NYCweboy

One... And That's Not Funny. (Or, Are You Ready For The New Seriousness?)

Time and others are taking her (as usual) to task for her snarkiness, but I have to say I think Maureen Dowd is onto something... though not something that's as bad as she thinks.

Flash forward to the kerfuffle — and Obama’s icy reaction — over this week’s New Yorker cover parodying fears about the Obamas.

“We’ve already scratched thrift, candor and brevity off the list of virtues in this presidential cycle, so why not eliminate humor, too?” wrote James Rainey in The Los Angeles Times, suggesting “an irony deficiency” in Obama and his fans.

Many of the late-night comics and their writers — nearly all white — now admit to The New York Times’s Bill Carter that because of race and because there is nothing “buffoonish” about Obama — and because many in their audiences are intoxicated by him and resistant to seeing him skewered — he has not been flayed by the sort of ridicule that diminished Dukakis, Gore and Kerry.

Dowd, of course, is worried about being out of a job... or at least, as Joe Klein suggests, forced to be serious.. but as I said, I think she's on to something, something I've been noting for a couple of posts and counting: the New Yorker flap, the discussion of humorlessness... there's something of a sea-change coming in political comedy, I think.

The Return Of The Brown Years

Back in the eighties - when, in an un-ironic manner, we thought we were having a blast reviving the sixties - the worst thing in the world (no, really) was expressing any kind of positive nostalgia for the... *shudder*... seventies. Spy Magazine was the first place I saw the decade referred to as "The Brown Years", and the moniker seemed so appropriate: that awful mix of wood paneling, "harvest gold" appliances, plaid upholstered furniture... oh, the horror.

Somewhere along the way - I blame grunge - all of that got reversed: the eighties were suddenly tragic, plastic, big shouldered, mulleted and overly bright... and the seventies were sublime, underrated, and a design feast. (And of course, somewhere along the way, Spy turned into a pale imitation of itself... and now we get former Spy-meister Graydon Carter draining the joy out of Vanity Fair.)

The re-appraisal of the seventies, at first seemed fair: sure, much of the fashion was tragic, the polyester blends unfortunate... but reinterpreted and re-styled, it was clear that indeed some adventurous notions of interior design had been abandoned too soon. Dark wood floors, modernist furniture... even, as Jennifer notes to me frequently, the return of "wear what you like" fashion  had a liberating quality that had been missing for a while.

Well, all good things must pass... and the past couple of years have been a tipping point of figuring out what comes next in design and fashion, without a lot of clear indications. In th meantime, the celebration of seventies-chic appears to have run its course... and we are back to: The Brown Years.

So What's The Use (Wow, Bam) Of Falling In Love?

Meanwhile... though it seems I wrote nothing today,that's just because you don't check me out at New Critics, as I try to tell you... and this one, about the lead-up to Sex And The City... well, it's not bad. :)

-- Weboy

And It Was Late In The Evening...

...when I came back and said that my daytrip wth Jennifer was longer than I expected... and I left things unattended.  My apologies.

Jennifer I went up to Yale to see the exhibit on Gerald and Sara Murphy, friends of folks like Cole Porter, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Picasso... and Gerald was, himself, an impressive cubist/modernist painter in the twenties.  It was a fascinating show. Hopefully, I'll write some more shortly...

Or maybe Jennifer will. I spent some time this afternoon proofing her first post, and it's great. Hopefully should be up in a day or so.  And I'll be back to writing in earnest tomorrow morning (and then, one terribly long day at the 'bucks... another national training night).

Good night. :)

Crrritic!

My first post is up over at Newcritics. Check it out.  And check out Tom on John Adams. And this really interesting Lance Mannion post on Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys.

I may cross post eventually; but for now I'd like the two to have separate lives (and to get you to visit newcritics, which is a great place).

More up here shortly...

Ketchup!

Although I have a number of posts in the planning stages, there wasn't a lot of time today to write.

However, it's been an exciting weekend, in a number of ways, so I wanted to mention a couple of things about changes here and elsewhere.

(I'm always nervous when someone writes something like "changes here and elsewhere.")

Since I started blogging (uh-oh), I've been waiting to see what develops.  I started out with a paid gig - for which I am still grateful - but wound up largely here, on my own, hoping to see if anyone would notice little old me. As it turns out, people have... though not necessarily in ways, or for things, I ever dreamed. A world of Clinton blogging, and a post about Joan Crawford... who'd'a thunk?

Because of the confidence I am feeling about increased traffic to the site - as well as a couple of amazing, unexpected opportunities - I am going to try and upgrade the site over the next couple of weeks; hopefully this will include new features for the site, maybe a few ads, and hopefully some additional contributors (something that may lead to a name change... I don't know).

So, first, though I find myself saddened somewhat by the news that my dear pal RedStar is planning to quit the "personal blog" game, I'm thrilled to say that it looks like we may get to act on some ambitious talk to share a blog space.   It's premature to say what shape it may take (it depends in part on my upgrade, and just how much of me she'll put up with)), but I'm  glad to help keep her in the blogosphere, talking about the issues we both care about so much.

Second, but really first, I'm also incredibly grateful that Tom Watson graciously invited me to join the crowd at New Critics, a group of cultural observers - including the Self Styled Siren who got me onto the Crawford beat - doing the kind of cultural criticism I've been longing to do all along (and I mean "all along" as in "since I was about 16"). Look for me there shortly... but mostly look there.  It's great stuff, and I'm humbled to think I have something to add of value.

Really, I go to be tonight a satisfied, yet still excited weboy. Blogging has been fulfilling like French Fries - improving pretty much everything. And all these new opportunities... ketchup! :)

You Deserve An Award, For The Role That You Play

One of the less noticed news stories of last week was the latest round of "inductions" into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It's a little surprising, and a little telling, that even with Madonna's induction into The Hall, the event received really only passing coverage (I only caught it, after the fact, at Towleroad.

I'm going to include Madonna's remarks at her induction, because as a long time fan, I have to say she surprised yet again: though she was her usual feisty, challenging self, she was also genuinely touched at the honor, and her words are undeniably heartfelt:

But what got me thinking, and indeed got me to write this post, is that J in Baltimore wrote me the day after and said how annoyed he was that Donna Summer isn't in the Hall of Fame.  I was surprised; I said I thought she was.  As it turns out, I was wrong, but only when I checked the list of inductees did I realize just how oddly lopsided the proceedings have been.  Below, a list of the women who have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  All of them. In order of their induction (beginning with Ms. Franklin, in the Hall's second year). And while it's a little long to ask you to read past it for the rest of my thoughts, I'm confident you will when you realize... it's not long enough. Not nearly enough.

The Wondrous Silences

Last week marked the renewal of the Weboy's High Culture License.  A trip to the theater, the symphony, and the movies - the former 2, at least, likely to elicit "oohs and aahs" from co-workers for their general imprimatur of "classy" - made me feel less like the world I'm in is a cultural wasteland.

The play was William Inge's Come Back Little Sheba, centered around th lead performance of S. Epatha Merkerson, a/k/a everybody's favorite senior police officer on Law and Order (I hadn't been counting, but she's been in that part for 16 years). Merkerson's casting in the role was interesting because the casting was basically colorblind, and added a layer of interracial relations to the proceedings.

Though I thought I knew the substance of the play - I think of it as part of the "neo realist" part of the fifties, where theater and TV especially tried to do dramas that captured the very everyday nature of some conflicts and problems - but really, I didn't.  Merkerson plays Lola Delaney, a housewife married to a midwestern chiropractor, who, she reveals fairly early on, is a recovered alcoholic. Due to the state of their finances, they have needed to take in a boarder, a young woman named Marie, who is involved with a man back home, but is having a fling with the handsome sorts star who models for her art class.  Doc, the recovering alcoholic, has taken a shine to Marie, and disapproves of her liaison. And it all falls apart, when Lola arranges a dinner for Marie and her soon to be fiance, and Doc disappears on a drunken binge, only to return in a nearly murderous, alcoholic rage.

One can see how the play was a revelation for its time - alcoholism was still not widely discussed at the time, and the role of Alcoholic's Anonymous even less so, and Inge works in a lot of AA material, including a general sense of hopefulness about recovery that's welcome. But he does it all with something of heavy hand, and though the actors tried heroically, the dated impressions of drunken binges and out of character behavior didn't entirely work - though it makes a nice counterpoint to the sweet, sad, poetic drunks of O'Neill and say, Tennessee Wlliams.

What did work was Merkerson, whose abilities and talents are rarely on display in L&O. In this play, she found the heart of Lola's character, the world of a codependant woman trying, as best she knows, to deal with a bewildering problem she can't really fix. It would be easy to make this a tale of being beaten down and hopeless, and Merkerson really refuses to wallow: this Lola is a woman who plays the hand she's dealt, as best she knows how. And it's all the more heartbreaking because her choices are so circumscribed. There's a moment in the second act where, surrounded by reminders of Doc's alcoholic rage, she literally finds herself unable to carry on, to even move. It's a stunning, revelatory moment, and Merkerson makes it entirely true.

The thing is, what worked in this production best were moments like that, in the silences. What was left unsaid, what went unexplored... these are the things that made this Come Back Little Sheba so affecting as drama.  I suspect that wasn't always the case.  I suspect that, back then, even the modest admissions shown here - of day-to-day coping with alcoholism and its aftermath, of knowing that young single "nice girls" could be sexually active before marriage, of the emotional problems that underpin marriage... must have seemed, in themselves, like a revelation. That's not the case now - our world has moved, we know more, we talk more about these things (though, arguably, we could stand to do more of it).  It's the play that feels dated, slightly archaic, something of a throwback.  that it has the power - as it did for me - to continue to move an audience, and catch us short, was a tribute to sensitive, thoughtful direction and talented, impressive actors. I'm glad I caught it; I'm sorry, since it closed this weekend, that you can't.  But if someone has the brains to film it and bring it to TV or cable, try and catch it. Merkerson, and her costars, are wondrous. Especially in the silences.

George W. Bush, Art Major

From my lazy morning trolling of the web, this hilarious insight into the President from Jacob Weisberg at Slate:

Hollywood Ending

Though I wanted to write this post for a while, I did hold off until it seemed clear: but by every account the Writer's Strike has been settled, and the resolution seems to favor what the Writers were demanding all along.  And now that it's done, I think we can observe what the Strike means for our culture... and for our politics.  Below, a few bullet-point thoughts:

• Hollywood is pro-union, and America isn't anti-union. If there's a political lesson in this, it's that the strike and the settlement does conservatives absolutely no good; despite their usual anti-union screeds, the idea that Producers would "break" the Writer's Guild was at least wishful. This was never Reagan and the Air Traffic Controllers, or even Auto Makers and the UAW. Hollywood is a union town, people are used to union dealings, and employers are more than willing to use the collective bargaining process. And the fact that the strike didn't disrupt (much) of the habits of viewers of film and television made this a focused, successful work stoppage aimed at the people who would feel it, the people with the ability to stop it.  In other words, it was a textbook example of how strikes are a useful tool in the union toolbox. And that reality does nothing to help conservatives in this election cycle: the workers, united, don't seem to get defeated.  Guess who doesn't like to see the workers uniting? (And by the way, guess what Reagan's work hath wrought: we lack Air Traffic Controllers.)
• ...but Negotiation, not Intransigence, Is How You Win. So was I wrong in this post to bemoan the strike? I don't think so; I was theorizing about a worst case scenario that never really materialized, a long, painful affair where both sides dug in and never gave an inch.  Instead, what I suggested as an alternative turned out to be the winning strategy: the appearance of a willingness to negotiate made the writers look sympathetic, and the producers refusal, for several months, to even hold talks, made them look terrible.  Despite trying to turn the PR tables on the Writers (and having a sympathetic LA Times to sell their side of the story), the Producers looked like unhappy Scrooges by refusing to even come to the table. And though the DGA deal put some pressure on the Writers, it was the Producers who had to actually humble themselves by returning to negotiations. A corollary to this lesson: don't mess with people who know how to write. The writers made their case with a warmth and humor that comes from... knowing how to make a persuasive case using, um, words.