Blog: The Determined Dilettante

So, Legally Blonde … First of all, it plays at the Palace, where I saw Liza Minnelli do her creepy but enthralling tribute to her father, Minnelli on Minnelli , in 1999. My pal Moe had gotten us balcony seats but we were able to sneak down to a better section as the show was pathetically undersold. This was in the pre– David Gest days, when Liza was physically and psychologically struggling, and she even did a number in a wheelchair—as a bit of a lark, but not [...]

I just noticed that director Ariane Mnouchkine has been writing a campaign blog hosted by the daily newspaper Libération (which has thrown all pretense of journalistic neutrality to the wind and openly supports Ségolène Royal's candidacy). Her latest post, dated from yesterday, is a plea for people to vote Ségolène Royal. It is impassioned and poetic, and those lucky enough to have seen Mnouchkine's stage work will recognize the tone. It ends with these words: "Will you stand it on Sunday night to learn that we missed by a vote? A single one. Yours. I implore [...]

It's raining postapocalyptic novels! Cormac McCarthy's The Road has pulled off a neat little trifecta—Pulitzer, Oprah and film deal. Matthew Sharpe's Jamestown and Jim Crace's The Pesthouse are getting reviewed everywhere Crace got Francine Prose in the Times and Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker —double whammy! Personally I found the latter book a flimsy little read, with too many plotholes (I'm willing to buy that America has reverted to feudal times while Europe seems to do relatively better, but why hasn't anybody ever returned from across the pond to [...]

My short review of Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is out in the new TONY. How I wish I had liked this book more. I agree with almost everything in it, and yet found it to be a tiresome slog; by the end, I felt as if I was stuck on the subway next to a self-righteous stranger screaming in my ear. Of course it's kinda moot to say that a reasonable tone would be more successful in luring believers—if believers were susceptible to reason, [...]

For a regular fix of home, we French expats in New York tune to France 2's evening news, shown here at 7pm. They're even subtitled for monolingual American viewers who want to experience TV news utterly devoid of neckless sportscasters. Judging from this screen grab, Nicolas Sarkozy had a refreshingly candid moment. But alas, it turns out there was a mistake in that subtitle—and no, it wasn't the repetition of "that we can." Sarko was inviting the French to rally around him, but the translator took some liberties. While many would think he or she simply verbalized Sarko's implied thought, [...]

That sad little medium (to quote from the brilliant Canadian series Slings & Arrows, which I've belatedly discovered) is theater, of course. It's true that its voice can get lost in our current maelstrom of media offerings, but its potential wonders remain unmatched. Emphasis on potential here, because we all know you have to kiss a lot of frogs to chance upon a prince. The latest batrachian I encountered was Aldo Perez 's The Curse of the Mystic Renaldo The, which I caught Friday night at the brand-spanking-new [...]

I was bummed to miss Dimmu Borgir's show at Nokia—and I'm even more bummed now that I've read Steve Smith's account . Steve is dead right about the fact that hipsters tend to laugh at bombastic black metal and prefer BM when it's recorded on hissy 4-track by misanthropic loners with mommy issues. But while I do enjoy the latter subgenre, particularly when oozing out of Burzum, Draugar, Leviathan or Xasthur's nether regions, there's no denying that over-the-top BM is giddily enjoyable, as theatrically satisfying as classic disco and an evening at the Met. I particularly love reading [...]

I saw in my very own magazine (well, the one I work for, not my property—which would be, I gather, this humble blog) that some people take their BlackBerry to the beach. Let me reassure you, dear readers, that I myself am getting ready to go to the beach, but you sure as hell won't hear from me for the next six days. Nope, I'm going off the grid, as the young, the eco-warriors and the survivalists say. (I have no idea where this came from, considering I don't belong to any of these three groups.) Okay, fine, so I [...]

Three pieces in the new Time Out New York : a review of Charlotte Gainsbourg's album, 5:55 ; a review of Elizabeth Hand's latest novel, Generation Loss ; and a blow-by-blow account of my shopping trip to the Mitsuwa mall in Edgewater, NJ. In tribute to Gainsbourg père et fille, here's a cover of their infamous duet "Lemon Incest" (which liberally borrows from a Chopin piece) by the excellent Belgian duo Vive la Fête, aka Danny Mommens and Els Pynoo. [fixed link] MP3 [...]

Braving a raging rainstorm, we caught Salvage, the third and final chapter of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia yesterday afternoon. Hours and hours of Russian philosophizing, and what do we, the hardy audience members, get? A wet blanket of a play. A timid whimper. A soap opera that dares not speak its name. Unlike the first two installments, which offered a variety of points of view within a motley group of (mostly) Russian characters, Salvage is dominated by one person; unfortunately, it happens to be played by Brían F. O'Byrne, in [...]

Just got some advance promo for Ken Burns' new marathon doc, The War, coming to PBS in September '07. The war in question is WWII, which is described on the package as "the greatest cataclysm in history." I won't argue with that. What really gets up my nose is that The War will portray said cataclysm "through the stories of ordinary people in four American towns." Hey, Ken, it's not called World War II for nothing! So does this mean the doc will only cover 1941–45, when America participated, [...]

If you went to college in Paris in the '80s, as I did, a rite of passage was to go see Hellzapoppin'. That nuttoid 1941 movie played constantly, usually at the Action Rive Gauche theater, and it was obligatory viewing for budding cinephiles. I haven't seen it in more than 20 years because the flick's fairly unknown in the U.S., a situation not helped by its unavailability on DVD (something to do with rights, I gather). Lucky for us New Yorkers, Anthology Film Archives has scheduled a rare screening of Hellzapoppin' for Saturday 7 at 7:3opm. [...]

Nah, not the BBC but the upcoming stage adaptation of Ann Bannon's pulp novel Beebo Brinker. I mentioned this cool project a little while ago, and now a fundraising event has been announced. Go there to sign up. And while we're on a girly bent: I went to the Brooklyn Museum to check out its new exhibit, Global Feminisms, along with Judy Chicago's Dinner Party (pictured above). As far as the contemporary works go, I was underwhelmed by a certain lack of emphasis [...]

What better way to unwind after an exhausting Saturday afternoon shopping at Century One (the one in Bay Ridge, of course, where untouched racks of Ted Baker and Ben Sherman shirts await) than listening to French public radio on podcast? Even better: One of my favorites shows—Kathleen Evin's usually sedate L'humeur vagabonde —ran into a highly entertaining glitch called Jeanne Balibar. Balibar is a French actress with an immediately identifiable voice (not unlike that of Delphine Seyrig) and immediately identifiable intellectual aspirations (inherited perhaps from her philosophy professor of a father, Etienne Balibar, [...]

My review of the compilation Bippp: French Synth-Wave 1978/85 is in the current issue of Time Out New York. Let's use this opportunity to pay tribute to the cold wave that did not sweep a nation back in the late '70s and early '80s with songs from Bippp and Transmission, a comp covering the 1980s French dark wave. Quite a few French alt-bands discovered synthesizers and punk at about the same time, as the Métal Urbain reissues from a few years ago showed. Add [...]

Today a colleague playfully—I think—called me evil. But how can I be evil when I go weak in the knees thinking about Darren Hayes ? Really, it's just a metaphysical impossibility. What possessed me to go see Hayes—oh hell, let's just call him Darren—at Joe's Pub last night? Savage Garden, of which he was half, used to send me to sleep. In addition, I'd heard only a couple of his solo songs, including the admittedly excellent "Popular." Actually what pushed me into going was the fact that Darren's two gigs sold out in something like ten [...]

Coincidentally, I've just seen back-to-back two shows that look at what being a performer entails. Never mind that one is a decidedly mainstream Broadway musical and the other is staged by a British experimental company at PS 122—both, in their own ways, look at what it means when the world is a stage, and the stage is your world. Kander & Ebb's latest (and last), Curtains, is getting a bit of a rough deal from the press. Are my expectations simply lower when it comes to Broadway musicals, so that I'd find that tuner so satisfying? [...]

BAM seems to have turned into an annex of the British Consulate. Right now, it's hosting not one, not two, but three imported productions at the same time—and in longer runs than is usual at BAM. Let's start with the dispensable offering. At the Opera House we have Matthew Bourne's adaptation of Edward Scissorhands. The production is eye candy but its pleasures pretty much stop there: It never graduates from pleasing to thrilling. Even the big ensemble dances—something to which I usually respond in a Pavlovian manner—failed to raise my pulse. It's hard to pinpoint where [...]

News has surfaced that lefty filmmaker Ken Loach—whose latest, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is currently playing in NYC—is supporting the candidacy of Olivier Besancenot for the French presidential elections. Give me a friggin' break! Besancenot means well, but he's also stuck in an illusory past and preaching for a no-less-illusory future. Besancenot is the candidate of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), a Trotskyist party long associated with Alain Krivine, who himself ran for president in 1969, 1974 and 1981. To his credit, Besancenot, a postman by trade, isn't as reactionary and sectarian [...]

See these guys on the left? They played Roseland Thursday night, except for some reason they were never mentioned in the New York Times' review of the show. The very first sentence announced "a very strong triple bill"—Machine Head, Trivium and headliner Lamb of God. Poor, poor Gojira, who went on first and completed what actually was a very strong quadruple bill. Reviewer Kelefa Sanneh also described "the most discordant moment of the night" as when the crowd responded to Lamb of God singer Randy Blythe's injunction to "Give it up for Trivium!" with a mix [...]