I'm not a theologian...

...but I play one on the radio!

I mentioned that there wasn't much "news" behind last week's New York Times story about the curious Catholic practice of seeking indulgences. Nevertheless, the topic generated enough interest that I ended up trying to explain how indulgences work on Canadian public radio! The interview I did for Commonweal made the final segment of last night's As It Happens on CBC Radio One. You can hear all six minutes on the As It Happens website: Click on "Listen to Part 3" and skip ahead to 22:47.

Isn't it pretty to think so?

On February 11, the Wall Street Journal ran a brief editorial entitled "Obama's Press List." As you might recall, President Bush was criticized for avoiding and disdaining the press, whereas President Obama has (so far) been making an effort to hold frequent press conferences and to seem generally respectful of the Fourth Estate. Of course, White House press conferences are painful to watch no matter who presides. If you want to learn how to avoid answering a direct question, they're master classes. If you want actual information, they're generally a waste of time. But I digress. Objectively, Obama is working harder to respect and accommodate the media than Bush did. But what about those members of the media who worked hard to respect and accommodate Bush? Isn't there a way for them to turn this state of affairs on its head, making a comparison that is somehow unflattering to Obama?

The WSJ editorial snidely called Obama out for working from a predetermined list as he called on members of the press. "Presidents are free to conduct press conferences however they like, but the decision to preselect questioners is an odd one, especially for a White House famously pledged to openness," it declared. "We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors."

Comparisons aren't arguments; they're substitutes for arguments. But if you're going to play the "What if the situation were different?" game, you ought to at least make sure your comparison isn't ignoring what happened when the situation actually was different. Because -- in case you haven't guessed -- President Bush did, of course, "prescreen his interlocutors."

We know this because then-White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said so during a press conference in 2003. (H/t to Media Matters.) At least, that seems to be the gist of this choppy transcript:

Q: Last night, after the fifth time has looked down at an apparent list of reporters, he smiled and he said, this is scripted.

MR. FLEISCHER: Are you going to complain he didn't call on you?

Q: No, no, no. No, no. Which surely suggests that he did not write that script which gave two questions to one network, two questions to one wire service, and one to other vague and wealthy media -- but left all the rest, including Helen Thomas, ruled out in advance of any chance to ask, and left to serve only as window dressing.

And my question is, since you are always fair, Ari, in recognizing all of us, who was it that wrote that script that the President confessed to? Was it Karl Rove or Karen or who?

MR. FLEISCHER: It was me who gave the President a suggestion on the reporters to call. And the President called on all reporters, the President did not call on any columnists.

Oh, but that was all the way back in 2003, you say. Yes, but Fleischer explained the process in greater detail earlier this week -- this week -- on The O'Reilly Factor. O'Reilly tried to make the same flimsy argument the WSJ is advancing in their editorial, only to be corrected by his guest, Fleischer, who explained that George Bush did indeed have "a list of guys he was going to call on" in his press conferences. Read all about it at the FAIR blog.

Here's how the editorial ends:

Few accounts of Monday night's event even mentioned the curious fact that the White House had picked its speakers in advance. We hope that omission wasn't out of fear of being left off the list the next time.

Zing! Except it wasn't so much an "omission" as it was a "failure to comment on a routine detail," and it was probably not identified as "curious" "out of fear" of being totally wrong.

So, just to recap: The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial in which they tried to paint Obama and his administration as controlling and untrustworthy, alleging that his behavior was "odd" and that President Bush would never have gotten away with a similar affront to the media. But, in fact, the procedure in question is standard, and Bush did just what Obama did. And, QED, he "got away with it." AND, perhaps most humiliating, this whole silly accusation was already advanced and debunked on Bill "no relation!" O'Reilly's show two days earlier. So... that's something to keep in mind when you're trying to decide whether to linger over the WSJ editorial page.

Meanwhile, The Daily Show did its own Bush/Obama press-conference-style comparison a month ago. But they went to the tapes. And it paid off. (The part about 2 minutes in is particularly relevant.)

Everything old is new again

I feel like I should do some outreach here. But rather than catalog the many minor inaccuracies and distortions in yesterday's front-page New York Times article about the practice of granting indulgences (it's not "absolution"; the practice never really went anywhere; this particular indulgence has been available since June, and not just locally; etc.), may I just point you to the relevant post at dotCommonweal? By coincidence, we talked about heaven, hell, purgatory, etc. in our RCIA group this week, so I've been doing a lot of research and reading on the topic. Googling has been a depressing activity since this article surfaced (and became the "most e-mailed" on the NYT site! For two days now!): so much misinformation, so many nasty remarks about those backward Catholics out there in the blogosphere. But the discussion at dotCommonweal has been lively (and mostly good-natured). Believe it or not, there are intelligent people who take this idea seriously, and some of them even have a sense of humor about it! Why not indulge your curiosity? (See what I did there?)

Don't criticize what you can't understand

I never really had strong feelings about New Yorker film critic David Denby, as some subscribers do. He was less entertaining than Anthony Lane, but not unreadable; and yes, he was occasionally out of his depth, but aren't they all? If he'd been writing about theatre perhaps I'd have been more sensitive to his shortcomings, but his movie reviews never really rubbed me the wrong way.

I recently saw his new book Snark in an advance-copies-for-review pile and I rolled my eyes: another writer tries to stretch half of an idea into a book-length Comment on Modern Culture. No thanks. The "pseudo-scholarly take on a pop-culture 'trend'" angle was especially unappetizing. I don't want to hear that particular lecture from anybody, but especially not from Denby. Although, as I said, I never had a strong reaction to his work in general, I had a dim memory that he was a writer whose insightfulness diminished as his subject broadened. That is, writing about one particular film, he did okay; writing long articles about the Meaning and History and Future of Film in Our Culture, as I remember him doing once or twice, he seemed sloppy with his "argument" and generally out of touch. (I think I hated this one, but I don't want to bother rereading it to recall the specifics.) Certain paragraphs and sentences still had the ring of truth within them, but the way they were strung together seemed false and tin-eared, inclined to generalize in unsupportable ways.

So I guessed from all that that Snark would be an unsatisfying, probably irritating read. But this Wonkette post -- about his attempt to take on Wonkette -- is really pretty horrifying. I'm actually embarrassed for David Denby.

I know it's not for everyone's tastes, but I love Wonkette, which I discovered belatedly toward the end of this election season. It got me through those last couple months, and it continues to help me cope with knowing that, for example, Peggy Noonan and Maureen Dowd and Bill Kristol and Richard Cohen and other such columnists are out there, and other people take them seriously. (That Noonan takedown makes me laugh every time I think about it. On the other hand, the very fact that Denby apparently describes Dowd as "the most gifted writer of snark in the country" is conclusive evidence that he has no clue what he's talking about.) Wonkette is the only place I can stand to read about the Blagojevich Affair. And the reader comments actually add value, which is a rare and impressive achievement. The funny thing is, Denby isn't off-base when he describes the site as "proudly idiotic." That captures something central to what they're doing over there. He just doesn't get how that approach is functioning -- how it manages to be crude and smart at the same time. The crudeness of the approach points out how crass the level of "serious" and "mainstream" political coverage and discourse actually is. When provoked enough, the Wonkette editors will explain that (much better than I just did), and it's impressive to me how thoroughly they understand what they're doing.

I wouldn't have expected the nuances of "snark" as employed at Wonkette to be apparent or appealing to Denby -- if we were friends, I wouldn't be sending him links to my favorite posts. And his not getting it would be fine, except that he's apparently so certain he does. And that's embarrassing. Normally Wonkette's post titles are (proudly!) hyperbolic, but in this case, "The 'Wonkette Part' of David Denby's Book Really Just A Bunch of Major, If Not Libelous, Errors" is accurate. Quite an achievement.

I'm not convinced that "snark" and its effect on "our conversation" is analyzable, or worth analyzing. But if you want to read more on the topic, read Adam Sternbergh's review of Denby's book in New York magazine. It's the only review I'd bother to read, because Sternbergh -- of the late, lamented Fametracker team, part of TWoP's extended family -- knows whereof he speaks. He's convinced me "snark" might be worth analyzing after all, if it's done by someone who knows what it is and how it works. "Snark is not a honk of blasé detachment; it’s a clarion call of frustrated outrage." Couldn't have said it better myself -- but then, I keep forgetting! I'm a blogger and not a writer.

With bad press like this, who needs good press?

I see Speed-the-Plow has recouped its investment. Looks like that PR campaign worked -- thanks, New York Times!

I love how that blurb begins, "Perhaps it’s true that even bad publicity is better than no publicity." It's like Patrick Healy (who wrote it) never saw this article... or this one. Bad publicity? No no no. This (which we discussed back here) is bad publicity.

Speaking of bad buzz for the Roundabout -- did Todd Haimes insult Ben Brantley's mother or something? The Pal Joey review was bad enough, and now this utter loathing for Hedda Gabler. I'm not saying he's wrong, in either case -- I haven't seen either, so I can't comment on that. But he's unusually gleeful about how much he hated Hedda. And yet he loved the Ian Rickson The Seagull, as he reminds us here ("one of the best revivals I have ever, ever seen") -- and it sounds like his objections in the case of Hedda are identical to complaints I heard from others who saw The Seagull.

Hey, speaking of Chekhov: I loved The Cherry Orchard at BAM, and you can rest assured there were no distracting shenanigans going on with the accents. (Well, except for Charlotta Ivanova: I'm still not sure what kind of accent she was trying to do. It sounded German by way of France. But that character is so inexplicable generally that her weird accent seems appropriate.) You'll get more details soon, I hope, but in the meantime, I recommend it.

The same goes for the Atlantic's The Cripple of Inishmaan, which I can't quite get around to really reviewing in detail. Very funny, very good cast, excellent evening out. More details as soon as I can manage it!

Listen to what the man said

Did you see Paul McCartney on The Colbert Report this week? If so, answer me this: What happened to his sense of humor? Did he lose it in the divorce? He did this interview like he lost a bet or something. I elaborate at Hey Dullblog.

*

Pick up a copy of Babytalk magazine at your pediatrician's office to read my sister Amy's excellent essay on expecting a girl (after having two boys). The online version of the article is truncated, but there's a .pdf here. And don't forget to check out the Mother Load blog for more adventures in parenting.

You may be right

Ron Rosenbaum is one of those writers who, I think, writes too much. By which I mean both that he writes too many articles and essays, leading him too often to apply his considerable critical skills to topics he's not suited for, and that his individual articles and essays tend to go on too long. So when I see a new Rosenbaum piece at Slate, I go back and forth about whether I should read it: it will almost definitely be too long, and I might end up sorry I bothered. I couldn't pass up the piece featured today, however: When I saw a photo of Billy Joel and the headline "The Worst Pop Singer Ever," I just had to check it out. I'm so glad I did.

Who knew Rosenbaum would be so passionate, so informed, so insightful, about the insulting badness of Billy Joel? This piece is worth reading not because it's saying something that needs to be said -- I have no burning desire to see Billy put down, and bear no ill will toward his fans -- but because Rosenbaum gets it so right, and good critical writing is a joy to behold.

I know people who love BJ. Never understood it, but that's their prerogative. Even Rosenbaum admits to liking a few of his songs, and I can join him in his affection for "The Longest Time." I personally have a soft spot for "Don't Ask Me Why." And back when I was playing the piano all the time, I enjoyed poking through my sister's old Billy Joel sheet music book as a warm-up for my fingers. But Billy Joel the personality, and the phenomenon, has always rubbed me the wrong way, and Rosenbaum expresses it perfectly:

Anodyne, sappy, superficial, derivative, fraudulently rebellious. Joel's famous song "It's Still Rock and Roll to Me"? Please. It never was rock 'n' roll. Billy Joel's music elevates self-aggrandizing self-pity and contempt for others into its own new and awful genre: "Mock-Rock."

...I think I've identified the qualities in B.J.'s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt's backside, so to speak.

Yes! That's it precisely! That quality comes out in every personal appearance and interview, which only makes the music harder to listen to. Who hasn't heard Billy Joel complain about the burdensome popularity of "Just the Way you Are"? How can you not be annoyed by a songwriter who seems to hold his own fans in contempt for liking the schlock that makes him rich?

This piece, true to form, goes on longer than it needs to, but it doesn't run out of steam. I'm especially happy that Rosenbaum didn't overlook the shallow "contempt for the Catholic religion" that saturates "Only the Good Die Young" -- because seriously, Billy, up yours.

The music itself doesn't get much analysis from Rosenbaum. But it reminded me of a few of the things I've always disliked about BJ the composer. First of all, Rosenbaum quotes blogger Jeff Jarvis, who wrote (in a context too convoluted and lame for me to bother explaining): "If I can't get 'Allentown,' the original, I'm not likely to settle for a cover." Rosenbaum is quoting it to mock the notion that BJ is some paragon of authenticity, and that's certainly true. But to me it's also risible because I've always found Billy Joel songs much more tolerable when covered by other artists. The main reason, as Rosenbaum has helped me to realize, is that cover versions present the music without the thick, unappetizing coating of "unearned contempt" that BJ brings to it. But it's also at least partly because I dislike the production and instrumentation choices on many of Joel's recordings. The cheesy keyboards on "Just the Way You Are"; The shallow tinniness of "Pressure" and "Goodnight Saigon"... Just his bad fortune to be recording in the '70s and early '80s, I guess. But pretty much any re-recording is going to be an improvement.

This leads me to my other valuable insight about Billy Joel, one that is driven home by listening to covers and unavoidable when you're picking your way through his songs on a piano. The man needs a writing partner. He's a McCartney without a Lennon (though he thinks he's got Lennon's "Working Class Hero" attitude down). Or a Lennon without a McCartney, maybe. The point is, his songs don't have the interior tension they need to hold my interest. Put very simply, they almost all have terrible middle-eights. As an experiment, think of any Billy Joel song that comes to mind, and sing it through in your head. Notice how it falls apart when you get to the bridge, meandering awkwardly for several measures until it finally returns to the verse/chorus. Bernadette Peters does a lovely take on "(S)He's Got a Way" (on her album I'll Be Your Baby Tonight), with a delicate piano arrangement backing her up. But the delicacy just makes it more obvious, when she gets to the middle, that the song should have gone through several more drafts: "He comes to me when I'm feeling down, inspires me without a sound..." You've always hated that part, right? Now it all makes sense! Let's try another one: "Leave a Tender Moment Alone." You know the part that goes "But it's not only me / breaking down when the tension gets high..." You don't know what's going on there, but it makes you uneasy, doesn't it? "She's Always a Woman" -- the song starts to go haywire in the "Oh, she takes care of herself" part, doesn't it? Aren't you relieved when it returns to the verse/chorus, the part that feels solid and secure? Even "Just the Way You Are" starts to stumble with "Well, I need to know that you will always be..." "This Is the Time" -- that one has only the chorus going for it. And then there are the songs like "Piano Man" that are nothing but chorus (which is fine, except do you need to go on for five-and-a-half minutes?).

The funny thing about Rosenbaum's article, and my response to it, is that we know all these songs well enough to analyze them in depth. Billy Joel is an indelible part of our cultural heritage. I think he could have been the world's most successful jingle-writer. With a songwriting partner, he could have been a pop-music treasure. With a better attitude, he could have been lovable, at least, like Elton John (before he started writing musicals). But then I guess he wouldn't be Billy Joel.

It's as if we always knew

Lately The Colbert Report hasn't been as sharp as it once was, and I haven't been watching as regularly. But their sendoff to the Bush Administration was sublime. Not least because it gave us all another reason to worship Christine Ebersole. In case you missed it:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Tribute to the Bush Administration - Christine Ebersole

While we're sharing videos, I suppose I ought to link you to this frightening (yet unsurprising) Patti LuPone freakout, caught on (audio) tape by, apparently, some other scofflaw Gypsy audience member who is lucky not to have been caught in the act by La LuPone. I've come across this a number of places, but my favorite writeup was by J. Kelly Nestruck of Canada's Globe and Mail, who joked that the picture-taker had been "Patti Lu-Pwned." Hee.

As for my thoughts, well: no sympathy for the picture-taker, obviously. But I do feel sorry for the rest of the audience (even if I doubt Patti's assertion that "every single one" of them was exhibiting "respect" -- come on, I've been in Broadway audiences before). If I pay a lot of money to see a Highly Acclaimed Performance, and the star breaks character in the middle of a solo number that happens to be the emotional and dramatic climax of the show, and it's not a medical emergency, I'm going to be annoyed. Of course, that's exactly why I never did pay money to see this particular Highly Acclaimed Performance on Broadway. And at least some of the people in that audience (including whoever was taping the audio) probably felt they got exactly what they came to see. "This is the theatre!!" You know, on second thought, I'm not sure she did break character. Doesn't that just sound like Momma Rose?

In pre-revolutionary Russia, accent uses you

Welcome to the Obama years, everybody! Soon all our problems will be solved! Meanwhile, one thing I'm looking forward to enough to spend money on it is The Bridge Project, now underway at BAM.

I'm especially excited about The Winter's Tale, which I've never seen onstage. It's surely one of the oddest plays in the Shakespearean canon; "exit pursued by a bear" is but one of its interpretive challenges. So I am very eager to see what this cross-Atlantic cast and creative team will make of it. I am a bit more apprehensive about the first of the two plays, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, but only because Chekhov is like the proverbial little girl my grandmother used to cite: when it's good, it's very, very good, but when it's bad, it's horrid. I have seen The Cherry Orchard performed once before, at the National Theatre in London in 2001. It wasn't one of those scarring bad-Chekhov experiences, but I honestly don't remember much about it, except that my friends and I bought student rush tickets and were disappointed to learn that the several Redgraves in the cast were all taking that performance off. I hope for better luck this time around.

One of the actors I'd be sorry to miss in these productions is Richard Easton, whom I saw at a restaurant a few weeks back. I pointed him out to the husband and told him to consider it an advance actor-sighting -- "You don't recognize him now, but you will!" Easton is one of the many reasons I have high hopes for this ambitious project. Take, for example, his remarks about repertory theatre in this New York Times article: “'You give a more total performance in each role,' [Easton] said, 'because you don’t have to spend all your expertise in either one.'” I thought that was pretty insightful.

Less insightful and promising was this passage from the same article:

The project treats accent as many theaters now treat race, as an opportunity to rethink great roles. In “The Winter’s Tale” the actors’ backgrounds are exploited for effect: Europeans play the urbane Sicilians, North Americans the rustic Bohemians. In Chekhov’s “Cherry Orchard” the distribution is less programmatic; Mr. Mendes is even allowing some American actors to experiment with British accents, and vice versa.

In doing so he invites the wrath of critics who still think that color-blind casting, let alone accent-blind casting, violates the supposed realism of the stage. “It’s important that the agenda is set not about how people talk,” Mr. Mendes explained. “Theater is not film; it’s a poetic world. If it weren’t, everyone in ‘Cherry Orchard’ should be using a Russian accent.”

Well, no; they'd be speaking Russian. To have your characters speaking English with Russian accents would just be stupid. And as I know Sam Mendes is a smart and capable director, I can't quite figure out why he would say that, or why anyone would quote it uncritically.

I sincerely hope that this article is doing a disservice to The Bridge Project in describing how it plans to deal with the "accent" question, because what's described above is a self-contradictory mess. It's not "accent-blind" (and shouldn't that be "accent-deaf"?) to use real-life nationality to determine how you cast characters in Shakespeare's fairy-tale world. And it's not "accent-blind" if you're "allowing" actors to "experiment" with nonnative accents (egad!). I also hope it's Jesse Green (the author of this article) and not Mendes who thought of likening so-called color-blind casting and the use of accents in performance, because the comparison is misleading and not at all apt. Everything about those two paragraphs distresses me.

Setting aside the issue of race, which is much too complicated in itself to shed any direct light on the question of accents: the reason Mendes and his company have to think about accents at all is that they do have meaning. They signify something to an audience -- maybe different things to different audiences. The challenge is to figure out how they're affecting these particular incarnations of these particular texts. If everyone onstage is speaking in the same accent, or even the same group of accents, the audience will know the accent isn't meant to carry weight. If everyone onstage speaks in his or her native accent, the audience can probably be convinced to ignore that too. But if you're mixing up British and American accents for the sake of it, or if you're using the accents to divide one group of characters from another, you're asking the audience to pay attention. It's an insult to the intelligence of theatregoers to suggest that accent is a trivial detail and it's about time we got over it.

Really, if you must make a comparison, accents function much more like costumes than like actors' ethnicity. You could have everyone onstage dress in a similar, simple style -- say, all black. That would signal to the audience not to pay attention to how the actors are dressed. You could have the cast wear street clothes and accomplish the same thing (with more difficulty). But if you have everyone dressed in completely different styles and historical periods, you're deliberately calling the audience's attention to the costumes, and in that case you better know what you're doing, or you'll end up with a confusing mess.

That said, I have more faith in Sam Mendes than I do in NYT arts reporters, so here's hoping that faith is rewarded. I'm seeing The Cherry Orchard tomorrow, and looking forward to filing a report!

Mamet, revived and reviewed

My review of this season's double serving of Mamet revivals is in the current issue of Commonweal -- and, lucky for you nonsubscribers, available online as well! I'm afraid American Buffalo closed shortly after I saw it, and long before this column made it to print. But Speed-the-Plow was by far the better of the two, and it's still alive today (and now starring William H. Macy)!

Here's a taste of my take:

American Buffalo’s cast, directed by Robert Falls, proved unequal to the challenges of Mamet’s script -- like the characters, the actors might have profited from more deference to the text. Cedric the Entertainer (known primarily as a standup comic) and John Leguizamo (who has similar roots) brought plenty of stage presence to their respective roles as Donny and Teach, and former child star Haley Joel Osment made a touchingly vulnerable Bobby. But Mamet’s highly stylized interpretation of natural speech has an internal rhythm that none of the actors could capture. The characters’ exchanges were stilted, stripped of the mesmerizing pulse that drives them on the page; and the play, which is nearly all talk, remained limp until Teach’s violent explosion near the end.

The stars of Speed-the-Plow have the opposite problem: director Neil Pepe keeps their exchanges moving at such a rapid-fire pace that the onstage chatter seldom bears any resemblance to actual conversation. The tempo is appropriate, since Speed-the-Plow is, on a superficial level, a gleeful satire of the motion-picture industry, and its characters’ dealmaking banter is fueled by coffee and cocaine. But the snappy dialogue is more than just a series of vulgar one-liners. Encoded in the ironic allusions and insults are authentic questions about integrity and faith.

When I saw Speed-the-Plow I didn't sense much chemistry between Esparza and Piven, so I can't say I'm surprised to learn of Piven's reported unreliability and Esparza's post-Piven backbiting. But my issue with the direction was more basic than chemistry -- when the characters interrupted each other, as called for in the script, it seldom felt organic in even a heightened, cartoonish way. High school drama teachers, if they're any good, teach students to know the unscripted ends of their interrupted lines, so they won't trail off artificially, waiting to be cut off by a scene partner. Too much of the dialogue in this Speed-the-Plow was delivered with the obvious expectation that the line would be interrupted, and not in a "we know each other so well we can anticipate each other's reactions" way, just in a "we're reading from separate scripts in our heads" way. I don't know whether that got better or worse once Piven stepped out. Maybe reading from a script onstage actually made Butz's half of the exchanges sound more natural?

Despite that, I thought Piven was terrific and the production was very sharp. But I think it's unfortunate that Speed-the-Plow tends to be described as a satire of Hollywood and nothing more. It is that, but I think there's much more to it than reviewers tend to communicate. However, I learned in working on this piece that it's very difficult to communicate the deeper, more interesting levels on which Speed-the-Plow operates. It's also quite difficult to find quotable lines in either script that (a) make sense out of context (or are at least complete sentences!) and (b) aren't too overwhelmingly profane. Oh, and the formatting can be weird, too: I opted to follow the printed script for emphasis and capitalization, since I'm a purist like that, but online all the itals are stripped out, so you won't be able to tell.

Have you seen this play (with or without Piven)? What did you think? How does my reading strike you?