I wish I'd seen Times Square before they cleaned it up, but when I went to New York in my misspent youth, I always went to Harlem or the Village. Now--except for the theaters on the side streets--Times Square's become a generic tourist attraction, with Toys R Us, a Hershey store, Hard Rock Cafe, etc., etc., etc.
I'm not so much nostalgic for the X-rated sleaze that used to infest the area as confessing a certain sadness when any distinctive place becomes just like everywhere else. Pretty soon, all of America will look the same, and you'll have to ask the locals to know where you are.
One measure of how little I get out these days is how surprised I was at the number of people I saw with tattoos. I don't just mean boys and girls with nose or eybrow rings and magenta hair, or the bouncer-like types guarding the Hard Rock Cafe. I saw more than a few women with tattoos pushing baby carriages, including one with what looked like green vines running up her left arm, under her sleeve, over her chest, and up her neck.
The last time we went to New York, I agonized over whether to wear a suit to the theater. I knew better this time, but I was still surprised to see an older man wearing a polo shirt, bright red shorts, and running shoes without socks take a seat a few rows in front of us.
At least he wasn't passing a bucket of fried chicken to his seatmates.
It made me nostalgic for a time I know only through movies and stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a time when men and women dressed up to go to the theater. Why, back then men even wore suits to baseball games!
Nowadays, of course, it's gotten harder and harder to tell who the grownups are, because most of us who aren't anymore still want to pretend we're young.
Walking towards the train at Union Station in Washington, I saw two women who appeared to be in their seventies, both dressed in the kind of multi-colored bell-bottomed clothes some hippie chick might have worn to the Fillmore 40 years ago.
It reminded me of the couple with gray-streaked ponytails, sandals, blue jeans, and tie-dyed t-shirts that I saw in the supermarket years ago. They were in the vitamin aisle, and the man had a bottle close to his nose, wire-rimmed glasses on his forehead, so he could read the fine print.
Later, out in the parking lot, I watched them get into a PT Cruiser with hot-rod flames on the sides. It had handicapped plates.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
On Broadway
My wife and I just got back from New York, where we stayed in a nice little hotel--the Mela--and saw two plays, the revival of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit, starring Rupert Everett and Angela Lansbury, and God of Carnage, which won Tony Awards for Best Play and Best Actress (Marcia Gay Harden.)
I'm not going to write reviews here (I did too much of that working for The Washington Post's Book World). But it's enough to say I liked both enormously.
I'd wanted to see them because of their casts--Lansbury, of course, but also Harden, Jeff Daniels, James Gandolfini, and Hope Davis in God Of Carnage. I wasn't disappointed. The acting in each play is excellent and I felt the way I imagine my son does when I read one of his favorite stories, enchanted and enthralled, willingly suspending my disbelief.
Both plays are laugh-out-loud comedies, though you laugh for different reasons at each one.
In Blithe Spirit, a seance goes haywire, and successful novelist Charles (Everett) finds himself haunted by the ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Christine Ebersole). As good as Everett, Ebersole, and Jayne Atkinson are (Atkinson plays Charles' second, put-upon wife, Ruth), it's Lansbury as the wacky, bicycle-riding medium, Madam Arcati, who steals the show.
Lansbury's 83, but she cavorts around the stage with the energy and enthusiasm of a far younger woman.
A far darker comedy, God of Carnage tells of a couple Alan and Annette (Daniels and Davis) whose son has assaulted the son of Michael and Veronica (Gandolfini and Harden) on the playground, knocking out two of his teeth. What starts as an amicable meeting to discuss the incident quickly turns ugly as the couples trade insults, drink more than they should, and tear the masks off each other and themselves.
It was all great fun. New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley put it best: "Never underestimate the pleasure of watching really good actors behaving badly."
I'm not going to write reviews here (I did too much of that working for The Washington Post's Book World). But it's enough to say I liked both enormously.
I'd wanted to see them because of their casts--Lansbury, of course, but also Harden, Jeff Daniels, James Gandolfini, and Hope Davis in God Of Carnage. I wasn't disappointed. The acting in each play is excellent and I felt the way I imagine my son does when I read one of his favorite stories, enchanted and enthralled, willingly suspending my disbelief.
Both plays are laugh-out-loud comedies, though you laugh for different reasons at each one.
In Blithe Spirit, a seance goes haywire, and successful novelist Charles (Everett) finds himself haunted by the ghost of his first wife, Elvira (Christine Ebersole). As good as Everett, Ebersole, and Jayne Atkinson are (Atkinson plays Charles' second, put-upon wife, Ruth), it's Lansbury as the wacky, bicycle-riding medium, Madam Arcati, who steals the show.
Lansbury's 83, but she cavorts around the stage with the energy and enthusiasm of a far younger woman.
A far darker comedy, God of Carnage tells of a couple Alan and Annette (Daniels and Davis) whose son has assaulted the son of Michael and Veronica (Gandolfini and Harden) on the playground, knocking out two of his teeth. What starts as an amicable meeting to discuss the incident quickly turns ugly as the couples trade insults, drink more than they should, and tear the masks off each other and themselves.
It was all great fun. New York Times reviewer Ben Brantley put it best: "Never underestimate the pleasure of watching really good actors behaving badly."
Friday, June 26, 2009
We Wear the Mask
The death of Michael Jackson gives me occasion to remember Stanley Crouch's essay "Man in the Mirror," which appeared in the collection Notes of a Hanging Judge.
Responding to those who (simplistically) thought Jackson's plastic surgery a sign of his self-hatred and the singer's desire "to eradicate his Negroid features," Crouch launched a long riff on masks and how we Americans improvise our identities; on practices of ritual mutilation and scarification in Africa; and on minstrel shows and gender bending.
It was Crouch's conclusion that got me, though, when I reviewed the book when it came out in 1997.
Responding to those who (simplistically) thought Jackson's plastic surgery a sign of his self-hatred and the singer's desire "to eradicate his Negroid features," Crouch launched a long riff on masks and how we Americans improvise our identities; on practices of ritual mutilation and scarification in Africa; and on minstrel shows and gender bending.
It was Crouch's conclusion that got me, though, when I reviewed the book when it came out in 1997.
"When a man's power is found in an adolescent form, time impinges upon his vitality," he wrote. "If sufficiently spooked, he might be moved to invent a world for himself in which all evidence that he was ever born a particular person at a particular time is removed. That removal might itself become the strongest comment upon the inevitable gloom that comes not of having been given too much too soon but of having been convinced that one is important only so long as he or she is not too old."
The Coming Apocalypse
Two of the scariest books I've ever read are Colman McCarthy's The Road and Thomas L. Friedman's Hot, Flat, and Crowded.
The Road, which has been made into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen and forthcoming in October, is the story of a man and his son wandering in post-apocalyptic America.
Just what's happened--nuclear war? environmental disaster?--isn't clear. But all of society's institutions have collapsed and the unnamed protagonist and his son roam through a bleak, unforgiving landscape where nothing grows and people eat other people to survive.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded shows us how this terrible future could come to pass.
It's a big book--438 pages--and Friedman would have been better served by an editor who made him cut 100 pages or so. Midway through, there's a a long, italicized section about how technology could help us use less energy without significantly altering the way we live that seemed more authorial self-indulgent than absolutely necessary to me.
But, quibbles aside, this is an important--and very scary--book that lays out in exhaustive detail how we got to the point where global warming threatens all life on Earth and what we can do about it.
Yes, Friedman says, there is a solution. The problem is, we needed to have started yesterday.
The Road, which has been made into a movie starring Viggo Mortensen and forthcoming in October, is the story of a man and his son wandering in post-apocalyptic America.
Just what's happened--nuclear war? environmental disaster?--isn't clear. But all of society's institutions have collapsed and the unnamed protagonist and his son roam through a bleak, unforgiving landscape where nothing grows and people eat other people to survive.
Hot, Flat, and Crowded shows us how this terrible future could come to pass.
It's a big book--438 pages--and Friedman would have been better served by an editor who made him cut 100 pages or so. Midway through, there's a a long, italicized section about how technology could help us use less energy without significantly altering the way we live that seemed more authorial self-indulgent than absolutely necessary to me.
But, quibbles aside, this is an important--and very scary--book that lays out in exhaustive detail how we got to the point where global warming threatens all life on Earth and what we can do about it.
Yes, Friedman says, there is a solution. The problem is, we needed to have started yesterday.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Celebrating Loving Day
Today, June 12, is Loving Day, a time to remember Richard and Mildred Loving, the couple--he was white; she was of mixed black, white, and Indian ancestry--whose suit resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court overturning laws against interracial marriage in at least 16 states.
You can read more about the Lovings at the link above or at lovingday.org.
For two years, my wife and I hosted Loving Day celebrations at our home in Washington, D.C. (One appears in the picture above.)
We're unable to host a celebration this year, which is unfortunate, because Loving Day has particular meaning for us now that we live in Virginia. Forty-two years ago we, too, could have been arrested for violating state law.
But even though we can't host a celebration, we'll still take a moment to remember the Lovings and honor their courage and their desire to live in full possession of all their rights.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
At the Movies. . .
Twenty-five years ago, I started a magazine called Black Film Review because the movies I was seeing--and I went to the pictures a lot back then--either had no black characters or else featured thinly disguised stereotypes of the kind present in American culture since the beginning.
When I go to the movies these days, mostly I go with my 8-year-old son. Confounded by how little has changed, I'm beginning to wonder if it might not be time to resurrect BFR.
Take the new Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.
The first in the series, Night at the Museum, featured the great Bill Cobbs in a fairly large supporting role, but--unless I'm forgetting someone--no black characters among the historical figures who magically come alive once the museum closes.
The sequel remedies that, featuring a group of Tuskeegee Airmen in two or three scenes, though none of them is really important to the picture.
Is the paucity of black figures in the two movies the result of the filmmakers' ignorance? Or are the pictures a fantasy that blacks weren't really part of American history?
I'd be a lot more depressed about this if I hadn't seen the new Star Trek, which features lots of steamy looks between Capt. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana), and more than a few steamy kisses between Uhura and Spock (Zachary Quinto). Of course, as real fans know, in 1968 Nichelle Nichols' Uhura and William Shatner's Kirk shared what might have been the first televised interracial kiss.
Sadly, in 2009 "post-racial" America, there's less of those kinds of interracial relationships in the movies than there are in real life.
Last week, the New York Times ran a story about Phylicia Rashad's role at the mother in August: Osage County. It's an inspired piece of what's sometimes called "non-traditional casting," as Rashad's family in the play--husband, daughter, sister, and others--are all white.
Too bad Hollywood can't be as colorblind.
When I go to the movies these days, mostly I go with my 8-year-old son. Confounded by how little has changed, I'm beginning to wonder if it might not be time to resurrect BFR.
Take the new Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian.
The first in the series, Night at the Museum, featured the great Bill Cobbs in a fairly large supporting role, but--unless I'm forgetting someone--no black characters among the historical figures who magically come alive once the museum closes.
The sequel remedies that, featuring a group of Tuskeegee Airmen in two or three scenes, though none of them is really important to the picture.
Is the paucity of black figures in the two movies the result of the filmmakers' ignorance? Or are the pictures a fantasy that blacks weren't really part of American history?
I'd be a lot more depressed about this if I hadn't seen the new Star Trek, which features lots of steamy looks between Capt. Kirk (Chris Pine) and Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldana), and more than a few steamy kisses between Uhura and Spock (Zachary Quinto). Of course, as real fans know, in 1968 Nichelle Nichols' Uhura and William Shatner's Kirk shared what might have been the first televised interracial kiss.
Sadly, in 2009 "post-racial" America, there's less of those kinds of interracial relationships in the movies than there are in real life.
Last week, the New York Times ran a story about Phylicia Rashad's role at the mother in August: Osage County. It's an inspired piece of what's sometimes called "non-traditional casting," as Rashad's family in the play--husband, daughter, sister, and others--are all white.
Too bad Hollywood can't be as colorblind.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
It Made it Hard to Type. . .
About two weeks ago, I was trying to force a metal handle onto a ceramic container we keep (actually, make that kept) in the kitchen to collect foood waste for composting.
The container shattered, leaving a cut on my left palm that required a trip to an urgent care center and four stitches,
The downside to all this was not being able to use the computer. The upside was discovering it was possible to live without e-mail.
The stitches came out earlier this week. We now have a metal container on the kitchen counter.
The container shattered, leaving a cut on my left palm that required a trip to an urgent care center and four stitches,
The downside to all this was not being able to use the computer. The upside was discovering it was possible to live without e-mail.
The stitches came out earlier this week. We now have a metal container on the kitchen counter.
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