THE SIMMERING BROTH FROM "MAD MEN"
It’s hard to remember now, but before 1998 the starrier kind of Hollywood actor was a rarity on the British stage. Then Nicole Kidman got semi-naked in “The Blue Room”, to the sweaty-palmed delight of the papers. Now it’s almost a commonplace: when Jeff Goldblum returned recently for a second stint in the West End, he was only the third interview on BBC Radio 4’s “Midweek” after a female adventurer from Norway and a newspaper cartoonist. Some, though, still whet the appetite. Elisabeth Moss, for example (right), who will be leading “The Children’s Hour”, Lillian Hellman’s cracking schoolma’am melodrama from 1934, which opens this weekend.
Some remember Moss as the president’s daughter in the “West Wing”, but it is Peggy in “Mad Men” that made her. Her performance—a simmering broth of dowdiness, naivety and slow-burn ambition—has earned her two Emmy nominations, for best supporting actress and best leading actress, a measure of the vivid life she has brought to the role. She has earned her laurels on stage, too. In a Broadway revival of Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” a couple of years ago she was Karen, the dogged but driven secretary. The casting director may not have won awards for originality, but critics were thrilled by the way Moss’s crisp wit clarified a character famously muddied by Madonna. So ignore the other big name in “The Children’s Hour” (Keira Knightley, often pancake-flat) and go to see Moss play a closeted lesbian tormented by a lying pupil: it could be just the right canvas for her quiet artfulness.
RIDDLED WITH OPPOSITES
In a world full of questions, the Royal Academy is about to pose three more. What is modern? What is British? And what is sculpture? The answer is a blockbuster exhibition—the first in 30 years to examine the peaks (and troughs) of 20th-century British sculpture, with a distinguished line-up including Damien Hirst, Richard Long, Anthony Caro and Jacob Epstein.
The exhibition will be urging us to compare and contrast with some strongly themed galleries. The pairing of Henry Moore’s “Festival Figure” with Barbara Hepworth’s “Single Form” (pictured) is a case in point. Moore’s work is figurative while Hepworth’s is abstract; Moore’s was commissioned for the 1951 Festival of Britain, Hepworth’s for the United Nations Plaza in New York ten years later.
Sculpture is a language riddled with opposites. Its most successful practitioners create forms that are both solid and fluid, manifesting boldness and fragility at the same time. In response, the curators have produced a show which encourages us to uncover new connections through innovative comparisons. Phillip King’s “Genghis Khan” is simple and stylised; Alfred Gilbert’s “Queen Victoria” is highly decorative. Yet here they are together, exchanging regal glances. read more »
THE FEED: JAN 20TH
What we're reading:
What happens when we look back?
(Scientific American): Studies show that imagining 'what could have been' might have a useful "ironic and tonic effect"
"Words and deeds"
(New Yorker): Parsing the language of the Gabrielle Giffords shooting
Today's quote:
“This high-flying Taylor extravaganza, in which actors have been regularly commuting from the theater to the hospital and preview audiences have been made unwitting witnesses to the construction of a second act, is a special case if ever there was one. It's reasonable to give a new musical time, but there's a difference between fine tuning a show and workshopping a commercial enterprise on the backs of overcharged consumers..”
~ Charles McNulty "Critic's Notebook: 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' needs some light shed on it by critics, and soon" (Los Angeles Times)
HOT AS SUN
You probably don't know Hot As Sun yet. For starters, the ethereal, synth-poppy, female duo that is Jamie Jackson and Deborah Stoll have only just played their first show at The Echo in Los Angeles. Their songs are ripe for road trips, but their repertoire is not extensive enough to take you great distances just yet. But you probably should get to know them, and not just because this music video is weirdly revelatory (in ways that Ok Go's Damian Kulash might recommend for their future solvency):
ON JOURNALISM, BOOKS AND OTHERWISE
Robert Cottrell, a former colleague, mad genius, the original editor of More Intelligent Life and a co-founder of the excellent Browser, offers his picks for the five best books on journalism. (Yes, "Scoop" by Evelyn Waugh makes the cut.)
On "The Imperfectionists" by Tom Rachman:
One point that I didn’t see made in the reviews, perhaps because it’s not true, is that I think this may be the last good-to-great novel ever to be written about newspaper journalism from first-hand experience. From now on, books about newspapers will be have to be researched from other books about newspapers.
Naturally we clung to the hem of his garment when he was in these offices. We have just spilled a drop of our mid-day martini to commemorate his absence.
A VERY FESTIVE FESTIVAL
Held at the Diggi Palace in India’s Pink City, the Jaipur Literature Festival is hugely popular, not least because it’s free: in 2010 it drew an estimated 30,000 people, a third of them from overseas. Led by the travel writer William Dalrymple and the novelist-publisher Namita Gokhale, it lays on a spicy variety of speakers, including Richard Ford, J.M. Coetzee, Mohsin Hamid, Kiran Desai, Kamila Shamsie, Jung Chang, Martin Amis and Orhan Pamuk.
Jaipur, Dalrymple says, “really is a festival. The buildings are festooned with streamers, thousands of people mill around, we let off fireworks at night, and after 6.30 the writers have to shut up and give over to music and dancing.”
DSC Jaipur Literature Festival January 21st to 25th
Picture Credit: lamoney (via Flickr)
THE FEED: JAN 18TH
What we're reading:
How is Iraq's National Symphony doing?
(Wall Street Journal): "We've moved forward a lot," says Karim Wasfi, director and chief conductor. "I'm now able to struggle with artistic quality—getting the music right—rather than logistics or mere survival"
Of course he considered himself a "Nietzschean"
(Slate): How Nietzsche gets misunderstood by Jared Loughner types
the "last bastion of individuality"—ie, art—is "crumbling, invaded by art as a group activity"
Today's quote:
“Even though O assumed it wouldn’t happen, he wished The Barracuda, as he liked to think of her, would join the Republican race. O knew they wouldn’t be that lucky, but he had let himself imagine such a contest. He had watched her speak to a rally of her faithful. There she was, thick hair piled up high, chin out, defiant, taunting, flaunting that whole lusty librarian thing, sweet and savory, mother and predator, alluring and dangerous.” read more »
TRAGEDY IN BLACK AND WHITE
Rape is “fundamental in destroying communities,” explains Marcus Bleasdale, a photographer who has spent years documenting brutalities within the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the slideshow below, he narrates a stream of images that capture the bleak lives of women who have been raped in the region. His photographs, compiled in the book “The Rape of a Nation” (2009), chronicle a dire and remote world that is all too easily ignored. They are also quite remarkable to look at.
As this excellent article in this week’s Economist makes plain, rape is being used systematically as a weapon of war throughout the world. In sub-Saharan Africa, where most (but not all) of war-time rape takes place, women are the glue of society, observes Mr Bleasdale. They nurture and educate the children, they plant the crops and oversee their harvest; most of the work that takes place in an African village is done by women. But when they are raped, as hundreds are every day in the war-torn regions, these women and girls are tossed out of their homes with nothing but their shame. Most are too busy scrambling for food to seek medical help, which they can hardly afford anyway. (In a feat of alchemy, Lynn Nottage managed to turn this subject into a fine play with "Ruined", for which she duly won a Pulitzer.)
Mr Bleasdale has done his subjects a service in these arresting photographs. In the interview below, he talks about the challenges of conveying the horrors of the violence while also protecting the identity of these girls and women. read more »
J.D. SALINGER'S MISERLY LEGAL LEGACY
J.D. Salinger's infamous mania for privacy included a rather self-defeating litigious streak. One of the author's final public acts was to file a lawsuit enjoining the publication of a book that otherwise would have passed immediately into obscurity. That case was finally settled last week, ensuring Salinger's legacy as the preeminent enemy of open culture in American letters.
"60 Years Later: Coming through the Rye" by Frederik Colting, a previously unknown Swede writing under the pen-name "John David California", tells the metafictional tale of J.D. Salinger's desire to resurrect his most famous character so that he can kill him in print, thereby silencing the troubling voice in his head. But Mr Colting's elderly Holden Caulfield proxy—whom he calls "Mr C"—escapes his nursing home to revisit his New York haunts 60 years later, all the while eluding his creator's lethal authorial intentions. read more »
THE FEED: JAN 14TH
What we're reading:
Before Britannica, before Wikipedia
(Washington Post): A review of "Too Much to Know", Ann M. Blair's latest book on early modes of "information management"
When less is less, less is more
(Slate): How the recession has changed architecture for the better
"Coming Through the Rye"?
(BBC News): Swedish author Fredrik Colting settled with Salinger's estate; his sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" will not be published in the America or Canada
Today's quote:
"Without surrendering sugar, dessert had surrendered all its familiar forms—the cake, the soufflé, the pudding—as the avant-garde novel had surrendered narrative, character, and moral. Losing our faith in art is, in a secular culture, what losing our faith in God was to a religious one; God only knows what losing our faith in desserts must be."
~ Adam Gopnik, "The science and imagination behind modern dessert" (New Yorker)
Comment of the moment
quote I agree absolutely with its broad conclusions, but there's a real danger in conceding too easily the non-scientific status of psychoanalysis, and allowing CBT and related practises to claim a uniquely scientific standing...