. Purchase #2 of the New Collection is actually a full pair that I can use - one shaped as an "X" and one as an "O". They are made with black diamonds and one single white accent diamond. So Purchase #2 of the New Collection therefore gives me two new earrings without having to break a set.

Purchase #3 of the New Collection is a small silver pair which is hard to describe - basically a medium weight silver disk with CZ's in the center. K. took a liking to those, however, and I've not had a chance to wear one yet. A hidden danger with pairs. Must play with with (Significant) Other.

One of the jewelers at Shaw is a guy named Chris who has pierced ears himself. So I took the opportunity to discuss potential designs for an earring I'd like. We'll see what he comes up with. He's anti-computer, so I have to wait for something sent via the actual US POSTAL SERVICE to see what his design suggestions are. That's like so...1993, right?

This past weekend, the hunt continued. And up at the Lyndhurst craft fair in Westchester, I ran into one of my favorite jewelers, Michael Alexander. If you're on the east coast, attend any of the major fairs, and you haven't met Michael and Andrea, you're in for a treat. They're so much fun to hang out with and Michael is incredibly talented. (The link above does not do his portfolio justice. But he's got to keep his most brilliant work on the down low lest others pilfer his best designs.) For those of you familiar with my "seven year ring" with the spinning, ladder-like center that I'm always playing with, that's Michael's craftsmanship you're admiring.

Being that I was on a mission of sorts, I seized the opportunity to ask Michael if he does men's earrings and he said he does. We looked at a few different options and now he's now busy crafting a groovy, industrial/mechanical-flavored earring somewhat reminiscent of an art deco ship's propeller with a sapphire in the middle. I can't wait to see how it turns out.

I will leave off with two questions for Evangelistas and Evangelistos who may feel like sharing:

1) Do you have any good sources of men's earrings?
2) What sorts of unlikely interests or obsessions have resurfaced in your life of late?

Toronto Film Festival

2005-09-14T23:45:00.000-04:00

i could write an entire post on the messiness of doing the TFF as an out of towner. Maybe another time. For now, here's the recap on the films we saw.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (**** 1/2)
We started off our festival with a bang, literally. KKBB is rollicking good fun. A meta-noir thriller in the tradition of the great Elmore Leonard adaptations Out of Sight and Get Shorty, KKBB stars Robert Downey Jr. as a small time thief forced by chance into a masquerade as a Hollywood actor and Val Kilmer as a gay private eye assigned to teach him the ropes. Naturally, they stumble into a real case.

Played for laughs and suspense all the way through, KKBB manages to send up film noir conventions while delivering a damn good and kooky noir thriller of its own at the same time. No mean feat. Downey is at his best, Kilmer delivers scathingly funny banter all the way through, and newcomer Michelle Monaghan fills in the love interest role without impeding the true professionals.

Don't miss it!

Takeshis' (** 1/2)
Takeshi "Beat" Kitano is the art-house Clint Eastwood of Japan; his films revolving around Dirty Harry-type plots. This film is his Fellini film, where the director has decided to confront his alter ego "Beat" Kitano with a bit-part actor (also named Kitano) who fantasizes about being "Beat" Kitano - both played by Takeshi Kitano. And so Takeshis' follows the lives of both characters: "Beat" himself, and Kitano, a mostly silent cashier at a convenience store.

Takeshis' is a film driven by dream logic and so each character's day dreams are presented throughout the film creating a yielding a continuously unfolding funhouse mirror experience. While non-Kitano fans such K. and me can appreciate the obvious talents of Kitano as an actor and as a filmmaker, this flick is truly only of interest to "Beat"-niks.

Three Times (***)
Taiwan's Hou Hsiao-Hsien has quite a reputation in film circles, although he's largely unknown to the average American moviegoer. Three Times shows pretty clearly why both things are true.

Three Times relates the story of two souls striving to connect in three different tiem periods, 1966, the 1911 and 2005. The lovers are played by the same two actors - the gorgeous Shu Qi and Shang Chen - in each vignette. In the 60's, she's a pool hall hostess and he's a young man called up for military service. In the 1900's, she's a courtesan and he's a married political agent fighting for Taiwan's independence from Japan (this story is shot as a silent film with placards to fill in the dialogue). In the present, she's an epileptic singer and he's a photographer. In every time, they struggle with their identity and their culture to make a lasting connection. Only sometimes do they succeed.

Beautifully shot and glacially paced, Three Times is only for those who can derive meaning for themselves. There are many who will feel that each vignette is flawed or unfinished for various reasons. I enjoyed the first two stories a lot, but felt the final one was inconclusive and failed to take advantage of the many opportunities presented by the plot.

To me, Three Times is a simultaneously a great example of what can be great and what what can be unsuccessful in Asian cinema today.

L'annulaire (*** 1/2)
Compulsively peculiar and watchable, this is the story of a young woman who cuts her ring finger bottling lemonade in a factory and finds new employment with a man who "preserves things for people".

Featuring the gorgeous Olga Kurylenko as the protagonist, L'annulaire is beautiful, erotic and far too strange to summarize. There are sexy red shoes that possess, an abandoned school that is now a laboratory, people who might be ghosts, and hot French sex in an antique basement pool.

Based on a novel by Yoko Ogawa and it plays as a fusion of weird Japanese eroticism with a European blend of surrealism that resembles the best of the collaborations of Jeunet and Caro.

Sisters in Law (*** 1/2)
SIL chronicles two remarkable women in Cameroon. One a judge and the other a prosecutor, the film documents their struggle to help, support, give succor to, and ultimately gain some measure of justice for the women and girls in their country who are systematically wronged. Following four heartbreaking cases of two girls and two women, Sisters in Law clearly demonstrates that while all may not be achieved in the battle for equality in the Western world, African countries like Cameroon are in a terrifying state.

There are some minor flaws with the film. It gives its audience no context, for instance, until the very end of the film when one of the women lectures a university class and we come to more fully understand what we have been witnessing. That said, Sisters in Law plunges you into a world about which good citizens of the world need to know a great deal more and that is time well spent.

Neverwas (**)
I'm so natively sympathetic to a film like Neverwas that I feel bad coming clean about its failures. It has a first time writer-director, an excellent cast (Sir Ian McKellen, William Hurt, Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange!) and a story that's tailor made for childhood fantasy geeks like me.

The scion of a famed children's book author who has lost a fatal battle with mental illness returns to the scene of his father's initial dissolution - an institution with kindly, unorthodox techniques. He sets out to help its patients and to uncover his father's hidden history. And to ultimately find the creative wellspring of his father's greatest success, an endlessly popular children's fantasy called "Neverwas".

Unfortunately, director Terry Gilliam and (then) firstime screenwriter Richard LaGravenese staked out this emotional territory long ago. That film was called The Fisher King. And it is far, far superior in so many ways.

Poor Neverwas falls prey to treacle at every single turn, erasing nearly all of its attempts at magic. Scored within a hair of being a DeBeers commercial by the strangely shameless Philip Glass (who knew minimalism could do fake emotion so mercilessly?), each and every actor is in desperate need of someone to warn them against the frequent Movie of the Week emotional sandtraps of a script. This is a text that needs to be played against not with. It's written like a Hallmark card and its only chance of not being laughable might be to try playing it with the gravitas of Pinter.

I wanted so desperately to like it. Unfortunately, Neverwas was so desperately needy for me to like it that it quickly wore out its welcome.

The Heart of the Game (*****)
GO SEE THIS FILM. This is 2005's Murderball!

A gripping doc about a girls' high school basketball team in Seattle and their menschy coach (who will be played by Paul Giammatti someday I guarantee it), The Heart of the Game chronicles how one man makes a tremendous difference in kids' lives by giving them 150% every single day.

A college tax professor made head coach, Bill Rensler brings a CPA's detailed diligence to his focus and care for the kids. And he brings an hysterical competitiveness to the game. Simultaneously creative, hystericla and bloodcurdling, he models his teams on being "a pack of wolves" one year, a "pride of lions" the next and a tropical storm another year. Each time he uses metaphors from nature to teach teamwork, tireless competition and commitment.

I hate sports. I hate silly competition. Go see this movie. I loved it.

We Feed the World (***)
A quiet documentary that packs an extraordinary punch, We Feed the World shows how global food production is making misery globally. Without beating you over the head, this film shows you, step by step, how chickens are raised and slaughtered, how seemingly healthy soybeans are being used to destroy the rainforest, how commercial fishing is raping the ocean and destroying economies, and how Western farming subsidies create starvation worldwide.

It's not a gross or shocking film visually. It's just terrifying. It's like Supersize Me with a supersized intellectual impact - minus any of the entertainment. Ouch.

Lie With Me (**)
Softcore from one of Canada's most esteemed directors. Real male erections, too. If you need a Gen X 9 1/2 Weeks, rent it.

Sketches of Frank Gehry (*****)
A simply womderful time in the cinema, Sidney Pollack's first documentary is a joyful and curious exploration and meditation on creativity. Made with the full participation of architect Frank Gehry (including the participation of his therapist), Sketches combines interviews with Gehry, colleagues, fans, friends and critics alongside engaging discussions between POllack and Gehry about being creative in their respective disciplines. Frankly, I can't wait to see it again. There is much to absorb.

Smell of Paradise (**)
I felt badly for the filmmakers after the Q&A. They have a lot of important knowledge to share with us and it's absent here. A series of interviews made over 10 years with leaders of Islamic jihad around the world, Paradise offers unprecedented access to many men you would never want to meet. Unfortunately, the lack of context for the content of their interviews makes the experience more bewildering than enlightening.

Kinetta (*)
Full of great premises on which it repeatedly fails to deliver, Kinetta occasionally seems to be a story about something that we might interesting. But we'll never know. After we walked out (something I have NEVER done EVER), I had K. read the summary in the festival guide. Her response was, "HOW THE F!(K WAS ANYONE SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND THAT THAT WAS WHAT WAS GOING ON?"

As the film wore on, it became mostly interesting as a socialogical experiment. After a while, people began laughing because while Kinetta is short on dialogue what the few verbal exchanges that take place are inscrutable and laughably bad. Then they began to get up and huff out the door in droves. We joined them.

The Hunt for a GOOD Sleeper Sofa

2005-09-06T22:00:00.000-04:00

If you live in The City, you are familiar with this problem. Our second bedroom serves as office, guest room and occasionally when we have more than five people eating dinner, it becomes the dining room.

This is obviously not an ideal situation. It means that furniture must do double duty, i.e., sofa+bed and desk+dining table. I really want to swap out the futon sofa bed because I think it's not incredibly comfortable as a sofa - which is what it is 99% of the time. And I'm not really crazy about our our desk/dining table because it's a desk 99% of the time and a) it's not a very good one and b) I'm not sure since we use wireless laptops how necessary it actually is.

So we began to reconceptualize what the room might be. I decided to start with the idea of eliminating one of the functions (dining, sleeping, working) and see what the pros and cons were.

Eliminating the sleeping function got an immediate veto from K. Where would our friends/family stay?

Eliminating the dining function is an option since when we convert it into a dining room, it doesn't work particularly well anyway. It's cramped and the table legs get in the way if you have enough people to actually warrant the hassle of putting the leaves on the desk and making it a dining table.

Eliminating the working function created some interesting side effects. Does that mean that you lose the table? If so, have you lost two functions, i.e., working and dining?

I decided to reconceptualize what it meant to work. We don't need a desk, after all. It's a LAPtop. Why not put it on your lap? Then what do you get? Well, the table could become a coffee table and the sofa would become a nicer, more comfortable sofa.

So far, so good. But then again, one of the virtues of the futon is that it's a very comfortable bed. How to find a comfortable sleeper sofa?

It turns out that you have four choices. (Or at least, I was able to find four choices after quite a bit of legwork.)

Choice #1 - Traditional sleeper sofa
This is NOT an option we were willing to consider. We had one of these years ago and we were mortified to ask anyone to sleep on it. You know the problem. It has that thin mattress that all sleeper sofas seem to have and those nasty bars underneath it dig right into you as the mattress (inevitably) bows under your weight. Add a second guest in the bed and then it turns into a human salad bowl. YUCK.

Choice #2 - American Leather Comfort Sleeper(R)
American Leather has patented a fantastic sleeper sofa mechanism. It is hands down the most comfortable option I have ever found. The sofa is essentially chunks of mattress that fold up. No bars. And it folds and unfolds quite easily. Great! Problem solved, you say.

Well, there is a hitch. American Leather's design sensibility in sleeper sofas is rather...conventional. It doesn't make for much excitement in the couch department. And remember, that's primarily what a sleeper sofa is.

Choice #3 - New & Groovy Folding Couchs
There are a number of companies doing these now. I particularly liked Bo Concept's version. It's remarkably inexpensive and comfortable as a couch and a mattress. If there's a downside, it's that you have to shift it around a bit to make it into a bed. There are legs hidden in the back that you reveal and then fold it down. All in all, a pretty great option all around.

Choice #4 - Commission a Carlyle
I knew there had to be a place like this. I just can't believe it took so long to find it. Carlyle is the place that can build your sleeper sofa pretty much to spec. You tell them what arms, what fabric, how big and they make it happen. Their designs run the gamut and it's hard to tell from the photos on their website, but you can really get some great sofas designed there. AND their patented sleeper mechanism is pretty darn good. It's not up to par with American Leather's, but it's remarkably good, especially considering the relatively close relationship between the design of their mechanism and a traditional one. They've made several improvements however, that make all the difference. Moved the bars away, beefed up the mattress a lot, and created a better web mechanism to support the mattress. Makes a tremendous difference.

The catch? A Carlyle will set you back a pretty penny. Several thousand dollars in all likelihood.

The question you're asking now is probably which route we've decided to go. The answer is...I don't know yet. Once we started talking about refurnishing the guest room/office/dining room, we began to "wander off the reservation". Now we're considering doing some construction in our apartment. And we're also examining other apartments in the neighborhood...

P.S. - Yes, we're in Bar Harbor. Yes, the weather has been FANTASTIC. On to Toronto tomorrow.

Cool Hunting, Part Deux

2005-08-31T21:45:00.000-04:00

The cool hunting post continues to generate conversation. Folks keep telling me that they didn't know about any of those sites and that they're following them now. Which is great since that's part of the purpose of this blog to begin with.

I thought it might be nice to share a couple more sites and also share some of my favorite finds from cool hunting sites.

design*sponge
Grace Bonney curates this site. There are a few things about it I particulary love. One is the sheer volume of posting she does. I know that it overlaps with her job in PR, but seriously, Grace posts at a pretty prodigous rate. Secondly, I like really her design sensibility. Most of the stuff she likes I relate to, even if I don't absolutely have to own it. Finally, I like the focus. Many sites try to scan a large variety of cool. Design*Sponge is very much focused on home furnishings.

Uncrate
Uncrate is focused on stuff for guys. As we all know, this is not really my nice and I have several complaints about Uncrate. Firstly, it's guy stuff. (Duh.) Secondly, it's got too much automotive going on for my taste. (Duh, again.) Last, but perhaps most importantly it is both behind the times (the Voodoo Knife Holder was on other sites six months ago) and often banal. To wit, they're flogging a new POLO fragrance. Look, I dig fragrances a lot. Can't you find me something unusual? Like a verbena fragrance that lasts for more than an hour?? That's what I really need.

Now on to my three favorite buys thus far that I discovered from surfing cool hunting sites:

Branie Belt
I designed a black one with silver buckle and orange dot. If you know me, you've seen it.

Transit Tote
Medium Design Group's "Transit Tote" is my daily go-to-work/laptop bag.

Welsh Dragon T
For those of you who made the August bash, I was stylin' in Bread of Heaven's short sleeve red T with black dragon. I've got the black longsleeve version queued up for fall, too.

Tomorrow, we take off to Bar Harbor until Wednesday and then we'll be in Toronto for the Toronto Film Festival with the usual suspects. I've got some blog content in progress, so I'll try to knock one out next Wednesday. The week of the 12th, we'll do the Toronto roundup.

In advance, I will note that Toronto's ticket buying process is really dreadfully organized, especially for us out of towners. There are no clear instructions online as to how to get your tickets if you don't live in Toronto. You'd think they'd have more pity on those traveling and make the process easier to understand. Anyway, please keep your fingers crossed for us that this all comes together.

Sundancing Everywhere

2005-08-24T18:30:00.000-04:00

It's remarkable the number of films we saw at Sundance this year that have found release in what seems like record time including Murderball, Ring of Fire, Grizzly Man, and The Aristocrats.

I was particularly shocked at how fast the docs got purchased and by whom. Ring of Fire went to USA Network and I read that Unknown White Male was bought by Court TV!

Recently, we went to see Junebug for a second time with Kecia when she was in town from Amsterdam. (We actually met Kecia on the plane coming back from Sundance in 2004 and adopted her pretty much on the spot. Since then, we've been to see her and Koert in The Netherlands and now they've paid a return visit to us here in NYC.) K. and I both loved Junebug at Sundance and were more than happy to see it again since one of Kecia's friends was involved with it and it's not so likely to be playing in Amsterdam anytime soon.

A second viewing of Junebug confirmed its virtues: it's focus, it's subtlety and the brilliant performances from Amy Adams and the rest of the cast, including my beloved Embeth Davidtz. It's a film that I could keep watching because I caught lots of details the second time that I missed the first time. The script is a LOT tighter than it appears to be on first viewing. Most everything really is explained.

One of the things that's nice about the speed with which these films are getting released is that there were some that we couldn't get into at Sundance, e.g., The Aristocrats. The press this film is getting is remarkable given what a small audience it's targeted at. (If you haven't caught any of the press, you really must be living in a cave.) Anyway, K. and I caught it a couple of weeks ago and it's an interesting examination of what it means to be a comedian. Seeing 100 people tell the same joke becomes like jazz, which was Gillette and Provenza's point. And it works. Really m0t%erf*C)!! well. (If you know what the movie is about...that's a bit of a joke on my part.)

In any case, if any of the above mentioned films are playing in your area, I suggest you get out to see them.

The Best of The Evangelist 6/04-6/05

2005-07-06T18:20:00.000-04:00

There are timeframes that naturally seem to drive one towards reflection. For instance, K. was saying last night to a friend that once you reach a "certain age" (which when we weren't looking we somehow arrived at) three months is often the first hurdle in a relationship. At that point, one is driven to ask, "Where is this going? Does it have a future? Can I spend the rest of my life with you?"

Similarly, a year is often a good length of time from which to gain some perspective on one's endeavors, personal or professional. So here we are at a year of The Evangelist and I thought it might be a good time to look back over the last twelve months and select the top five posts that, based on the amount of emails and IMs I received about them, appear to have struck the loudest chords with Evangelist readers. I have listed them in the order they were published, not based on any personal preference.

1) Pondering Time Travel
2) Going Under Cover
3) Adam Curry's Dangerous Question
4) The Good and The Beautiful
5) Whipped by the Long Tail

So. I've re-read them. I've examined our relationship. I'm committed. Hope you are, too. Thanks for reading.

- Tony

Hug It Out, Bitch

2005-06-29T23:55:00.000-04:00

Like the rest of the world, I cannot help but be helplessly tickled by Jeremy Piven's star turn in HBO's Entourage. As master agent Ari Gold, Piven manages to embody the strange truth of certain powerful nutjobs: they simultaneously disgust and engage us. Revile us and seduce us. Offer us opportunity at the cost of our souls.

Gold's relationship to Eric (winningly played by Kevin Connolly) feels all to familiar to me. As best-friend-cum-manager to rising Hollywood star Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier), Eric finds himself out of his league. He has no real world business experience to speak of; his main talent is his trustworthiness and his ability to influence Chase. As an experienced wheeler dealer, Ari knows this from the moment he sets eyes on Eric and is constantly seeking opportunities to use Eric, or to disintermediate him from the cash cow that is Vincent.

To me, the relationship Ari and Eric is the archetype of the scary/sexy dance between any individual and the powerful person who appears to have the ability to grant one's desires at the potential sacrifice of one's values.

Drop Down Into the Frog

The first time I found myself in this position was at a Shakespeare festival in New Jersey. I was a struggling young actor, longing to join the union and do real professional work. Summer repertory festivals are where young actors earn "points"
towards union memberships while building sets, running the box office, making coffee, understudying the union performers and IF YOU ARE LUCKY getting to get onstage and carry a spear and IF YOU ARE REALLY FUCKING LUCKY getting to speak a line or two of the immortal bard.

As it happens, this particular festival was notoriously poorly managed. The interns were brought on in droves, which ensured that there were lots of free hands to make things run and that the competition for the supernumerary roles was quite fierce.

The theatre took on an extraordinary number of female interns, too. (If you're not familiar with Shakespeare's plays it might help you to interpret this hiring practice properly to know that there are a VERY FEW ROLES FOR WOMEN.)

The festival had some great union actors to understudy. And it had great plays (natch) to watch and perhaps carry a few props onstage. What it featured in spades, however, was the deep imprint of its agingmegalomaniacalal director. A man who had
developed his own acting technique (classes with him were mandatory) that was very strange indeed. Young interns were asked to arrive in a field at the crack of dawn, stretch endlessly, and then to perform arcane breathing exercisedevelopeded by the
so-called master which involved a lot of glutteal flexing and the repeated barking of "SQUEEZE, RELEASE, DROP DOWN INTO THE FROG!" Frankly, the most tangible result of all of this was a tight ass and a ton of mosquito bites and some in jokes that have survived more than a decade of wear.

A few more choice details: we did three show repertory. This involves rehearsing a show, opening it, beginning rehearsals on the second show during the day while performing the first show eight times a week. The second show then opens after four or five weeks and then you run both shows in an alternating fashion. As those two shows alternate, you begin rehearsal on show THREE during the day. Finally, you are running a three show repertory, which looks like this:

Monday: "Dark House" = no show
Tuesday: Romeo & Juliet
Wednesday Matinee: Measure for Measure
Wednesday Evening: King John
Thursday: Romeo & Juliet
Friday: Measure for Measure
Saturday: King John
Sunday Matinee: Romeo & Juliet
Sunday Evening: Measure for Measure

Rinse. Wash. Repeat!

Now what is not obvious to the uninitiated is that after each *three hour show* (dear Will's shows were not designed for the MTV generation), the interns had to do a "change over". This means changing the set. In this particular season, on top of taking down lots of walls and wall coverings and what not, this also included unscrewing EVERY floor panel in the stage (roughly 100 in total) and flipping it over to reveal a different pattern (one for each of two shows), or removing each floor panel entirely (for show three), or screwing the DAMN THINGS BACK ON to return the stage to the proper floor for show number one. If a show started at 8pm and ended at 11pm, interns could look forward to completing change over by 1am. And for the bonus round? Wednesday and Sunday the set had to be changed over twice.

So, why did we put up with it? Because we were dying to be actors, we were dying to get into the union, we were dying to perform Shakespeare. The director had power. He had the union points to dole out. He gave you theatrical credits you could put on your sorry ass resume (if you were a male and got to actually go onstage).

Years later, a friend asked K. and I why we went there. She informed us that the summer theatre guide she bought for young actors described the place and finished its description with the phrase "RUN LIKE HELL" in capital letters. We didn't believe her. Then she showed us the guide.

The sad part was that we all knew at the time that we should be running like hell. But we were frozen in place. The summer had started. Where would we go? Could we afford forfeit the points? We knew damn well we were being abused.

Finally, after much renting of my clothing, an attempt to start an intern rebellion, and lots of other offstage theatrics, I quit. I swore to myself that I would never prostitute myself like that again just for "experience".

Add "NET" and Stir

Years later I was at my first Internet startup. I had moved from theatre to the business world and this job promised to be a key part of that transition. The environment was dynamic and lots of other creative folks with earrings around. No one cared that I had started my career as an actor.

The upside was that there was a lot of opportunity to do new things and learn. The downside was that were were inventing a business that we ourselves did not understand. And there were a number of players in our environment who were there largely for one thing: a big payout.

It was that crazy time where simply adding the words "NET" made things cool. Pitching Sprint? Sell them SPRINTERNET. Pitching Radio Shack? SHACKNET! Pitching a company called IGI? Sell them D.I.G.I.N.E.T, The Digital IGI Network! We were faking it AS we were making it.

A sample week from those heady days: I went from NYC to LA on Sunday and replaced an entire technology department (the Mac technicians resigned en masse when we went to a Microsoft platform) by Wednesday. I received a phone call on Wednesday to go to Silicon Valley on Thursday to do due diligence on a potential acquisition. On Thursday, I got a call telling me not to come home but to fly to Chicago instead Thursday night to pitch the Tribune business on Friday. By the end of that poorly planned week, I had flown four different airlines and conquered my fear of flying.

The net result of this environment (ha, ha) was experience. I worked all day, all night, all weekend. My pager went off at all hours. I hired 100 people. I fired 100 people. I went from recruiter to HR Director, to Operations, to Mergers & Acquisitions to client management. I ran a luxury car account. I given responsibility for one of the most successful consumer packaged goods sites on the web. When we won our largest client ever, it was handed to me.

The downside to this glamorous life? The fear and the mania caused by the power struggles of the super-caffeinated egos in upper management. When people left the room with one of my bosses, he slagged them so badly in language so foul that I shuddered to think of what he might say about me when I wasn't present. He knew that, I'm sure.

Also generating a lot of angst was the fact that our hiring and firing curves seemed entirely unpredictable to those not in the know about the gritty details of our revenue stream. Personally, I never knew when I would be asked to let someone go. I began to feel like this particular task often fell to me because I was basically a "nice guy" and it was somehow fun for my boss to watch me have to execute an order I agonized over.

Once the order was "fly to Colorado and fire the Managing Director." I flew out with a colleague under cover of night. We called everyone else in the office ahead of time and told them to meet us for dinner at a certain restaurant, but not to tell anyone else about our being in town. We landed, we called the MD and asked him to meet us at a restaurant. Lunch was over and the restaurant was empty. Then we took everyone to dinner, closed the office for business the next day and took everyone to Austin Powers to cheer them up. Three weeks later, we sold the office to another company. Taken as a whole, our shameful days there were Jerry McGuire as if it had been directed by Terry Gilliam around the time he made Brazil.

I think my boss thought he was toughening me up. Making me a man. Teaching me the way of the world. Perhaps he did.

In the end, it was a somewhat brilliant business. We really did things that had never been done before that time. On the other hand, it was equally a pretty skeevy business: too much of its major deals done at strip clubs, too many of its financial quarters engineered through "cutting edge accounting", and too many of its employees being fired as they hit the wall of burnout - having bled company colors for the entirety of their tenure.

When the time came for me to resign, I stood in front of this most feared boss trying to figure out how to say the words. I had arrived like Eric in Entourage - with little real business experience and my main attributes being trustworthiness, a willingness to learn and a deep desire to get things right and not to fail.

Like Ari Gold, my boss simultaneously intrigued and scared me. He always seemed to have access to knowledge that I didn't. Knowledge that I thought I needed to attain my goals. But I wasn't sure whose side he was one. I wanted to trust him. I needed to trust him for my own sanity. But still, I always wondered what went on when I wasn't in the room.

Given our history, I found myself facing two men in one. The first man was someone who had given me opportunities that in effect compressed what seemed like 10 years of business experience into three years. The second man was the guy for whom I had done a heck of a lot of dirty work - including closing down the division that had originally hired me. The second man was the boss who compulsively flirted with my wife when he called and found out I was not home. Together, these men were the person in whose service I had needlessly lost countless hours of sleep due to various cockups beyond my control. The physical toll of all this was visible in the 15 plus pounds I had added to my frame during those three years.

I stood in front of him, all of these contradictorimpulseses flashing through me and then...I cried uncontrollably. And he reached out his arms. And we hugged. And I meant it.

Yes, he had done some things I found very, very hard to stomach. But through it all, I still felt somehow that in the final analysis he had as good to me as he knew how to be. He trusted me. He gave me opportunities I felt I had not earned in any way. Did I do things I thought were wrong at his instruction? Yes. Whose fault was that? Mine.

He didn't say, "Hug it out, bitch." But he might as well have. And we did. And I was grateful.

Ballet and Push Ups

2005-06-22T19:00:00.000-04:00

Last week's "Putting Out for the Planet" post requested by my friend Mark was admittedly on the darker side. Perhaps as a result of that, a reader named Frank suggested in the comments that I should write about "ballet and push ups".

At the time, I didn't think it was a particularly helpful suggestion for saving the planet, but it occurred to me later that it might be a great help for my recent bout of writer's block. So I decided to take it up as a challenge.

Therefore without further ado I hereby present the second in a row of "On Demand Posts" as requested by readers of The Evangelist humbly entitled, as per Frank's request, "Ballet and Push Ups".

In the last post, I suggested that my subscription to Real Simple magazine was a clear sign of my being a metrosexual. (Perhaps this inspired the suggestion for this post?) I used the term metrosexual because it had been (until recently) the best term I knew of to describe my general lack of affection for the American heterosexual culture.

I have never been much interested the traditional trappings of that style of "manhood" which includes - centers on, really - bars, sports, and Maxim. While it amuses me somewhat to see it portrayed faithfully on Entourage as the silliness it is, I have never been able to stomach the company of those who embrace it without any sense of irony. (And no, The Man Show was not in truth particularly ironic gloss on the subject. It's just two guys who are smart enough to
know what gets attention selling - and endorsing - the hetero culture back to its primary consumer under the protective guise of belabored humor.)

When I think about how I ended up so out of touch with the mainstream, it occurs to me that perhaps it did all start for me with ballet. Or at least with Mikhail Barishnakov. When I was a child and saw him dance on TV, it seemed to me that he'd achieved every kid's dream: he could FLY. He didn't need anything to do it, either. No machines, no gimmicks. The man could just launch himself in the air and fly enormous distances.

I desperately wanted to be able to do that. I would leap around the kitchen hoping that I would somehow gain the ability to do what he did. I didn't particularly grok anything else about ballet. Not the plot, not the music. I just wanted the ability to fly like Barishnakov.

While I never did learn to fly like Mischa, I found that as I grew older that I was only fleetingly able to care much about the traditional "boy" pursuits. I liked playing sports in school. But I didn't find watching someone else playing them to be particularly interesting. So watching games on TV was not high on my list of things to do. Frankly, I preferred to do anything else. The truth is, if I was going to watch a sport at all, it was most likely to be Olympic figure skating.
By the time I got to high school, I was pretty comfortable in my status as a geek far removed from "cool" male society. But high school changed me in some fundamental ways. I went to a Quaker school and somehow mid-way through, I began to switch grooves. I grew into my body. I got contacts. And I found the alternative music scene.

Some interesting things were happening in the popular music culture in the 80s in terms of male imagery. All of groups within the Bryan Ferry/Roxy Music-inspired New Romantic movement (Spandau Ballet, Ultravox, New Order, Orchestral Maneouvers in the Dark, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Cure...), not to mention the more mainstream Duran Duran, Prince and Culture Club began leaning into and, in the case of Boy George, moving pretty far beyond the 70's androgeny made acceptable by David Bowie, the Dolls and many others. My personal style influences began with Adam Ant (I grew a tail), moved through a Billy Idol style of pseudo-punk (I had the spiked hair, the dangling cross earring, and the spiked leather bracelets), and then became a sort of cross between Prince/Robert Smith androgeny and Bauhaus/Peter Murphy Goth.

Around the same time, the girl who was my best friend (Hi, Amy!) came out. This confluence of events crystallized something. I was very protective of Amy and wanted to support her. People would wonder if you were hanging out with someone who was gay if you were gay, too. And I began to think rather confrontationally about the issue: what if I were? Would that change something? If it would, then take a long walk off a short pier, buddy.

So I began to remove any conscious signals of my sexual preference. At the time, it didn't take much. My earring was on the left, which was a signal in that culture that I was straight. (This particular signal varies from generation to generation and state to state.) But I could easily confuse that by balancing it with an ear cuff on the right side. A little carefully applied eye liner helped, too.

When the time came to choose a college, I chose Vassar. Notoriously liberal and willfully gender confused, the largest event of the year after Founder's Day was undoubtedly the Gay People's Alliance "Homo Hop". Since gender preference signals were muted at best, the safest assumption was that everyone was bisexual until they specified a preference to you. Many of my classmates assumed I was gay. But I didn't care. And neither did they.

Since I initially pursued a theatre career after college, I didn't have to worry too much about macho American culture ("Push Up World" as we might call it in deference to dear reader Frank.) But I'm a pretty big guy. So while on occasion I was called a fag in public it was always muttered under someone's breath. No one dared to say it to my face.

When I found that my survival job was cater-waitering, I discovered that it was advantageous to pass...as gay. All of the guys who controlled the booking and had the highest paid parties were gay. And it was no fun for them to have an uncomfortable straight guy around while they were in their element.

So I needed to pass or I wouldn't get the best jobs. It wasn't hard. I referred to K. simply as my "partner" so as not to accidentally lead anyone on. And then I "played Mary" with
the best of them. Only after I knew someone really well would I "come out" as straight. This led to my having following conversation with a co-worker:

Tony: Um, Jim. I need to tell you something, but you can't tell anyone else.
Jim: What? You can tell me anything.
Tony: I mean it.
Jim: OK! Spill it!
Tony: Jim...I know this is going to come as a surprise. But I'm...straight.
Jim: Ha, ha, HA! You are NOT.
Tony: I know this is hard to believe. But I am.
Jim: GET OUT!

Silence.

Jim: You're kidding, right?
Tony: Nope.
Jim: Are you SURE?
Tony: Uh, yeah. I mean, I live with a woman. We're probably going to get married.
Jim: STOP!
Tony: I'm serious. Now you understand why you can't tell anyone.
Jim: Of course! I get it. I won't tell a SOUL. But look. Have you at least TRIED being with a man? I mean, because if you haven't maybe you're not 100% sure about this being straight thing.
Tony: Well, no. I mean, I've had offers. But when push came to shove, I didn't feel like pushing or shoving.
Jim: So you're sure.

Silence.

Jim: This is really blowing my mind.
Tony: Yeah. I know. I'm sorry. I had to tell you though.

(Needless to say, this story delights gay friends. They have had more than their share of traditional coming out conversations and naturally are amused to hear about the shoe being so clearly on the other foot.)

It was only years later when I entered the corporate world that I fully encountered "Push Up World" for the first time since high school. And I HATED it. The talk about beer and getting drunk. And endless talk about sports. And cars. And how wonderful the administrative assistant's ass was who just happened to be walking by. (It's not that I didn't appreciate her ass. I just didn't need a 30 minute monologue on it.) The "refined" version of this style of conversation I would hear frequently was a "who's is bigger"-style conversation about the best kinds of WINE. Conversation about any subject in the world does earn the adjective "cultured" when the not-so-subtle subtext is how much can spend on the pursuit in question.

I began to experience uncontrollable urges to subvert this culture. Standing in a group of guys admiring another guy's suit, I'd say exactly they would have said if they were admiring a woman's wardrobe: "I'd fuck him." Awkward pause. Shuffle. Laughter. After a while, I got a reputation as a bit unpredictable, funny, and clearly left of center. Real assholes avoided me. The merely misguided would get the point and play more by my rules.

So given my personal history, when the term "metrosexual" surfaced a few years ago. I thought, "FINALLY, a word for a straight man who doesn't buy the hetero worldview. What took so long?"

But then, this weekend the New York Times blew up my identity by introducing a new term: GAY VAGUE.

Now I've argued with a gay friend (Hey, David - you got a mention!) about this article because it appeared in the same issue with the NYT Magazine article on the conservatives who oppose gay marriage. Some folks feel that the two articles are contradictory: the style article says straight men are more comfortable with not having to so clearly signal their sexual preference because being gay is not a stigma and the magazine article says the reason there is a sea of opponents to gay marriage is because they believe that homosexuality is an aberration and needs to be stamped out.

Personally, I see the articles as clearly reinforcing each other. The anti-gay marriage folks claim that gay people have a specific agenda: since they cannot procreate they have to recruit. And they believe that homosexuals recruit others through a concerted campaign to make "the gay lifestyle" acceptable. And the haters point to entertainment like "Will & Grace" as both the proof of the "gay agenda". I'm certain these people feel that trends like gay vagueness are FURTHER proof of the "danger" they perceive.

In any case, I felt that the gay vague article hit on something that resonated with me far more than any of the articles on metrosexuality: that some men do not accept the need to brand themselves as traditionally masculine and do not care about sending "the wrong signals". All of the text on metrosexuality focused on shopping and clothing. (And yes, I'm a clothes horse. In truth, K. calls me her "peacock" because of my wardrobe.) But the shopping focus of the metrosexuality articles and references trivializes any larger philosophical issues. This first article defining gay vagueness, while still pretty darn trivial, at least begins to bring some more interesting ideas to the pop culture dialogue. And in truth, I suppose we probably wouldn't have had gay vague without metrosexuality to pave the way.

In any case, I'll say in closing that I'm pleased that the NYT article has started some dialogue about shifts in American male hetero culture. It's not really a huge deal for me. But I have to admit that it is nice to see a little representation in the media of the lifestyle I have lived for a long time. Unlike actually being gay, being gay vague actually is a lifestyle choice.

Frank, I hope you liked your post.

My Absence/Putting Out for the Planet

2005-06-13T19:20:00.000-04:00

I’ve been struggling to come back to The Evangelist for weeks now. There are a number of reasons for this, but one of them was clearly a lack of motivation. I lost momentum and got caught up in reading the huge information flow that I seem to consider necessary for my existence.

For whatever reason, I am a compulsive information hound. It started years ago. Probably the first attempt to manage it came at age fourteen. I was in boarding school and I decided to subscribe to the New York Times. I thought, “I’m living away from home. I’m an individual being now. I had better subscribe to a newspaper so I know what’s going on in the world. After all, I’m no longer living in The City. I’m in the WILDS OF PENNSYLVANIA.” I had no idea what I was in for. The flood of articles began. I couldn’t make it through the paper each day, so I began piling the daily papers up so I could “get to that article later.” This quickly threatened failures of our room inspection, so I began just saving the section that had the article and it still didn’t help. The paper had too damn much interesting in it and I had homework to do. Finally, after several months of the grey fluttering deluge, I relented. I subscribed to Newsweek instead. That solved the problem pretty handily. For high school, anyway.

Some years later, when I went to grad school/conservatory, the problem cropped up again. I subscribed to Newsweek, The Nation, Utne Reader (an attempt to get more info with fewer subscriptions) and the Quality Paperback Book Club. Around that time I began to try to rotate my subscriptions so as to continually try new things, but not get overwhelmed.

That strategy worked for many years, but then suddenly during the Internet boom I discovered that there was so much I wanted and (felt I) needed to absorb. This got me to an all time high where I was subscribed to Business 2.0, BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Newsweek, The New Yorker, The Internet Standard, TimeOut NY, and Wired ALL AT ONCE. I was getting a lot of free subscriptions, which allowed me to rationalize this infoglut, but it was a lot even for me to handle.

So recently, I found myself determined to pound down some more sources and I returned to focus on my current subscription list: BusinessWeek, The New Yorker, Real Simple , Topic (a GREAT new magazine! Subscribe now!) and The Week. Real Simple has been fun, but I’ve decided not to renew it. I kept hoping that they would realize that I and my fellow metrosexuals were reading RS and shift the content, but they haven’t. (Calling all magazine publishers: there’s a market for an RS type magazine for men. I promise.)

So all of this explains PART of why I haven’t posted in ages. The other reason, which is the primary topic of this post, is depression with the state of the world. You see Elizabeth Kolbert published a well-researched, three-part article in The New Yorker (here are links to parts one, two, and three) about global climate change.It’s well worth your reading…if you’re prepared to be depressed. I don’t recommend it if you have children because the outlook for the world after the middle of the coming century is extremely bleak. That is for humans. For Mother Earth, it looks like she finally might be ready to start the global washing machine and cleanse herself of these nasty parasitic humans.

Between Kolbert’s reporting and everything I’ve been reading about the “peak oil” theory, it doesn’t seem like there is much to look forward to on a macro scale. It would appear that pretty much simultaneously the following three catastrophic things are going to happen more or less simultaneously (on a cosmic timeline, not necessarily in the same year or decade):

1) We are going to begin to exhaust the earth’s available resources of oil.

No matter how you feel about oil, you must recognize that the planet has only so much of it. It’s tempting to think that it will last forever, but you know in your heart of hearts that just isn’t possible. Logically speaking, at some point we will have hit the midway point in what oil is feasibly recoverable from our blue marble. (We may figure out how to get beyond that threshold to hard-to-recover oil, but still it is a fundamentally exhaustible resource.)

Why does this matter? Because pretty much all of what we define in modernity is the product of oil. Not just the obvious, like the gasoline that powers every moving vehicle from motorcycles to airplanes. But the power grid is fundamentally dependent on oil. So are many, many other things you think of as unconnected. Including Vaseline. (We have to have a little humor here, but that’s true, too.)

So what happens when we hit the midpoint? Supplies become unable to meet the ever growing global demand.

2) The global economy will begin to respond to oil scarcity.

Inevitably, economies will begin to plummet. Those that can get oil will survive for a while. Those that don’t will begin to spiral. This is going to start wars around the globe to defend, keep or acquire oil resources, depending on the side you are fighting on. (I’ll leave Iraq out of this discussion. But the implications are obvious. The Pentagon has created and published scenarios about the coming oil scarcity. But don’t take my word. There’s plenty of journalism available on the Web through reputable sources on that story.)

3) The atmospheric changes we have wrought will raise the oceans globally.

Ironically, our love of fossil fuels is also creating the third leg of the impending forces of doom: global climate change. After you read Kolbert’s articles, you’ll get a pretty good sense of why I’m worried. It’s not just that the planet “gets hotter”. It’s that global warming is a reinforcing and self-accelerating cycle. Essentially, we’ve toyed with the forces of entropy by heating the atmosphere. It melts the icecaps, which raise the oceans, which return to the depths pieces of continents that were formerly underwater, which increases the size of the oceans…it goes on and on. And each reaction spurs another reaction which continues to heat the atmosphere and destroy life as we know it.

So, given this sorry state of affairs I’ve fall off the old blogging horse. And if you follow, understand and agree with any part of my train of thinking, it’s not so surprising is it? But I was hanging out with some lovely folks on Memorial Day and K. and I were talking about all of this and my dear friend Mark said, “But there MUST be something we can do, right? We can’t just sit back and let this happen.”

I have obviously been feeling pretty Eeyore about it all, so I could not come up with much beyond “Well, I recycle and I vote. But other than that, I’ve pretty much given up. We’re not having children, so I figure I’ll enjoy life and then hopefully we’ll miss the worst of the cataclysm.”

Given that Mark’s delightful 11 month old was toddling around our legs as this conversation took place, he said, “Come on! You can do better than that.” Now as it happened, our new friend B. was with us. B. is being courted by a rich enviro. So I said, “Well, I think B. should marry her suitor and then we can collectively participate in saving the planet by influencing his decisions on how to spend his money.” I promptly coined this strategy as “Putting Out for the Planet.” (Conveniently for me, only B. was going to have any putting out to do. But you know. It was a holiday weekend and I wasn’t feeling up to any whoring about myself. Perfectly happen to volunteer others, mind you.)

While we were all chuckling and amusing ourselves with my handily volunteering poor B. to save us all with her feminine wiles, Mark was not having any of it. He said, “You need to write a post on your blog and ask your readership what I can do to help save the planet.”

So that’s where you come in dear readers (if there are any left after my hiatus). Mark and I both desperately want your ideas. Why? Because otherwise, it’s all up to poor B. How can we all put out for the planet? Because this is a collective effort if it is going to succeed.

So please leave any constructive action-oriented comments below on how Mark (and all other interested parties) can help save the planet. We need all the help we can get.

Administrivia: Subscribing to This Blog

2005-05-20T15:06:00.000-04:00

I posted this in the beginning of the year, but it's worth repeating. If you would prefer to get The Evangelist via email instead of checking the site, send an email to the-evangelist-subscribe AT yahoogroups.com. When you join this Yahoo! group, you will automatically receive emails with the contents of each new post to the site.

Tribeca Film Festival - Part II

2005-05-10T23:00:00.000-04:00

As promised, here is the second (and final) set of reviews from the Tribeca Film Festival.

Transamerica (****)
I rarely comment on the circumstances of a screening, but this one merits it because the advance word on this film was totally out of control.

At the screening I attended, they overadmitted people and the aisles were full of angry unseated attendees. Despite the fact that festival administrators repeatedly announced that the screening would not start until the aisles were clear, many refused to leave the screening theatre for some fifteen minutes.

Hype aside, Transamerica is a very good film. It tells the story of Bree, male-to-female transsexual on the verge of getting the final surgery when a long lost son suddenly turns up. Refused permission by her counselor to go ahead with the surgery until she resolves her relationship with her heretofore unknown progeny, Bree sets off to find some way to expedite this process and get on with her operation. This desire kicks off a cross-country car trip with Bree and her son Toby; with Bree finding herself unable to own up to their true relationship and masquerading as a Christian missionary.

Felicity Huffman does a remarkable job with the role and there is well deserved buzz that she might garner an Oscar nomination. The entire cast, in fact, turns in terrific performances. Kevin Zegers delivers the goods on all fronts as Toby, a gorgeous gay hustler with strikingly low ambitions. And the divine Fionnula Flanagan fires off an outrageously tempestuous yet plausible performance as Bree’s unaccepting mother.

While there is obviously a lot of room for comedy in this plotline, Transamerica deals directly and sensitively with Bree’s condition, her desires and her relationships. It’s also very strong work on both fronts from writer/director Duncan Tucker and should bring him a fair bit of attention.

Mad Hot Ballroom (*** 1/2)
Speaking of festival buzz, Mad Hot Ballroom was the breakout film at Slamdance (the festival held simultaneously as Sundance is held) and was snapped up by Paramount Classics and Nickelodeon. We didn’t catch it in Park City so we were happy to have a chance at Tribeca. It’s now in wide release.

This documentary shows us a special New York City school program where ten and eleven year olds learn ballroom dancing at school and then teams from each school compete against each other.

While not a brilliant documentary structurally (it plays its hand too clearly throughout), it is a Mad Hot Ballroom is a dedicated crowd pleaser in every sense. The kids come in all flavors of precocious, from verbal skilled to physically adept to emotionally connected. And it is delightful to watch them dedicate themselves to this pastime that their great grandparents might have loved and which has been so neglected in successive generations.

The competition itself is also great fun. You get to witness, along with the professional judges (including Ann Reinking), the marvelous abilities of these underprivileged kids, many of whom have found real meaning in the competition and potentially a lifelong passion in dance. It’s mad. And it’s hot.

Neo Ned (***)
This is film whose premise along would doom it as a straight to video release, were it not for committed performances from Gabrielle Union and Jeremy Renner: throw together inside a mental institution are Ned, a neo-Nazi skinhead, and Rachel, a beautiful black woman who thinks she’s Hitler. They fall in love.

The script doesn’t try to hold this silly premise together for too long. Ned quickly turns out to be a charming troublemaker who just wants attention and Rachel a woman on the run from her past. But the actors rise above the risible material and make this a very watchable movie. They manage to ground us in the implausible and make us care about their characters. And thanks to the strength of their performances, the characters stay with you long after the troubled plotline has floated away.

It makes one wonder why Renner isn’t a star yet and why Union usually gets such bogus material to work with. (Actually, that’s easy. She’s a fantastically gorgeous black woman. Even Halle Berry has only had Monster’s Ball to acquit herself with. Then it was on to Catwoman.) Somebody needs to give these young talents a bigger break because they’re clearly capable of outstanding work.

The Illustrated Family Doctor (**)
An Australian film with the best of intentions. A young man working at a book packager (they abridge novels and the like) soldiers on after the death of his father. He struggles to navigate his dead end job and his dead end life, which gets increasingly surreal as the film progresses. Based on a novel - and it feels like it - The Illustrated Family Doctor manages to hold your attention, but despite everyone’s best efforts (cast, production design and direction), ultimately it doesn’t quite come together.

The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green (**)
Based on a queer comic strip, TMUSLOEG seemed to register a lot more with the largely gay male audience more than it did with me (despite my rampant metrosexuality).

Protagonist Ethan Green is searching for love and stumbling a lot along the way. He can’t seem to decide what he wants so as soon as he gets into a relationship, he’s finding his way out of it.

A farce with some entertaining moments, the film is hampered by a general lack of finesse in the material and the acting. Making matters worse, Daniel Letterle as Ethan seems to be miscast. If he is actually gay himself, he’s simply not that convincing. (Ouch.)

Tribeca Film Festival - Part I

2005-05-08T10:00:00.000-04:00

It’s happened again. I fell off the posting wagon. And it’s not because I haven’t had anything to write about either. We’ve been seeing a lot of films and plays. In fact, that’s part of the problem. K. and I have been so busy seeing stuff I haven’t had time to process it all! I think that perhaps I have to settle for more frequent shorter posts vs. the longer weekly essays I have been tending to write. We’ll see. In any case, It’s time to talk about the films we saw at the Tribeca Film Festival.

We began this film festival obsession at Sundance 2004 and Tribeca 2004 was our second festival ever. Sundance was so amazing and Tribeca was terribly disappointing; there were very few films that I enjoyed and overall I found the screenings to have sensationalist content combined with abysmal execution. It seemed like the dregs of the independent scene to me. So I was – understandably – tentative about returning.

Then the Tribeca guide went online and I was shocked at how much I wanted to see. The timing did not work out for us to be able to see as much as I would have liked, but we did pretty well nonetheless.

I should also point out that K. has said that I always “find some way to see something positive” in all the films I see and that I should institute a ratings system to give Evangelist readers a better sense of my response to a particular film, play or other event.

I would like to point out that part of the issue is that if I didn’t like something (unless it was at a festival and I summarize it with the rest of what we saw), I have not bothered to review it here. This blog is called The Evangelist and not The Detractor for a reason.

The fact is that year we have been subscribers to Manhattan Theatre Club, Second Stage Theatre and Brooklyn Academy of Music and the only show I reviewed here was Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. Tells you a lot by omission, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s a story for another post. Let’s return our attention to Tribeca, shall we? But before we do that, let’s talk ratings. Here’s what we’re going with:

One Star: Save your time! I wasted mine so you don’t have to waste yours.
Two Stars: Skip it. Unless there is something specific (subject matter, actor, director) about it that you know you want or need to see.
Three Stars: Worthwhile. While not perfect, it has something substantial to appreciate.
Four Stars: Very strong. You should put it high on your list of things to see.
Five Stars: Outstanding. The work will stay with you long after you see it.

Mysterious Skin (*****)
Greg Araki’s latest feature film is a truly remarkable work. Based on Scott Heim’s novel of the same name, Mysterious Skin tells the story of two young Kansans who grew up in the same town and each of whom had a specific childhood experience that they view as the defining moment of their life.

Neil fell in love with his Little League coach and was sexually abused by him. Brian suffers nosebleeds and fainting spells that he dates back to a faintly remembered experience of what may have been an alien abduction. Neil becomes a gay hustler and Brian spends his time trying to sort out and clarify his memories of the aliens. Both of them are pushed apart into very different lives and then gradually back together as Brian begins to recover fragments of his memory. Ultimately, they connect for a shattering moment of unlikely grace.

Araki has managed to do a wide range of extraordinary things with this film. He has gotten tremendous performances from his cast, including Brady Corbet as Brian and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Neil. (If you weren’t at Sundance, you probably remember Gordon-Levitt as the talented young physical comedian who played the alien son on Third Rock from the Sun. If you were at Sundance and didn’t see Mysterious Skin there, you might remember Gordon-Levitt as the star of Brick. In either case, stayed tuned. This young man promises to be the next Johnny Depp: a daring and very young actor who takes strong, quirky scripts and delivers top notch performances.) Araki has also managed to edit together incredibly frank scenes using very young children. They appear to show the abuse in action, although Araki explained at the Q&A that the children were filmed in a completely different context. Not since Hitchcock edited the Psycho shower scene has a director so effectively used their craft to make you think you see something that you never actually saw.

Mysterious Skin is a film that brings a full spectrum of experience to the viewer. It is different things at different moments: funny, shocking, engaging, moving, uncomfortable, beautiful and finally haunting.

I Am a Sex Addict (****)
Caveh Zahedi’s latest effort almost defies description. It is an autobiographical, somewhat documentary comedy with multiple streams of meta-commentary. Zahedi set out to make an autobiographical film about his struggle with his addiction to prostitutes. But fate intervened on several levels and the results are wonderfully unexpected and fresh.

Because Zahedi had no money, he had to recreate scenes from his life in cities where they didn’t happen. His freewheeling revelations of this sort of detail, which he addresses directly to the camera, provide one of the unusual levels of meta-commentary. Additionally, unbelievable coincidences in his casting process (which I’m loath to reveal) prod him to begin to address the camera about the actors he has chosen to portray key figures from his life experiences.

On top of all of this, Zahedi is unflinching in recreating the worst of his behaviors. He is brutal in showing his ability to continuously and hilariously justify his nonsensical strategies for trying to overcome his sex addiction, which ruined a number of ill-fated marriages.

I Am A Sex Addict resembles Ross McElwee’s seminal work Sherman’s March in its ability to let the audience get ahead of its protagonist as the story unravels, but also continuously and effectively throws wrenches into our expectations due to the creativity in its storytelling and filmmaking. Also like Sherman’s March, it’s a longer story than it needs to be although it’s a fraction of a fault by comparison. For all its joys, Sherman’s March overstayed its welcome by as much as ninety minutes and managed to be successful due to in spite of that. This film is only a wee bit longer than need be.

I Am A Sex Addict is well worth catching when it comes your way. It’s funny, fresh and creative.

The Power of Nightmares (****)
The Power of Nightmares is a BBC documentary that all Americans who want alternate points of view about the Bush Administration and its engagement with Al Qaeda should see.

The premise of the documentary is that two schools of disciples are in conflict with each other: those who follow the teachings of Islamic fundamentalist Said Qutb and the American Neoconservatives who follow the teachings of University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss.

Both groups were dismayed at their perception that liberalism failed to make the world a better place. And both groups believed that only a vanguard spinning a mythology that would engage the masses uniting for a common cause could make the world better.

Having failed at coming up with a positive mythology, both sides settled on nightmares to establish power and authority. The fundamentalists use the nightmare of “Western corruption” of Islam and their countries. The Neocons use “freedom” and the “war on terror”.

While the film suffers from a certain amount of didacticism and would benefit from more detailed “hard evidence” (as much as that is possible) to support its claims, it pulls together a striking alternate view of our current world situation: that both the Neocons and the Islamists were facing complete irrelevancy. The Cold War ended and the Neocons had no enemy left to give them meaning. The Islamists tried and failed for many years in Algeria and elsewhere to foment revolution, but failed. Bin Laden and Al Zwahiri were desperately trying to achieve relevance when they happened to fund “the planes operation”, an idea created by a separate group and funded by Bin Laden as a sort of venture terrorist. Up until that point, there never was an “Al Qaeda” as we have come to perceive it in the news. But with the execution of the “planes operation” both the Neocons and the Islamists found an enemy and a new and terrible raison d’etre.

This concludes the first group of Tribeca reviews. Stay tuned for the rest of this festival's reviews in a subsequent post.

Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffiths Story on USA Network

2005-04-15T17:00:00.000-04:00

Originally reviewed here on The Evangelist and airing commercial free on Wednesday 4/20 at 9pm EST on the USA Network. Set your TiVo.

Fabulous Furniture

2005-04-13T23:59:00.000-04:00

When I first got the idea of launching The Evangelist about a year ago, it was in part an effort to archive a certain intersection of information: the things I like to promote and my compulsively created categories of related things.

The “film festival” posts are examples of my compulsive categorization of relationships. This first expressed itself visibly when a high school English teacher taught our class the “cf.” abbreviation while reading Shakespeare. As I recall, we were originally using it to compare common uses of imagery in Henry IV, Part I. It became some sort of a hunt for me. How many references could I find to whatever image it was we were tracking in the text? Suddenly I was adding “compare with” abbreviations to my copy of Henry IV until every other page was scrawled on. I don’t know if this was creating a new compulsion or simply making visible some hidden function that was already well at work in my little, hormone-addled brain. But it’s been there pretty much ever since.

The desire to share and promote things that I’ve discovered came much later. But it’s probably born of the same kind of intensity in some part of my personality. Probably the first evidence of it was my early devotion to American crafts. There was a store in the town I grew up in called The Craftsman’s Gallery. My father was quite fond of it and it was a continual source for the many little gifts he liked to give his friends, staff and family. (You could count on there being Craftsman’s Gallery boxes under the Christmas tree every single year.) I became a peculiar juvenile fan of the store. I’m not sure what Sibyl - the store owner – made of this peculiar twelve year old making regular pilgrimages on foot or by bicycle into downtown to see her latest show - and bringing his friends, to boot. “Isn’t this COOL?” I’d say pointing out some pin, brooch or ceramic sculpture to a friend I’d dragged along. Most of them would nod uncertainly, “Uh, yeah.”

As an adult, when someone inquires about something I own or asks for advice in furnishing their home I develop lists for whatever the topic might be: rugs, housewares, lighting or furniture. Recently, K. and I went to see our friends Sarah and Jimmy’s new place and saw that they had purchased a fabulous bed from Scott Jordan, one of our recommendations. Suddenly, I remembered creating the list of places they should look and I thought, “Darn it, I should put my current ‘places to consider for quality furniture’ list up. I meant to do that ages ago. Here it is:

Berkeley Mills
We first chanced into BM on our honeymoon in Santa Fe. They offer a stunning array of designs that are a fascinating mélange of influences: Frank Lloyd Wright, Mission and Japanese woodworking. The Harp Chair (http://tinyurl.com/3kdo3) and the Wave Table (http://tinyurl.com/7yftb) are great examples of how those styles can come together in wonderfully original ways. The BM stuff is expensive, but when you see it and touch it, you’ll understand why.

Design Within Reach
I have been bemused by the boom in “mid-century” home furnishings. Seeing the Scandinavian and Eames-influenced designs that furnished my childhood home lovingly restored and priced through the roof is just plain peculiar. It’s not that I don’t value the design aesthetic, I do. But the Tulip Table? That was my parent’s kitchen table. The Compact Sofa? I used to watch TV on it.

Anyway, given how this trend has taken off, the “within reach” brand is something of a misnomer. But if you long for the mid-century style that is now lauded by the Museum of Modern Art and don’t want to buy an original, DWR is the place to start.

Nakashima
Do you like timeless furniture that respects the source of its beauty, using only joints and no nails? Do you love tables with unfinished edges, including the bark? Whether or not you know the source, you are a devotee of George Nakashima. A warm and gentle spirit who made his home in New Hope, PA, Nakashima launched an American furniture vanguard that incorporated the ethos of his homeland into the American craft movement of the 1960’s and 70’s.

Your choices with the master’s furniture are not as limited as you might think. You can buy an original through a dealer or an auction. Better yet, there is a studio of artisans who are working in the Nakashima tradition under the direction of his heirs so you can have a new piece made that suits your needs. You can even select the wood yourself.

Pompanoousuc Mills
PM specializes in quality, affordable furniture with a range of traditionally influenced, yet modern styles. Their pieces are great quality and are generally available in a range of finishes. The combination of quality, affordability and design range has made Pompanoousuc Mills has made their customers into real fans. My experience is that people who buy “Pompy” furniture usually end up owning several pieces from their different collections.

Rocky Coast Joinery
I’m the sort of person who loves to know who made the things that I own. And I also like to LIKE the people who make the things I own. Lowrie Sargent is about the nicest guy you’ll ever meet. He and his wife got off the corporate treadmill down in Washington, DC, relocated with their sweet (and massive) dogs up to Maine and Lowrie turned to his true vocation: quality furniture. If you’re headed up to Maine, stop into Lowrie’s studio and hang out for an afternoon. It’s a treat. (When K. and I get more space, Lowrie’s already designed our ultimate dining room table!)

Room and Board
R&B have just moved into NYC from Chi-town and I was pretty impressed. They have a tremendous range of furnishings and they offer an unbelievable range of options on pretty much every piece. If you’ve got a lot of furnishing to do, R&B is a great way to go.

P.S. - Their paper catalog is GENIUS, coming complete with sticky tabs to bookmark the pieces you are considering.

Scott Jordan
SJ specialized in extremely tasteful, hardwood furniture. It’s the sort of stuff you like AND your parents would approve of. SJ is a very small, local producer of furniture, so it’s a great compromise between knowing the craftsperson yourself and buying mass market furniture.

Stickley
Stickley is one of the premier brands of the American Arts & Crafts movement. But unlike the other major brands of its time, Stickley is still being produced today by the heirs of one of the largest Stickley dealers: the Audi family. In NYC, you can go down to the Fifth Avenue EJ Audi store. On the web, you can go to the eponymous Stickley site.

PS – If you like Stickley, but want something in a lower price range, The Michaels Furniture Co. of San Francisco makes some quality Stickley-style pieces. You can’t find it online, but in NYC they are retailed by Laytners.com. Here’s what a Michaels bookcase looks like.

New Directors/New Films

2005-04-06T23:30:00.000-04:00

This was the first year I’ve attended the film festival collaboratively programmed by Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art called New Directors/New Films.

I was interested to see the volume of films that overlapped with this year’s Sundance festival and was glad for the opportunity to catch one film I’d considered seeing there (see below) as well as the fact that NYC audiences were being exposed so soon after Sundance to some of the great films that were there, namely Murderball, Junebug and Live-In Maid.

I enjoyed the range of things I chose at New Directors, although the roster did not offer that many things that I felt compelled to see. (Which is probably just as well since the Tribeca Film Festival is only a few weeks away anyway.) Nonetheless, each of the screenings I attended gave me something different, and worthwhile, to mull.

They Came Back
Robin Campillo, a French screenwriter turned director has created an audacious, original and thought film. The story tackles the question, “What if we got our (sometimes spoken and often silently desired) wish and our loved ones came back from the dead?” The film gives no back story. It simply starts with a cemetery in a small French town where a flood of people, clothed and healthy, are walking deliberately forth into the streets.

In a classic zombie movie, this scenario would be played for terror. But Campillo isn’t going for that effect. He’s trying to tackle what the realities of the situation might be if this were to happen. What would the living say to the former dead? How would we make a place for them in our homes, our lives, and our workforce? How would the dead describe their experiences in the beyond to us? What if they refused to reveal what happens after death?

Some of the town’s attempt to deal with these very (for lack of a better word) human issues is unexpectedly quite funny. The French being the French, they form committees to deal with finding jobs and to study the behavior of the risen and determine their health, their mental states, and their likely longevity on this second go-round.

These are the results of attempt to cope by people as a collective. On an individual level, there are terrible struggles. One couple tries to reintegrate their dead child who is acting peculiarly – who can know exactly why under the circumstances? – and who is painfully unresponsive to their ministrations. The town mayor bravely tries to welcome his elderly wife back to their extended family and every time he turns his back she’s trying to escape over the garden wall to an unknown destination.

The living and the risen dead have entirely separate desires in this movie and Campillo often leaves them spookily unexplicated. We simply witness the interactions and have to struggle, as the characters do, to make sense of this painful, awkward, and frightening situation. It’s a quiet, peculiar, troubling and ultimately engaging affair.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston
I had considered seeing this documentary at Sundance, but it sounded like a downer and I’d had enough good crying jags by the end of the festival. So I passed. The fact that it ended up winning Best Director for Jeff Feuerzeig left me curious about what I’d missed and now that I’ve seen it, I’m very glad I did.

The movie is a portrait of Daniel Johnston, a mentally ill songwriter, singer and artist who is admired by many other artists. The director effectively combines home movies, concert footage, and audiotapes, (it seems that Johnston compulsively records nearly every second of his waking life) to reveal the intersection of talent (some claim genius) and madness. In retrospect, The Devil and Daniel Johnston is almost a “what if?” movie. Or perhaps it’s better to say that it belongs in the Ripley’s museum where life’s oddities can outstrip our expectations of fiction because what has happened to this poor man is nearly too much to reckon.

Raised by fundamentalist parents with whom he was at war as a young man, Johnston pursued his artistic ambitions with the blind, focused narcissism often seen in the gifted. But something came unraveled (his diagnosis is apparently manic depression) and Johnston’s life began sliding from the unpredictable to the unbelievable. Episodes include running away with a carnival, being discovered by MTV, causing and surviving a plane crash, frightening an elderly woman to jump out of a second story window. It goes on and on. Throughout it all, a band of interested parties – some altruists and some idiots – conspire to create enough guardrails to keep him alive and creating.

Perhaps the best feature of the film is that it is truly a human interest story. One need not buy into Johnston’s “genius” label to be shaken, moved and perhaps even inspired by his single minded struggle to create; fighting his way through the mists of his mania and his depression.

Kontroll
Hungarian American filmmaker Nimrod Antal’s impressive debut is not in any way marred by its obvious predecessor, Luc Besson’s debut film (at the tender age of 20), Subway.

(Granted I have a special fondness for Subway. It was perhaps the first independent film I ever saw under my own steam. My high school girlfriend and I saw the nifty posters advertising its engagement at The Ritz (then a single venue, now four!) in Philadelphia. It was the first time I ever saw Isabelle Adjani. I immediately declared that if Grace Kelly was the most beautiful blonde on screen, then Adjani took the prize for the brunette category.)

Antal’s feature takes place in the Budapest subway, the second oldest system in the world after London’s and not particularly well maintained. The key to the film is that the subway works on the honor system and therefore has bands of “controllers” whose job is to ask riders at random to display their tickets to prove they have paid to ride. Our hero is Bulcsú, the leader of one of the ragtag bands of misfits that apparently comprise the ranks of controllers. He and his cohort battle daily against the apathetic and sometimes violently aggressive patrons of the subway, making the best of a bad and often dangerous situation.

Blending aspects of horror, crime, and romance – all of them stylishly executed, Kontroll makes for a very impressive debut. Additionally, the writer/director bravely decides not to explain each and every detail. People do what they do. Sometimes we understand their motivations, sometimes we don’t.

Time will tell, but Kontroll may possess all of the lovable flaws that occasionally make for a cult film: originality of execution, visual panache, pastiche, paeans to other films and filmmakers, and the raw energy of a young filmmaker who doesn’t yet have any boundaries to contend with.

Our Brand is Crisis
People, watch out a charming and pretty young filmmaker named Rachel Boynton. I would not normally point out the gender and appearance of a documentarian (I must protest my innocence on this while it may be hard to credit given the links to Grace Kelly and Isabelle Adjani above), but having watched her handle the festival Q&A session like an old pro, I cannot help to speculate that her charm and her looks forced her subjects to overlook the fact that she’s extremely bright and that she was going to be pointing a camera at them while they tried to engineer an election.

Let me explain in more detail. Our Brand is Crisis shows how the American-born and educated technocratic politician Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, (known colloquially as “Goni”) hired the polling/political strategy consulting firm owned by James Carville and Stan Greenberg to help him return to the presidency of Bolivia. It was a high stakes adventure as his country was teetering on the brink of complete anarchy and how the politically idealistic American consultants managed to get him back in the front of the race after starting from a dismal position is a wonder of modern electioneering.
What makes Boynton’s film so compelling, and her accomplishment so impressive, is that she managed to acquire and maintain tremendous access to all of the key players during a terribly dangerous affair for all involved. The Carville/Greenberg team was attempting to ply their modern trade in a foreign market, far from the culturally specific context in which they honed their skills. Goni was risking his wealth, his reputation and potentially his life. The going was extremely rough and the parties inevitably did not always see eye to eye. The result is a striking first effort with many insights into the many challenges facing America’s effort to “spread democracy” abroad to countries and cultures that have very different priorities, histories and desires.

Somersault
Australian director Cate Shortland’s impressionistic feature spins the story of Heidi, a blossoming young girl whose sexuality is fast spinning out of her control. Caught kissing her mother’s boyfriend, she runs off to the ski resort of Lake Jindabyne where she meets a handsome young farm boy who is engaging, emotionally elusive and also not quite in control of his libido. The two enact a confused romance, each trying to sort out what they want out of life and each other.

This film seems to fall into a category with a number of other films that I’ve seen over the last eighteen months that are driven by the character of a young-woman-bursting-forth-in-confusion including Thirteen, Blue Car, and All the Real Girls. Like the others in its category, Somersault features highly watchable performances from its young actors (Abbie Cornish and Sam Worthington). I found that Somersault was not always consistently engaging but had enough moments of true excellence and stark emotional reality to suggest that director Cate Shortland future work is worth anticipating.

The Good and the Beautiful

2005-03-30T00:01:00.000-05:00

Recently I’ve been reading Mary Renault’s The Last of the Wine. It’s an historical novel about the city state of Athens when Sokrates and Plato sat in its fabled agora. Sokrates was a divisive figure at the time and our protagonist Alexias finds that many of his family, friends and acquaintances will not suffer the sage’s company. Xenophon is chief among Alexias’ friends who avoids Sokrates. Imagine then Alexias’ surprise one day when he finds Xenophon sitting in with the students.

“What brought you to Sokrates?” Alexias wants to know. Xenophon explains that he had been walking down an alleyway when Sokrates blocked his path and asked,

“Can you tell me where one can buy good oil?”

I thought it odd he should need telling, but I directed him. Then he asked after flour and cloth. I told him the best places I knew; he said, ‘And where can one get the good and beautiful?’ I must have looked pretty blank; at last I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, I can’t tell you that. – ‘No?’ he said smiling. ‘Come with me, then, and let us find out.’ So I turned and walked with him, and stayed with him all day.

I was very moved by this passage. I love the idea of finding a wise teacher who opens you up to the world. A teacher that engages you in a community of fellow travelers struggling to understand the universe; that discusses the nature and definition of concepts such as “good” and “beauty.”

Down a few conceptual, spiritual, and cultural levels from trying to intuit the Platonic forms of good and beauty, is the matter of seeking the new.

Many years ago, I worked as a headhunter in the fashion industry. The fashion industry has a great divide between the creation (design and manufacturing) and the distribution – (retailing) sides of the business. I specialized in the former; placing designers, technical designers and merchandisers into the major, New York-based apparel houses. Occasionally, folks from other ancillary parts of the value chain would end up at my desk, such as merchandisers from fabric houses, e.g., Loro Piana, who specialize purely in sourcing the high-end fabrics that are sold to the design houses. I never knew what to do with those folks.

One particularly confounding group of people was the trend forecasters. I was learning a great deal about the business world as I transitioned from my former life as an actor to being a headhunter. So it was not the fault of the trend forecasters that I did not really understand who they were or what they did at first. I knew who the futurist and cultural forecaster Faith Popcorn was, probably thanks to an early issue of Wired Magazine, but I did not know that there were trend forecasters in the fashion industry. (And frankly, my fellow headhunters at the agency neither understood nor cared who they were. They were from small companies. They weren’t part of our core clientele. They were not money sitting in the chair in front of you.)

I’m a people person. So I interviewed the trend forecasters. I learned from them about their business. I thought it was fascinating. Trend forecasters in the fashion industry walk the streets to watch what people are wearing. They photograph them. They focus group people who seem like trendsetters. They scan lots of different media looking for emerging colors, patterns, and fabrics. Then they write reports which designers read on what the predicted trends are for the coming seasons. This helps designers choose whether to lean into a coming wave or away from it. Eventually, from my interviews I learned who the major trend forecasting houses for the fashion industry were and how they operated. But I also learned that those companies were too small to use headhunters and so I never could find jobs for those nice people who sat at my desk and patiently explained their art.

A few years later, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in the New Yorker (and later in his first book – frequently referenced here) about Nike’s division of “cool hunters”. Cool hunters are a blend between a trend forecaster and a designer. Cool hunters go trend spotting to see, for example, what urban youth (read: black kids) are wearing on the basketball courts. Then they try to design a prototype of a shoe that will pick up where that trend is headed and take it to the next level. They take the shoe out to a court and have a kid play in the shoe and, in addition to asking for that one kid’s feedback, they watch how others respond to him wearing the sneakers. (By writing about Nike’s team, Gladwell put “cool hunting” into the common vernacular in place of “trend spotting.”)

In the past six months, I’ve noticed that individuals have nominated themselves as cool hunters on the web. They’ve set up sites that track, and point their readers towards, new pieces of merchandise that represent the latest in design trends. The web having a strong geek audience, it’s not surprising what most of these sites are focused on: gadgets, sneakers, and clothing - primarily t-shirts. Some of them also cover trends in modern art and architecture, although not to the same degree. Here then are some of those sages who purport to have the power to show you the good and the beautiful:

Boing Boing
I don’t know of Boing Boing started the podcasters shrieking “Boing!” all the time or if the site’s name is just playing on the trend of geeks to shout “Boing!” when they find something that floats their boat. (“Boing!” seems to be the “schwing!” of the 00’s.) In any case, Boing Boing, subtitled a Directory of Wonderful Things, glosses technology, gadgets, humorous news events and various web-based ephemera.

Cool Hunting
Josh Rubin founded this site and was its sole editor until a few months ago when he asked a host of others to co-blog with him. The site scans sneakers, t-shirts, gadgets, design, music, and nifty futuristic prototypes made by companies and individuals. While I preferred it when it had a single editor, I still enjoy its variety of categories and appreciate its non-tech specific focus.

Being Hunted
The folks at Being Hunted are interesting in part because they’ve crossed the line into commerce. They now have a European retail operation called The Glade that sells some of the fashionable items they review.

Engadget
Together with Gizmodo, Engadget defines the category of gadgetblog, of which there are now burgeoning numbers. In addition to being the place to find out what the latest cell phone designs are in Tokyo, Engadget is the place to go to read the editors and readers pontifications on the future of TiVo.

Gizmodo
Gizmodo carried the 2005 Bloggies for the “Best Computers or Technology Weblog”. It’s pretty duplicative with what you’ll find on Engadget, although for some reason I’ve not yet defined, I prefer Engadget.

Josh Spear
Subtitled The Pulse of Cool, Josh scans art, books, fashion, popular music, design and gadgets. For some reason, he’s elected to group blog on Cool Hunting, but his site is still worth reading because he generously does not write overly duplicative posts to each site.

Mighty Goods
One of the few female cool hunters out there, Mighty Girl of the Mighty Goods Shopping Blog picks out housewares and kid’s stuff in addition to the usual host of fashion items, gift ideas and gadgets.

Shiny Shiny
UK-based Shiny Shiny is gadgets for girls. Very much like Gizmodo and Engadget, but frequently referenced by Cosmo and Allure, Shiny Shiny picks out chic cell phone holders and LED-covered lingerie in addition to the usual gadgets that the guy-oriented sites fixate on.

As a final note, I was amused to note that Gothamist recently posted a (not so engaging) interview with a professional trendspotter from Youth Intelligence. I guess I'm onto something in the zeitgeist.

"Give Us More to See!" (2005 Photobloggies)

2005-03-23T22:40:00.000-05:00

Stephen Sondheim wrote an extraordinary musical about the creative process called "Sunday in the Park with George". Without regard to the strength of the musical as a whole (the book is challenging in certain respects), it's well worth listening to the music and what he says about creativity.

One of my favorite lines comes from the artist's muse (Dot - originated by the supremely original performer Bernadette Peters) as she sings with the protagonist the heartbreaking song "Moving On". Dot sings:

Anything you do,
Let it come from you.
Then it will be new.

Give us more to see...

Right now on the web, there are a host of talented photographers who are publishing their work, often on a daily basis and providing a tremendous amount of inspiration to their viewers. There is truly some astonishingly good work out there.

At Chromogenic, the photographer ran out of film for his Hassleblad and jury rigged the camera to take a smaller film stock. When he developed the film, he discovered he had exposed the film across the sprocket line. A terrific effect. Here's a favorite from that series.

At OneMountainPhoto, Ed Nazarko has a wide array of work. A favorite winter shot.

For landscapes, it's hard to compete with A Walk Through Durham Township, PA. Check out this shot, up for a Photobloggie Award.

Mute has some terrific portrature, both posed and candid. Speaking of which, Joe's NYC has some incredible street scenes.

These are just a few shots to represent the multitude of photographic creativity blooming on the web. So go to the Photobloggies site, click on the links and then vote for what you like best.

P.S. If you're a photographer or a designer yourself, you should check out Daily Snapshot's Interviews with web photobloggers. The new design is gorgeous!

No Hope For Humanity – The Misanthrope’s Film Festival

2005-03-09T23:59:00.000-05:00

More film festivals are on the way! Dan did the honors yet again in picking up our tickets for the New Directors/New Directions Film Festival at Lincoln Center which is in a couple of weeks. And after the excellent experience we had with the documentary screenings at Sundance, K. and I are also seriously considering going to Durham, NC for Full Frame, the documentary film festival.

Given that all of these events are on the horizon, I thought it might be time for another Evangelist Film Festival post. These are my opportunity to program a mini-festival in your living room, focused on a single theme. This time around, its misanthropy.

I have no patience with misogyny, but having a bit of a fatalistic streak I have a lot of patience for misanthropy. I think the first time I had a good taste of filmic misanthropy, it was probably Heathers. (By the way, haven't you always wondered what the heck happened to Heathers director/writer team Michael Lehmann and Daniel Waters? The answer is not pretty. Their next big endeavor was on the notorious flop continuum alongside Ishtar, Heaven's Gate and Waterworld. The film's name? Hudson Hawk. To add insult to injury, Waters' brother helmed 2004's massively successful, Heathers-lite flick, Mean Girls.)

That was the first time I recall seeing a character so disgusted over his fellow humans. Heathers remains, however, a teen comedy and so I did not include it here. While some of the films in the Misanthrope's Film Festival are also comedic, they are generally more adult in tone and present more incisive arguments for dislike of one's fellow man and perhaps all fellow men.

American History X
Anchored by Edward Norton's searing portrayal of an American neo-Nazi, this film powerfully depicts the ills of American racism at its worst. The film is truly unforgetable and will give viewers new insight into just how awful people can be to each other. In fact, the film manages to encapsulate in a single sound effect how evil might inhabit each and every one of us when pushed to extremes. (If you've seen the film, you know just what that sound is. If you haven't, you will recognize it as the foulest, most effective sound effect you've ever heard the moment you hear it.)

It's hard to know who to credit for the film's potency. Director Tony Kaye was supposedly yanked from the project during editing and later sued to have his credit listed as Humpty Dumpty! The buzz was that Norton wrapped filming and helmed the editing process as well. In any case, I found it to be quite an eye opener and well worth seeing.

Citizen Ruth
Everybody loves writer/director Alexander Payne after Sideways, but it's worth taking a trip back in time to see this earlier effort.

Laura Dern stars as a drug addict named Ruth whose especially cheap brand of entertainment is "huffing" spraypaint. When Ruth turns up pregnant, she becomes a political pawn between right-to-lifers and a band of old-school feminists. Comedy ensues as each side does their best to use Ruth for their own purposes, desperately pretending to themselves and the world that Ruth's welfare is their paramount concern.

It sounds strange to say, but it is Dern's brave and essentially unlikeable characterization of Ruth make this film work and also make it worth watching.

Dancer in the Dark
This film began my "von Trier habit". About 15 minutes into the film, I said to myself, "Wow, he really hates women." By the end, I said, "Wow, he really hates all of us!"

The film tells the story of woman's gradual descent into blindness and her attempts to save enough money from her factory toils to save her son from the same fate. The cruelty of her situation is compounded by the way some of her co-workers deal with her situation.

As difficult as Dancer in the Dark is to watch, it is truly original filmmaking that makes excellent use of cinematography, music and as unlikely as it might seem, dance.

Dogville
Von Trier strikes again. This time a Brechtian saga with an whiff of Cold War paranoia. A young woman enters a mountain mining town, perhaps on the run from someone. What should the townspeople do?

A fascinating film. Potentially a searing endictment of America. Maybe a messiah myth. All depends on your point of view. Here's the thing: you cannot help but have an opinion. There is no neutral response to this work.

Election
Another early work by Alexander Payne featuring wonderfully hateful performances from both Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon. Quite an achievement, don't you think?

Centered around a high school election, the film tells the story of a teacher who so dislikes a student that he cannot stand to see her win. Payne uses the election as a filter not only for American politics, but also as a way of examinging human competitiveness. Weird, funny and very nasty.

Happiness
Who can make you have empathy for a child molester? Only one man: Todd Solondz. In this film, Solondz takes an Altman-esque approach to examining sexually maladjusted American suburbanites (a favorite target.) Skillfully weaving together several storylines, Solondz continually takes us to the point of complete squeamishness and offers release by returning to the thread of another tale we'd begun earlier.

This film is proof that Solondz is Soderbergh minus the sellout. All the filmmaking talent, the use of brilliant ensemble casts, but he hasn't lost his agenda: to put the worst of the human condition under a microscope and examine it thoroughly.

The Shape of Things
You have to hand it to Neil LaBute. Whether or not he does actually singlehandedly own the entire misanthropy genre, the press pretty much thinks he does. Crashing out of the gates with In the Company of Men and barreling through Your Friends and Neighbors, LaBute brings it on...and on...and on. Each time setting up a specific set of human failings and watching it play through.

The Shape of Things is one of his more interesting films to me because it is much harder to parse. In this film, the question is "how far would you go for love?" Without recapping the plot, suffice it to say that it will keep you asking questions right up through the very end.

Whipped by the Long Tail

2005-03-04T18:15:00.000-05:00

In the October issue of Wired Magazine (remember Wired?), Chris Anderson wrote a very interesting article on a new business theory called the Long Tail. The premise is that the Internet aggregates demand virtually in a way that makes possible an entirely new business model that cannot be duplicated in the physical world.

Essentially, freed of the constraints of shelf space, retailers of physical and digital products are discovering that Pareto’s 80/20 principle crumples under the huge catalog of potential SKUs beyond the “hits”. Everything beyond the 20% of what constitute “hits” or “best sellers” in the physical world can produce a profit at least equal to, if not greater than those hits that physical retailers rely for their profits.

This Tail Smells Familiar
I believe that this phenomenon is not entirely new. I’ve been told that when MTV launched in the Midwest, record retailers were entirely flummoxed by straight-laced teens marching into their local record store to demand their Kajagoogoo. “Kajagoogoo? Don’t you mean John Cougar?” said the retailers. Because that is what their demographic retailing models told them to stock in Ohio. They simply were not prepared to find (nor to market to) the potential Depeche Mode market in Akron. MTV threw a wrench into the traditional marketing models because no one had put much thought yet into marketing bands across American markets via music videos. Markets were labeled in a fairly limited psychographic manner and marketed to accordingly. MTV changed all that. Suddenly, there was new demand in unexpected places. (In fact, as long as we’re discussing the music industry, they NEVER seem ready for change. Direct mail in the form of Columbia House blew their minds back in the 50’s, and it’s happening to them yet again in their current MP3-driven muddle.)

Similarly, the Long Tail model posits that businesses can aggregate (what would otherwise be) niche demand into such volumes that it is profitable; especially because they don’t have to worry about shelf space. (Unless we’re talking about digital products, e.g., music, someone in the value chain does have to stock those items or they have to be easily manufacturable on demand. Anderson’s Long Tail article doesn’t address this issue, however.)

What’s most interesting is that sometimes a product that was way down “on the tail”, e.g., well below the status of a bestseller in a traditional model, can jump up to bestseller status based on the use of collaborative filtering where consumers can see what others with similar tastes are buying. Anderson gives the example of how “Touching the Void” returned from an almost out of print status to bestseller when Amazon recommendations suggested it to people who were buying “Into Thin Air”.

Who’s Wagging the Tail?
Thinking back to Gladwell’s seminal work, it seems appropriate to wonder how the demand for items that are on the tail is generated. Gladwell posited that there are three important roles in the phenomenon that makes up an unexpected hit: connectors, mavens and salesmen.

Connectors know astonishing amounts of people and are masters of the “weak tie”. In other words, they are good at maintaining many relationships on a weak level that they can leverage when they need someone else’s support. Mavens collect vast amounts of information on a particular topic or topics and share it compulsively. Salesmen…well, you don’t need me to tell you what they do. (They sell!)

On Amazon.com, collaborative filtering makes us all mavens by sharing what we like with others who like similar things. The user reviews turns the willing into salesmen. And the combination of the two makes Amazon.com into a very effective connector.

Getting the Long Tail in Your Face
What happens when the Long Tail aggregates demand for the unexpected and the unexpected is…YOU? That’s what seems to have happened to a hapless teen in New Jersey named Gary Brolsma.

Who is Gary Brolsma? If you’re reading this site, I’m pretty sure you know him. You just don’t know his name. You see Gary Brolsma uploaded a video of himself to the web. We don’t know why. Probably to amuse a few friends. But I’m guessing that somewhere there was a connector in the mix. And the next thing he new, Brolsma was famous in a way he really did not want to be. His “Numa Numa Dance” was forwarded lightning speed around the world and suddenly the Today Show wanted to know if this young Staples clerk wanted to meet the world.

You see in the physical world, a hard copy of Brolsma’s videotape would not have made it very far. It’s amusing sure, but would you take the time to duplicate it and mail it to ten of your friends? No way. But it seems that online the demand for silly and transient amusement is pretty high. And the cost to share those amusements is non-existent. And so websites that collect funny items collected Mr. Brolsma’s video (either as a file or via a link to another site) and suddenly that demand was a flood. SMACK. Hit in the face by the Long Tail.

So while the Long Tail is very interesting when one is considering a retail business model, it should also be a cautionary phrase to those who think “I’ll just share this with a few of my friends” because once we’re in the digital world, the Long Tail can strike rather unexpectedly. Just ask Gary. Or Pamela. Or Paris.

Beware Data Aggregation: the New ‘Big Brother’ Meme

2005-02-23T19:40:00.000-05:00

The word ‘meme’ means ‘idea’ or ‘concept’ and in colloquial use is generally used when discussing the viral transmission of ideas.

I first came across the idea of memes via mid-90’s Wired Magazine articles about Richard Dawkins and in Neil Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk opus of that period, Snow Crash. Stephenson posits that religion is a virus and that the brainstem can be hacked linguistically in order to program behavior. (For the esoterically inclined readers of this site, this was precisely the driving concept behind the neurolinguistic programming (NLP) movement that grew out of Milton Erickson’s hypnosis work.) Stephenson’s work subtly and effectively foreshadows all of the current and insidious waves of fundamentalism under the guise of sci-fi fun.

In the late 90’s, I hooked up with Bruce Kasanoff. At the time, Bruce was focused on the use of data to delight customers via personalization. And the good folks at places like Amazon have employed the ideas that Bruce was pioneering to good effect since then. But that was then.

In early 2005, I have noticed that there is a form of ‘big brother’ meme that is growing and mutating in the American cultural Petri dish. It is focused on the fear of the potential abuses of privacy as it regards data and personal privacy and, perhaps much more importantly, liberty. This meme focuses on and promulgates concerns about a post-Patriot Act, post-Homeland Security America where both government and business organizations are aggregating large databases for disparate purposes but with similar results: intimate knowledge of American citizens used without any kind of checks and balances in ways that could wreak classic Michael Crichton-style havoc.

Examples of the meme mutating and expressing itself in various media are Robert O'Harrow Jr.’s book No Place to Hide (Amazon and NPR interview). On the web, there is a proliferation of websites that document where the both government and privately owned surveillance cameras are. The most interesting expressions of concern to me, however, are two thought pieces published on the Internet, snarkmarket’s EPIC animation and the ACLU’s “Pizza Palace” animation. I recommend watching them both because they are well done and they express different facets of this new meme.

Watching the EPIC piece, I thought that given that certain industries have so successfully blurred the line between government and business, e.g., the frequent shifting of players from the military, government contractors, and the federal government itself, it's not surprising that some people are wondering when an economic power like Microsoft will become a threat of some sort. Part of what interested me about the EPIC story is that it had not yet occured to me that I should worry whether Microsoft is a threat beyond the sphere of capitalism.

The ACLU piece surprised me less. Government collects information, government abuses information. The J. Edgar Hoover story redux, right?

So now that I have been exposed to various strains of this big brother meme, I cannot help but wonder just how concerned should I be about data aggregation and my personal liberties. I think to myself, “I’m not a terrorist. What do I have to fear?”

And then I remember when in the aftermath of 9/11 a Pakistani colleague of mine raised money to take out an ad in the New York Times in order for his Pakistani friends to broadcast their solidarity with America. The result? The FBI saw a lot of transfers of small amounts of money into his bank account from Pakistanis (individual contributions for the very expensive full page ad) and showed up at his door for several days running to ask questions.

So if Homeland Security or any other government agency/contractor is aggregating my personal data, might it look suspicious? And if it does, can I be assured that I will have recourse to an attorney?

Say…this new meme is infectious.

Let Michelangelo Throw the First Stone

2005-02-16T23:59:00.000-05:00

Let Michelangelo Throw the First Stone.

Along with a sea of fellow Manhattanites, I went to Central Park to experience The Gates on opening weekend. I spent a couple of hours rambling from West 86th Street down alongside the lake and then cutting across the park towards Bethesda Fountain and the Boathouse. From there, turning downtown to meander through The Mall. Near the high 50’s on The Mall, we turned back and cut back west, skirting the Sheep Meadow and returning up the west side of the Park to 72nd Street. Truly, it was a delightful experience.

Returning to work on Monday, I was surprised to discover a number of colleagues who “didn’t get it” or simply did not appreciate it in concept. Were people really making an effort to see it? they asked. Preposterous. Twenty one million dollars? Ha. People are crazy.

No, I protested. It’s really worth seeing. Go see it.

Later, I was amongst a group of friends, many of whom are now or have been writers, artists, and performers. “It’s not art,” said a friend who works in an art gallery. “It’s a civic event.” “Orange,” said another. “Ugly.” And so it went. Truly, I was shocked. Not because they did not like it. But because they were judging it and they had not been to experience it for themselves.

I found all of this frustrating. I am not a fan of the Christos, per se. I’ve never experienced their work before and do not believe that I would like all of it. But I had an opportunity to see The Gates and I have to say, it’s more than seeing The Gates. It’s experiencing The Gates. It’s not about photos.

For me, The Gates is about raising the viewer’s consciousness on several levels. We fail to see our surroundings, no matter how spectacular, when they become familiar. The Gates forces us to see the park anew. And it does so by literally re-framing the experience. As you walk through the park and underneath the gates, you are being forced to wake up. Passing through each gate briefly brushes against some part of our consciousness and works on an animal level to rub lightly against our personal space like a cat causing static electricity and raising the hair on your arms as it runs over your lap.

On a visual level, the gates create new framed views every step of the way. And because of their fabric flag-like components, those views are not static. They continually play in the wind and in the light, the effects of which also serve to once again jog the viewer’s consciousness, wordlessly emanating a command to “Stop! Look!” and then after a few steps, “Look again!”

In Seeing is Forgetting the Thing of the Name One Sees, Lawrence Weschler (as I’ve noted on this site before) explains how Robert Irwin began his career as a painter and over time changed the focus of his work to shaping environments. Irwin began to see art as the experience that takes place in the viewer and not necessarily the physical (in Irwin’s case painted) object. As a result, over time Irwin’s work evolved to using lights and scrims to reshape gallery spaces and thereby create experiences for willing participants.

Over the years, Irwin’s artistic evolution led to him designing environments, including gardens and grounds. Perhaps most famous/notorious is his work for the Getty Museum in LA where architect Richard Meier was not pleased to have his fanatically rectilinear buildings complemented by Irwin’s circular plantings. Most recently, Irwin did the grounds and interiors of the refurbished factory that is Dia:Beacon.

At Dia:Beacon, in the midst of a lot of Irwin’s wonderful and subtle manipulation of the museum environment sits a monstrous achievement in creating experience in the viewer. Michael Heizer (recently profiled in the Sunday Time Magazine) has an installation that consists of primary geometrical shapes (circle, triangle, square, cone) cut deep into the foundation of the museum. I have linked to a photo, but you’ll have to trust me that experiencing the Heizer piece creates forceful feelings of primal fear, awe, and wonder. The experience is capable of imprinting itself on you in ways you cannot control.

I think The Gates make more sense in an Irwinian articulation than they might as explicated by Christo or Jeanne Claude. The Gates are not best understood as the saffron colored posts and fabric that they are made out of. The Gates better understood as the experience one has while moving in, around and among The Gates.

I am not arguing that the Christos should hold a place in the pantheon of great artists of the Western world. I don’t think that The Gates will stand the test of time precisely because it is so experiential. But for those who are here now, it provides a highly accessible opportunity to experience art.

And this leads to my final point. For a host of socio-economic reasons, the vast majority of the world will not have the opportunity to have a Bernini statue burn itself indelibly into their consciousness. The Christos have generously put their time and effort into a piece of art that will potentially change and inspire millions.

And to argue against that is to argue about whether it is a bad thing that most people love the simple happiness of Pachelbel's Canon, and do not appreciate the mysterious genius of Bartok. It’s a lack of gratitude both for the artists’ effort and for its peaceful and positive effect upon the multitudes that take the time to experience it.

2005 Sundance Festival: The Documentaries

2005-02-09T23:40:00.000-05:00

As I mentioned in the first post, the documentaries this year were incredibly strong. (We saw mostly American and one foreign doc.) In fact, they were so good that the six films in the “best” category below are not necessarily in absolute order of preference. They are all terrific for different reasons.

The Best
Unknown White Male
A 34-year old man with a British accent turned up in Coney Island with no idea of who he was, or how he got there. Through luck and chance, the man was finally identified as Doug Bruce.

Rupert Murray, friend of 15 years, was erased from Doug Bruce’s along with all the rest of life. Hearing of what had transpired with his friend, Murray wrote Doug Bruce a letter and requested Bruce’s permission to document his predicament. They re-met and Mr. Bruce agreed. The result is an extraordinary film that follows an unimaginable journey to build a life anew. From re-meeting his father and sisters to seeing snow for what is effectively the first time, Mr. Bruce works to rewrite the blank slate of his mind. Watching Unknown White Male raises painful and fundamental existential questions about the interplay of memory, personality and identity in establishing our humanity. I found it astonishing, moving and terribly compelling.

Murderball
Remember the US/Russia Olympic Hockey rivalry? Now imagine it with quadriplegics! Murderball is about the men who play Quad Rugby – rugby played by ferocious quadriplegics in Mad Max style wheelchairs. You’ve never seen anything like it and you’ve probably never met anyone like them: their life stories are often worthy of Ripley’s Believe it or Not.

All of the subjects of Murderball are incredibly charismatic (especially the hard charging Mark Zupan), and the US/Canada rivalry is truly fierce. The rivalry is inspired because Joe Soares, the Canadian team coach, is a former American champion who became a turncoat when he was cut from the US team. (Soares is so tough that if there was a movie of his life he could only be portrayed by Robert Duvall.)

Murderball manages to weave fast-paced, down-to-the-buzzer sports action with the moving, compelling and inspiring stories of the athletes in competition. This film will win your heart and blow your mind. Don’t miss it.

Twist of Faith
This fantastic film was nominated for the Academy Award this year*. And it should have been because in my estimation, Twist of Faith is a classic example of what a documentary can do: illustrate the human complexities of a timely topic by using one person’s situation as a microcosm. The topic is child sexual abuse by clergy and our subject is Tony Comes, a brave Toledo firefighter.

Comes did not publicly acknowledge his childhood abuse at the hands of the family priest until he discovered that he had purchased a brand new home only five doors down from his abuser.

The Comes family make terrific subjects; Tony Comes is engaging, extremely forthcoming about his state of mind from moment to moment, and unexpectedly articulate to boot. Twist of Faith follows his (and his family’s) struggle to deal with the flood of emotions that burst forth when he tells his wife, parents and the world what happened as well. It also details his attempts to get the local archdiocese to acknowledge the wrongdoing. It’s a gripping, timely story and is presented extremely well.

It’s worth noting that one of the best parts of the Sundance experience is the opportunity you have to participate in Q&A with the film makers and, in the case of documentaries, with the subjects as well. The presence of Tony and Wendy Comes provided a cathartic experience for the audience at our screening. We were all so caught up in their story and so empathic for their struggles that I think collectively it was helpful to check in with the Comes family and get an update on their wellbeing.

*Interestingly, Twist is up against two other docs from last year’s festival, Born into Brothels and Super Size Me. And while I expect it will lose to Super Size Me because SSM is more innovative in terms of filmmaking technique, Twist of Faith is a far more emotionally resonant work.

Why We Fight
What a family the Jareckis are! Andrew made Capturing the Friedmans and his brother Eugene made The Trials of Henry Kissinger and now Why We Fight, which won best doc at Sundance.

Why We Fight is Eugene Jarecki’s exploration of how the forces that Eisenhower in his farewell speech dubbed the “military-industrial complex” have evolved into a triangle of relationships between the military, private contractors, and government officials. Jarecki interviews key players across all three legs of the military-industrial complex, along with members of what one subject argues is the latest addition to the web of symbiotic relationships: the Washington policy institutes known colloquially as “think tanks.”

Chronologically, the film takes us from Eisenhower’s speech through various American military entanglements and finally into Iraq. The film presents

Iraq

as a microcosm of the dangers of the interwoven employment histories and mixed loyalties of those individuals who have migrated through the various arms of the military-industrial octopus.

For instance, the film details how Americans have been oversold on the efficacy of “smart weapons” by contrasting the original claims of their effectiveness in the so-called “decapitation strikes” that launched the war effort with scenes of the actual strike zones, making clear that where in specific cases there was 100% success and zero collateral damage reported, the ratio was exactly the opposite.

Why We Fight makes a cogent and balanced argument that these unchecked political forces have created a headless beast that has yielded the kind of “standing army” that our first president George Washington warned the country would turn the

United States

into an imperial power.

In short, Why We Fight is the film Michael Moore might have made, were he as articulate and talented as he is driven.

Shakespeare Behind Bars
This film is the story of a group of convicts at a Kentucky prison who participate in a program where they rehearse and perform full productions from the canon. At the time that this film was made, the troupe was working on The Tempest.

It’s hard to describe how moved I was to see these men struggle with the text. And I don’t mean intellectually struggling to understand the text. These men have no more or less trouble than anyone else with that. I mean watching the struggle of a truly committed actor to find the truth in himself that will give him emotional access to the text. To watch a convict recognize Caliban’s rage as rage he himself has once owned. To watch a murderer who has a beloved daughter find in himself the connection to Propero’s relationship to Miranda. And to watch their director, the saintly Curt Tofteland who has entered their world every week for 10 years, facilitate their growth as individuals and as a group of friends and colleagues.

The film raises many issues surrounding crime, punishment, incarceration and most of all redemption. Directed and edited with an extremely gentle hand, Shakespeare Behind Bars is both a bittersweet and unexpectedly joyful work.

Rock School
This film is going to be a crowd pleaser, but there’s a lot more to it than what sits on the surface: Paul Green runs a Philadelphia after-school program that teaches very young kids and teens how to play rock and roll. And while Green can be bright, funny, entertaining and iconoclastic, he is also a self-centered, abusive crazy man. His students range from 6 year old twin Ozzie wannabees, to a young guitar prodigy to a talented young woman who may well some day climb the college rock charts. Some of the kids flourish under his tutelage and others suffer. Together, Green and his protégés have created a community of oddballs pursuing their peculiar urge to rock the house.

Good
The Education of Shelby Knox
Shelby Knox a paradox. A high school student in Lubbock, Texas from a Southern Baptist and Republican family, she took an oath to preserve her virginity until marriage. Then she joined a student council and fought against the Superintendent and the local school board to try to institute a complete sex education program in the school system that extended beyond the current abstinence-based agenda. The movie documents her growth as an advocate for underdog causes, as a person and as a politician. And her parent’s struggle to support their alien adolescent as she moves from her first controversial topic to one that’s even more so.

Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story
Emile Griffith was a simple hat designer from the Caribbean working in New York’s garment district. His boss noticed his rippled physique and used his position as a father figure to turn Emile against his gentle nature and goad him into becoming a champion boxer. How this poor soul ended up killing a man in the ring after being called a maricon at the weigh-in is a sad tale. If only he had been allowed to be a hat maker.

Grizzly Man
Timothy Treadwell lived among the Alaskan Grizzly bears for 13 summers. Styling himself as their protector from poachers, he filmed himself with the bears in their natural habitat. Werner Herzog uses Treadwell’s own footage to show us the fearsome nature of the bears, Treadwell’s tenuous existence in their midst, and his final descent into mania that lead to the inevitable for Treadwell and his unfortunate girlfriend. Bizarre, sad, shocking and chock-full of car wreck fascination.

The Worst
Protocols of Zion
Given the fact that anti-Semites everywhere continue to disseminate this piece of Tsarist propaganda (If you don’t know what The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is, google it.), it bewilders me why filmmaker Mark Levin spends so little time on its origins. If you know nothing about modern anti-Semitism, then this film might be worth seeing. But for those who know, this film adds nothing. Additionally, Levin inserts himself needlessly into the film (e.g., filming himself watching Daniel Pearl’s murder).

Perhaps the most needless tragedy here is that Levin clearly missed the most interesting film that’s right in front of him: his family. The film skims briefly over such interesting things such as that his father Al Levin has let his graffiti artist grandchildren spray paint the exterior of his suburban New Jersey home and has apparently had a longstanding relationship with an imprisoned ex-white supremacist. Levin's grandfather, Herman Levin, helped to found the Jewish Reconstructionist movement in the 1930s after growing displeased with the role of women in his Conservative synagogue. Next time, Mr. Levin should take advantage of the great raw material in his own backyard.

Frozen Angels
A documentary about Los Angeles’ starring role in the reproductive technology arena, Frozen Angels has every reason to be more interesting than it is. It has a cast of characters that includes a loudmouth radio host who also runs a surrogacy agency and a woman who has been a surrogate for multiple families. Soporific editing and a tentative point of view make a needless bore out of what could have been a fascinating study.

2005 Sundance Festival: The Dramas & Comedies

2005-02-02T23:30:00.000-05:00

There’s a lot to say about Sundance this year because we did a longer trip than last year. In total, we saw 21 films from Wednesday afternoon through Sunday. It was a great trip and I’m so glad we did it again.

A number of folks have asked about all of the press about Sundance, celebrities and merchandise. The Hollywood folks mostly come the first week of the festival. The studio executives to buy films, the celebrities to promote their films, and the silly folks who are famous-for-being-famous to make a scene of some sort and thereby forestall the end of their fifteen minutes, even if only on Gawker.

K. and I purposely go for the second week of the festival in part to miss all of the nonsense. For a cinephile, going the second week of Sundance means no distractions. The festival is about seeing good films and given the crop of promising creations in the Sundance catalog, we planned several 5 film days and even one 6 film day!

Because there is so much to say about what we saw, I’m going to break up my Sundance experience into two posts. This week, I’ll talk about the dramas & comedies. Next week, I’ll discuss the documentaries. (By way of a teaser, I will mention that the documentaries were outstanding this year.)

The Best
Junebug
The craftsmanship of Junebug is such that I was not surprised to learn that the screenwriter (Angus MacLachlan) is primarily a playwright. But that’s not to discount in any way the contributions of director Phil Morrison. Not only has he assembled a terrific ensemble cast, but he directs with a light hand and lets the actors deliver.

Madeleine, a Chicago gallery owner (the glorious Embeth Davidtz) specializing in outsider artists brings her new husband George (the underrated Alessandro Nivola) back to his hometown in North Carolina, primarily so she can pursue a local talent. This brings them into the orbit of his estranged family and neighbors, brought vividly to life by a remarkable team of performers that include character actress supreme Celia Weston as his mother, and Amy Adams in a potentially career defining role as Ashley, George’s pregnant sister-in-law.

Not surprisingly, when a big city art dealer comes to the rural south, worlds collide. But in this gentle and respectful film, they never collide in the ways that you might think. Small, but realistic surprises are around every corner of MacLachlan’s fine script. The cast fill their roles with nuances that pull the world, and the story, together into a coherent whole without filling in every blank.

It’s a small gem of a film and Amy Adams delivers one of those luminous performances that seem more like channeling than acting. The Sundance jury awarded her with a well deserved special acting honor.

The Squid and the Whale
What if Woody Allen had directed Hannah and Her Sisters in his early 30’s? Can you imagine what his career might look like now? After two early films that received some small notice, many New Yorker columns, and co-authoring The Life Aquatic with Wes Anderson, Baumbach has finally delivered the film that many suspected he had in him. And it is a very good film indeed.

The Squid and the Whale is a deeply personal film about two young children’s experience of their parents’ divorce. Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney brilliantly portray a pair of Park Slope academics that thrive on their intellectual firepower.

Daniels' performance as the self-absorbed novelist/professor past his prime is jaw dropping in its ability to disgust and frustrate, all the while somehow generating empathy. Linney does some of her best work as the mother whose unexpectedly and late blooming creates utter chaos in the family. And Jesse Eisenberg and young Owen Kline turn in picture perfect performances as the 16 and 12 year old brothers seeking ways of navigating the wreckage. Squid’s only imperfection is its final (and too novelistic) scene, which feels abrupt and not entirely satisfying. But given that 99% of the film is excellent, this seems like a quibble. Funny, touching and well done all around.

I look forward to seeing what Mr. Baumbach delivers in the future.

Brick
Although my festival sherpa Dan derided it as pretentious, I thoroughly enjoyed director/screenwriter Rian Johnson’s Brick. In a move that is quirky, risky, and entertaining, Johnson has lifted the film noir genre and transposed it to a Southern California high school.

Our hero in hard-nosed detective role is Brendan (Third Rock’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an antisocial type who eats lunch alone behind the school. And it is no wonder that he does. Everyone wants something from him. The vice principal wants him as a stool pigeon, the police (“the bulls” in Brendan’s wonderfully specific patois) want to make a bust, the drama queen wants him back as a lover, his most recent ex-girlfriend wants him to save her from her downward spiral into a junkie’s life, and the biggest drug dealer around (“The Pin”- short for kingpin) wants him as a partner.

Johnson effectively creates a completely new world for his audience. We’ve seen this genre, but never this way. He packs his script with a complicated back-story that unravels continuously through the course of the film, gradually clarifying everyone’s motivations as Brendan races the clock to solve a murder. True to genre, he gets caught in a complex web of intrigue where he must play the many conflicting sides off each other.

While the quality of the acting is somewhat varied, the taut script, terrific sound production and impressive direction all keep you wrapped up in the action right to the end. Brick signals the arrival of a young director to be watched.

Live-In Maid
I have to admit that it was hard not to be affected by what preceded this film. Argentinean director/screenwriter Jorge Gaggero was very touching as he introduced his film, trying not to weep for his repeatedly bankrupt and bereft country. Live-In Maid is his way of sharing his countries difficulties through some wonderful storytelling.

The film is a detailed portrayal of the relationship between Beba, a formerly wealthy woman desperate to deny her true financial condition and Dora, the family maid of more than thirty years whom she can no longer afford to pay. Both women are strong in different ways and the complexities of their long relationship make it hard for them to easily unwind from each other. Both actresses give tremendous performances and the film succeeds in not being a sob story, despite being a microcosm of, and a proxy for, the dire circumstances of Argentina.

Likely to be dismissed as “a small film” by many reviewers, Live-In Maid offers a lot for audiences who are able to still their minds and watch two masters of their craft do their work for us.

Worth Mentioning
Pretty Persuasion
Imagine if Lars von Trier had written Heathers with one eye turned back towards the 1950’s shocker classic, The Bad Seed. Pretty Persuasion is that film.

A thoroughly caustic and misanthropic endeavor that stars wunderkind Evan Rachel Wood and includes star turns by James Woods and Jane Krakowski, Pretty Persuasion tells the story of a private school girl’s attempt to become a famous at all costs. Scenes that read like Sarah Silverman punchlines blow the roof off of any sense of propriety, each one overflowing with an outrageous potpourri of sex, misogyny, anti-Semitism, racism and constant skewering of American mores.

This film is going to be one hard sell, I can tell you that. Beyond the script written in the language of blue, Evan Rachel Wood, a very young actress, plays a character who performs a sultry striptease, delivers tons of (partially off screen) oral sex on both sexes, and freely owns to indulging in what one might now politely call the ballet dancer’s specialty.

I found Pretty Persuasion to be funny and outrageous, although not entirely successful. The people behind me were offended beyond recovery.

Reefer Madness
Based on the mini-cult off-off Broadway musical, which in turn was based on the original 30’s film which decried the dangers of marijuana usage, Reefer Madness desperately wants to be the next Rocky Horror Picture Show. (Based on that comparison alone, the impossibility of any sort of plot summary should be immediately obvious.)

The film’s opening number (“Reefer Madness”) is dreadful and it all gets off to a rocky (no pun) start. It picks up speed, however, and is largely enjoyable fluff.

While the songs themselves are not memorable, some of the performances certainly are. Alan Cumming chews on the scenery in all the appropriate places. Young lover ingénues Kristen Bell and Christian Campbell deliver the goods consistently throughout. Amy Spanger as a bad girl repeatedly kicks ass, singing and dancing. Robert Torti as a sexy, Vegas-style Jesus is hysterical. SNL regular Ana Gasteyer as the drug dealer’s moll is also a standout.

(Note: Reefer Madness was produced by Showtime. Theatrical release is unclear.)

The Worst
Between
A young woman goes in search of her missing sister in the border town of Tijuana. Very quickly, we enter a world of dream logic where scenes repeat with slightly different results. Hmmm. A world of dream logic. A border town. The movie that’s called Between. Could it be that our protagonist is…somehow not alive?

Although the buzz on Between was good, I have to say that this was one of the few out-and-out disappointments of the festival for me. The film is executed with workmanlike competence from a directorial standpoint (David Ocañas), but it feels like David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as it might have been developed for the Lifetime Channel. Our comatose and dreaming protagonist (Poppy Montgomery as the “I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter” version of Naomi Watts) must choose between joining her gorgeous young husband who is already dead or returning to consciousness. Because this is the schmaltzy version of a tired trope, she goes off to Heaven as personified by a gorgeous suburban McMansion.

The Girl from Monday
Ah, Hal Hartley. From a New Yorker’s perspective, he practically created the quirky independent American film genre. Beginning the mid-80’s, Hartley has been writing, directing, producing and composing the music for his sizeable body of work, which includes such art house and cult favs as The Unbelievable Truth, Trust, Simple Men and Henry Fool.

Unfortunately, The Girl from Monday is not a particularly good film. In fact, it’s really just a retelling of the mermaid fable. We find ourselves in the Earth of the future where the Orwellian world government is a media/military complex. The leader of the rebellion works in the government’s ad agency. He struggles to bring down the government, even as he comes up with some of the best ideas for keeping the people down through marketing. Suddenly, a beautiful woman from another world falls to our planet. On her world, individual identities are not differentiated and no one has a body. She has come in order to bring back a missing piece of her people. Someone who individuated to come to Earth and perhaps has forgotten who he is and how to return. Can you guess the rest of the plot from here? It’s the mermaid story, right? He can’t return to her (idyllic) world and she can’t stay in his (corrupt) world.

Watching The Girl from Monday, I couldn’t help but feel that the burden of doing it all is too much. Hartley desperately needs a collaborator. Someone to push him to develop certain themes more deeply. Someone to tell him to try a different angle. And someone to say no.

High School Record
This was the low point of the festival. Music video director Ben Wolfinsohn took a group of non-actors who are members of young LA bands and used improvisation to create a narrative.

The storyline is that two high schoolers are making a video record of the senior year of a group of students at an arts magnet school. While some scenes are genuinely funny and there is a lot of promise in the characters and some of the premises, the film is ultimately a desperately careless affair with some scenes finding a reason for existence and others falling terribly flat. When it was over, K. turned to a friend and said, “I want my two hours back.”

[NOTE: An apologies to the Yahoo Groups subscribers about getting this late. Technical difficulties.]