
Alex Ross has done yet another amazing thing (simply writing the first chapter of "The Rest Is Noise" humbled Shallots everywhere), and no one was more deserving of a MacArthur this year (although, I guess that friendly geomorphologist is a stone-cold rockstar). At any rate, Ross has now expanded the online audio guide to his book, now in paperback, which is sort of like creating a multimedia museum as a simple compendium. You know it's unusually meaningful when it can teach people (via sound) how to better understand The White Album as well as The Rite of Spring. Now, if only we could Google sounds. I know someone's gotta be working on that, but hurry up!
Posted on October 15, 2008 at 08:25 AM | Permalink

The news is slowly creeping out of Nebraska Methodist Hospital. But apparently three ordinarily healthy septuagenarian Omaha librarians are still in critical care after suffering simultaneous cardiac arrests this morning when they were struck by news so grammatically and linguistically abominable that they could not maintain homeostasis. Margaret Dubrovic, 71, head librarian at Omaha's central library system, was reportedly enjoying a routine morning when her latest copy of The New Yorker magazine arrived in the mail. Allegedly, Dubrovic looked forward with great verve to the arrival of her private subscription copy and had been rumored to read half of the entire periodical well before the end of morning on delivery days with friends and co-librarians Betsy O'Neill, 74, and Edith Cooper, 76, both of whom also suffered cardiac arrests. But this morning the group happened upon what junior librarian Thomas DeBouef, 23, could only call "literary blasphemy of the highest proportions." The insidious word "whatevs," a slang term for "whatever" used by the so-called Britney Generation and the blog whatevs.org, apparently found its way into music critic Sasha Frere-Jones's recent review of the latest Coldplay album. And while the estimable writer had likely used the term in the most tongue-in-cheek manner, it even appeared as a one-word sentence--capitalized, of course. "He didn't have to go that far," said DeBouef, whose grandfather Eli, 89, also works in the library as a volunteer and suffered minor whiplash from today's events. "There's no doubt in my mind that the act of literally seeing such a word, if you can call it that, printed in the magazine these ladies have held so dear to their literary hearts for so many years caused their simultaneous tragedies. It's a damn shame." Of course, one Generation X reporter cannot help but wonder, in the words of character Carrie Bradshaw from the HBO show "Sex and the City," what septuagenarian librarians were hoping for from a review of a Coldplay album in the first place. "They weren't as shocked as many of their friends were that The New Yorker had taken to reviewing popular music so substantively over the last few years," added Debouef. "They rather liked Coldplay, and as the article said, they often played the album 'Parachutes' during their afternoon tea sessions as a means to relax from the stress of their jobs." For now, however, the implicit danger posed by a simple unsubstantiated slang term such as "whatevs" is all an entire community can cling to for some explanation as to why their best librarians are on leave from the city's hottest reading room. More news as it breaks. In the meantime, get better, girls.
Posted on August 01, 2008 at 08:51 PM | Permalink

I have just interviewed three of America's top tennis players -- though, not the celebs you may be thinking of -- and have to share the following with the world: these people are super-boring! So much so, I find the above tennis racquet-manufacturing image much more interesting. It's odd: Growing up, I always thought tennis was a social, thinking person's game. But now the young stars are not unlike the young conservatory bred violin prodigies putting us to sleep at concert halls. So much technical game, so little personality. More on this story as I get deeper into it. But how sad has tennis become since Andre Agassi left the courts? I continue to mourn life on the court.
Posted on April 07, 2008 at 11:31 AM | Permalink

Talk about someone who knows more than he lets on.
Posted on April 05, 2008 at 07:10 AM | Permalink

I admire Daniel Day Lewis as much as any dedicated film fan--the idea of seeing a film with him even scares me a little in the good way. But I was never big on P.T. Anderson-- even though I liked Magnolia and Boogie Nights some, I never felt the director made important narrative decisions that felt earned. His work seemed to crave hipness--to steal it--instead of achieving it with truly innovative and genuine narrative work.
Oddly, I thought this concern would dissolve upon seeing the massively hyped "There Will Be Blood." I thought the film would be, as it has been publicized, an epic interpretation of Upton Sinclair--replete with fantastic acting; an admirable score in the old sense; and big ideas about oil, humanity, industrialism, America, Manifest Destiny, evil. But most important, a script worth drooling over. I believed in DDL that much.
But I was wrong, and despite all the universal praise for the film--yes, the main performance is admirable--I have to wonder why so very few people have come out to say this movie is even smaller--and malignantly so--in some ways than Anderson's "small" indies. There is so much obsession over detail, so much amazing cinematography and early buildup. But it doesn't come together when the film jumps down into a hole and narrows in on a petty if entertaining climax that could have been performed on a cheap stage--never mind the expanded issues this climax could have symbolized (that the director probably thinks it does symbolize) with better developmental screenwriting.
I'll try not to spoil the journey for you should you care to take it on the half hour as many theaters have scheduled it. But not only does Anderson choose to focus on what should just be one small conflict in a potentially epic story--and then choose to skip through time and tell us about it as opposed to showing a lot of foundational material needed to care this much about said conflict as the movie's most obvious struggle. The rapscallion--oh, P.T., you're sly--mischievously doesn't follow through on the promise of the film about big ideas, and he sadly doesn't completely flesh out his "oil man." His history or his relationships--say, with his son. Such that when they fall on hard times, it's nearly impossible to care. That is, if you can detach yourself from DDL's performance--and it's hard, but try.
Sure, it's fun to see bowling pins used in new American ways (I'm not a spoiler). But the whole show shouldn't have been so comedic or surprisingly focused on such a lame tangent when it seemed like so much could have happened. There was a lot of laughter in the theater--and it wasn't the dark, twisted laughter for which the filmmaker may hope. But don't worry if you liked it: I'm sure the Academy's already sealed this film's destiny.
After all, it's an acting triumph for DDL. But is it really? Didn't we know he could do this stuff? Did we need to see it again? Some of it was very enjoyable but it seemed like wasted effort. Pair the genius actor up with someone who thinks bigger--and better. To make a movie this long that gives us this little is really a feat--but not one we should endorse.
Even more offensive to Shallot central is the musical side of the equation. The filmmakers hired a potentially strong composer--Radiohead's Johnny Greenwood--to write what sounded like an intriguing score made of pitch-bending dissonances and anxiety provoking rhythms.
But the movie tries too hard, shallowly, in this department too. Instead of letting Greenwood follow through on what could have been a start-to-finish symphonic score--something you'd want to listen to on its own, say--Anderson shares with us the novel third movement of Brahms's Violin Concerto to interrupt it and accompany one of the film's most triumphant and tragic plot points. Then, when matters turn mysterious, the music supervisor throws in a cello ensemble version of Arvo Pärt's Fratres. Too easy and disrespectful. To the film, the older music, and new film composer.
I love both of these pieces--and there's definitely something in the barren setting of the film and the character's wayward morality apropos of Pärt if not this one movement of Brahms. But both of these musical insertions undermine Greenwood's work. The film feels musically disjunct because of them, especially when the credits role to the victorious Brahms conclusion.The real Independent thing to do here--you're P.T. Anderson, right?--would have been to let Greenwood score the film in its entirety, not use pre-recorded hits known to conjure narrative power in the middle of the story.
This type of music-supervisory decision isn't always the supervisor's fault. And I'm usually a fan of using great music in a movie--but not so cheaply. It could just be--and seemingly is--the director's too-self-conscious "I'm not as good as I sell myself to be so I better throw in everything but the kitchen sink" mentality. It's hard to find this problem under the thick veil of all that tarry oil and DDL glory acting. But it's there. Believe me.
In fact, such a musical strategy--to say nothing of flaunting DDL and all the detail and epic cinematographic talent the movie employs--renders this truth shockingly obvious when you realize how petty the film's main narrative turns out to be.
And I'm not alone. So many people--including friends I disagree with very often--left my showing at the Arclight disappointed. This movie could have been so much more than it was. But by producers giving free reign to an "indie" filmmaker who shouldn't have been given so much freedom to begin with--then again: hell, I'd give money to anything involving DDL, too--that's what you get.
Frankly, I prefer it when Steve Martin gets small.
Posted on January 06, 2008 at 07:13 AM | Permalink

I had a funny discussion the other day with another New Yorker living in LA. He said he felt like an "expat" here: a "big fish living in a small pond," in his telling--at least when it comes to meeting people who think beyond headlines. I didn't exactly agree or make the statement, but it wasn't the first time I heard it. Luckily, I've met tons of brilliant people in my new fair city. But I've sought a lot of them out. You don't always converse with new ones in line at El Pollo Loco. But my tales of serendipitous philosophical chicken-joint communion will have to wait.
Funnily, another friend just pointed out that Variety, Hollywood's glory trade mag (Ari Gold once called it the "school paper" on Entourage), linked to my Sweeney Todd piece earlier in December. The blog's quote? "Adam Baer claims that 'Tim Burton "re-invents the movie musical" with 'Sweeney Todd.' Really?'"
I had to laugh when I saw that. Did the blogger even realize that the actual subhead of the article--written by someone other than me--made it very clear that "re-inventing the movie musical" is what the filmmakers claim, and that I simply reported what they had to say? Probably not, because short-order blogs and especially movie-trade blogs meant for D-people aren't exactly the most accurate places to get your news.
Read the story that I wrote carefully. There's hardly any criticism in the piece, save for a very careful statement that reads: " [Sweeney's] as entertaining, artistic and efficient as anyone could make a 'Sweeney Todd' film that might appeal to a broad swath of moviegoers." While I believe the movie is entertaining and a great shot at creating a Hollywood movie version of Sweeney, save for a lot of the singing, I don't go beyond that point. I'm not hired to be a critic here. And I'm actually pleased with that fact. So argue away with each other. I'm not jumping into the fray as a film or music critic on this one.
And that's the way it was supposed to be. I was paid to tell other peoples' stories in this case. Additionally, I write that: "The key, therefore, was not to produce a performance film like Ingmar Bergman's "The Magic Flute" but to create an original movie genre: a consciously present-day spoke-sung music-film with younger actors, no traditional singers and a cinema-grotesquerie style, full of viscous slashes of blood." But this isn't my opinion. It's implied that the "key" belongs to the filmmakers. This is the opinion of those interviewed--see forthcoming Steven Sondheim quote. It's factual reportage.
In Sondheim's words: "You can't just adapt stage musicals for the screen. You have to re-create them."
If I had been hired to critique the film, I might have printed all kinds of comments that discuss this recreation of genre and what Sweeney means to music and film. But I wasn't. And I'm not going to do it here and undermine my story. I stand by it. And if its sub-headline should read that the filmmakers' claim they've created a new genre--and if I should go on to give you those opinions--well, that doesn't mean I'm making the critical statement.
Frankly, after a childhood of conservatory composition, mainstream movie-loving, and a decade of criticism, I don't think Sweeney re-invents the movie musical; I think it adds new elements to it as filmic entertainment. As I wrote: " Sweeney's new Burtonesque world is a visceral, inflated experience only film can provide."
But please, Variety blog, read between the lines before misquoting
reporters on critical statements they, personally, haven't made. This
sort of reaction to a story about Sweeney Todd is exactly what worried
me when I learned such a meaningful and complex piece of music-theater
was going to be fed to the multiplex crowd--and those who
blog for those who feed them. Perhaps I should have asked the producers if they were worried about how the insider movie press would handle the movie and the primary press it might inspire--as opposed to how audiences across America would handle it. Happily, I left a midwestern theater the other day after seeing the movie in its completed version to find goth teenagers singing "Nothing's Gonna Harm You..." Sondheim doesn't need anyone's help connecting to any brand of audience.
Posted on January 02, 2008 at 07:37 AM | Permalink
Burton Reinvents the Movie Musical, Los Angeles Times, December 18, 2007 (Click title for online version of article)
For behind-the-scenes extras, see yesterday's look at the writer's quote book.
For a text version of the article, click on "continue"
Posted on December 18, 2007 at 02:36 AM | Permalink
On Tuesday, I’m told, the
Los Angeles Times will publish my story on Tim Burton’s “Sweeney Todd.” I’ve
reported it for months, after noticing in the summer that perhaps the only musical I like would be turned into a film. The story was initially assigned as a thorough narrative about
the idea of the music-film that would include deep reporting on how the music-driven
stage show became a cinematic production in many respects--good, bad, or ugly. In the course of the reporting, I had
some intriguing discussions—basically with everyone involved in the film, including some self-congratulatory remarks but also some really unusual quotes. Most
memorable? A lunch with producer Dick Zanuck at Warner’s and a few funny
comments from Tim Burton, to say nothing of a conversation about
the business of such filmmaking with Dreamworks’s Walter F. Parkes. But over
the course of the last few months, the Times also published a separate story
about Burton that included information my original story would have
covered (nothing personal: this is how newspapers often work when they cover
entertainment so thoroughly from so many angles). So my piece, for tomorrow or later this week, has had to be rejiggered. It will now focus more on the musical qualities of the film, but still include chats with Depp, Burton, and others. Still, there are lots of
cutting-floor scraps. To precede the piece, then, I thought I’d share some extra quotes
with you, and take you behind the scenes of the story.
1. From my Sondheim conversation:
“Of course, you can fill
them, but it's not dynamic, and that's what Tim [Burton] and[screenwriter/producer John Logan] were so cognizant of.
You can't just expect the audience to watch anything. I'm a movie fan, and if
something isn't happening in a movie, get on with it... The director is hard
put just to keep the camera interested [when a song occurs in a traditional
movie musical].”
It had been nibbled at by two producers in
I started work in 1977,
it was first done in ‘79, and that's it. I should say I was going to write the
whole thing, including libretto, but by the time i got up to page seven of 35
in the printed version, I was already close to an hour, and I thought: Uh, oh,
this is going to be longer than the Ring cycle. So I called Hugh Wheeler. He
was british and knew the legend and had also written mysteries - under name of
Patrick Quentin. Then, when his collaborator died, he wrote solo mystery novels
under Q. Patrick, and they were popular in the 1930s and 40s when Ellery Queen
was popular. I thought he would be perfect: he was a suspense writer and we had
a good time writing it.
He saw to it that it wasn’t five hours long. He essentially took what Bond had
done but re-plotted successions of incidents, introduced the young person's
story a little. He changed the periodicity of it. He stuck very closely to what
Bond did. And I did too. Bond wrote this as a potboiler for his traveling
theater company. He not only introduced classic stuff in it but made the distinction
in language between upper and lower class. The upper class spoke in a kind
of blank verse, not written out in pentameter. Lower classes were much more
vernacular. There was a whole sociological caste from the play. But the point
was that he gave us free reign. It was easy to write.
I was big fan of Bernard Hermann. A big fan of Hangover Square. And the score got me. So this is an homage to Hermann
and that kind of Victorian melodrama music that you hear if if you listen to Hangover Square. I wanted to write a musical that would keep an
audience in suspense without letting them laugh at it, which is not easy to do.
What you realize when you step outside the theater, though, is that the horrors
are so much more than inside. You have to keep background music going: it keeps
the audience’s suspension of belief. Once they step one foot back, it's close
to way over the top. Sweeney is over the top but in a way that an audience gets
involved as opposed to giggling at it.
On different productions of his many works, and this one work in particular:
An opera approach in an opera house is a different show than when [Sweeney’s
performed] on Broadway. I've always felt when people say: what defines opera,
what makes it different from theater. It's where the performance is done. When
Menotti was done on Broadway, it was a Broadway show. It's audiences’
expectations and what an audience brings into an opera house as well as how
performers perform. With opera singers, the concentration is on vocal production.
In Broadway or theater, the concentrations is on story-telling and acting. And
the best operas like Carmen combine both. That’s what Puccini was, too.
On Sweeney being a genre bender:
On Sweeney being called “musically
complicated”:
”Well, Ravel would have thought it was pretty stodgy. That's not a Broadway
audience, though. A Broadway audience hears a dissonance and…[he was implying
they react strongly to this stuff.] A person at Yale even once came up and said
was this the first atonal music ever written! [Insert shock on the part of
Sondheim.] My father was shocked by West Side Story be cause he was brought up
on Victor Herbert.
On how a broad American
audience will react to it:
“What are they going to
make of it? I have no idea. They’re going to wait for the power chords!
“John Logan [the
screenwriter] tried very scrupulously to keep the shape of the score while
recognizing it had to be kept down… Anybody can do MTV-style cutting to any
song in world. That's happened in movies like La Boheme. The point of this is a
really good story, and you got to keep it going. This isn’t Bergman’s Magic
Flute [ prompted by question the journalist had offered] whose pleasure is
lingering over the singing and audience. An opera audience. I'm a movie fan. If
somewthing isn't happening, get on with it. When you go into a musical in the
theater, you have an unwritten contract: people are going to face front, imagine
a fourth wall, and what goes on for three and a half minutes holds your
attention because you have a little lingering that opera audiences have love
for.
On whether or not
Sondheim ever thought the work would have a life in
It never occurred to me. You can't just adapt stage musicals for screen, you
have to recreate them. Where songs are respites in the middle of comedy, it’s
OK. But when you attempt with musical theater to tell story through song, it
becomes a whole other matter.
On letting go of the rights to the show:
Dreamworks took an option on the piece and it was developed. It's like writing
a novel. It started during the recording session of Bernadette Peters’ revival
of Gypsy. I went out with Sam Mendes for coffee, and he asked if I thought
about it as a movie, and I said no. And he said, wel, I have. He had a deal
with Dreamworks. He got together with [screenwriter John] Logan, and then Sam
decided not to direct it, but it was taken to Tim Burton. Tim came to me 20 years
ago and asked to do it, and I said no, and he went on to other projects. When Sam
brought it up again, I was startled. And
when this came back to Tim, he wanted to do it. It was a piece he liked. I
wasn’t worried about how it would be treated because it was Sam who suggested it
in the first place, and then I loved what
On how Oscar Hammerstein would react to the film:
2. From my conversation with Tim Burton:
“This is not my background at all, you
know. I certainly was never a big theatergoer. I just happened to be in
“What works on a stage, doesn’t work on film all the time. With film,
you have the luxury of seeing character's faces and being up close and kind of
getting the more interior nature--the inner piece, in a way. And, it
changes things. My goal was always to be true to it, because I loved the
original.
The first script I ran by [Sondheim] had
less music in it, so we ended up going back and putting more back into it just
because the show was more music-driven and less kind of traditional dialogue
and structure.
On the
potential difficulties in editing the film:
Well, you know, the writer John, now I
don't know this for sure, but he'd done it where there was more music, less
music, different music, you know. He'd been through a lot of different versions
and when I got in the ballpark, I went back to more music, like I said. But
there were certain things that surprised me that we ended up not doing or
changing just because of the somewhat organic nature of it--and it being a
film. There a lot of different weird elements. Sondheim's music isn’t the
easiest thing to do. Except for a couple of effects, we had no real
professional singers--you know, they weren't really classically trained. But
that created an interesting dynamic and it was actually quite exciting to me
that way. We did it fairly quickly, as we went along.
The interesting thing is that it's great
having music on the set because it really informs you and the actors.
Any stage
influences?
No. Probably the first one that I
saw in
The music is quite beautiful. That's
what I love about the piece; it's very lyrical. And then you have that
juxtaposed against the imagery. That's what I love about it.
Was Sondheim
thinking movies when he wrote this?
Absolutely. The first time I met him
he said that and it just made complete sense. And in fact what was amazing was
when we first recorded the orchestra without hearing the lyrics, we really hear
it. So that was fun in this case to do. Some of the pieces, we
didn't keep the lyrics but we kept his score. So it's really kind of
great to hear the score because you usually hear it mainly with the
lyrics. To find that balance was interesting. And also we recorded
it with full orchestra and then we isolated some instruments, and when you pare
it down, it really is like an amazing film music score.
On this
recording of the music—is it thick or thin?
No, it's thick. But there are, like
I said, times when we didn't end up using the lyrics so that you could hear the
music.
Is it too sophisticated for mainstream
movies?
Well, it was a strange thing. It's an R
rated musical, and while some musicals have met with a certain amount of
success, you never know. It's something that, you know, doesn’t
necessarily come to mind. I think the term “musical” still scares studios
a bit. Throw in some blood and an R rating, and you know…
Is this an
homage to horror movies?
Yeah, that's one of the things Johnny and
I have always talked about over the years. You know, horror movie actors
that we loved. This was an opportunity
to try to do characters like that. And again the music really fit. There
used to be a pianist in these music, or somebody on the side, and the actors
just move differently. And what was exciting about this is that you see
everybody acting in a different way and moving in a different way because of
the music. I thought beforehand that it was going to be really
restricting, but it turned out to be the opposite.
On delegating the filmmaking:
“Dante Ferreti [the production designer], I've never really, really
worked with before but he's done Fellini movies. You just try to find
people that you feel in sync with. We kind of had... not quite a
luxurious schedule like you sometimes do on a movie. It was a bit
tighter. But it was fun in a way to do that because it did feel like we
were making an old horror movie. Just get in there and shoot it as
quickly as possible. It kind of woke up the whole horror movie thing. I
like to work where you don't have to be overly literal, and everybody gets the
whole vibe of it. We never see just one thing as an inspiration, it's
always a few. So it never feels like it's this precious box. If it gets to a
point where you have to say: do it exactly like that. Or you have to show them
a picture and say, make it look exactly like that, you know you're working with
the wrong people.
On
“I was actually interested, a long, long
time ago, maybe more than 10 years ago. I was sort of involved with it
loosely. I was just with Warner Brothers at that time. I was interested
in it for different producers, and I just got sidetracked with other
things. I didn't even really know Johnny at that point very much, and I
always felt everything happens for a reason, and he just felt more accurate
with the character. And that was another issue. You know, on stage,
everybody was a little bit older, and that was fine. But for the film it
just felt right to make them slightly younger. To make a kid feel like a
kid, you know? Not that you’re going to harm your son by a real kid. But
it was great: it just gives them an extra layer of strangeness and emotion that
it isn't sung by a 30-year-old. There’s something about a kid going in
that makes it more strangely real.
On Sondheim
and the play:
“I didn't really know Sondheim at
all. I had seen enough productions to see that he seemed to be open to
different interpretations. One was a bit more stylized, one was not. You
know, it's been around for a while, and someone told me that it's one of the
most performed school plays: kids love performing it. There's a large
arena of different types of productions. I talked to so many people here at
schools in
On the cast
being mostly British:
It just seemed right. Obviously, Johnny's
not British. But [the piece] lived there, and it just made more sense.
How was
Sondheim involved?
“He had cast approval over the two leads
and we ran by everybody else with him. And he was great because he was
extremely knowledgeable about films. He was a fairly cool guy; he came to
the first couple days of the orchestra recording. He spoke to
Blood.
“Well, it's not real. That's the
thing, to me. It's more like it was on the stage where it was a bit over the
top. It goes less for reality and more for emotional effect. It sort of
undermines the emotional; it flourishes; it serves as exclamation points. Because
it is a melodrama and old horror movie it sort of fit right into that.
Sweeney.
“He's such a repressed, such a brooding
character. Really, the whole movie is about him getting back at
people. So, you know, since he's such an internal character, it really
felt like it needed those releases. [The blood, again.]
Were drawings
made beforehand?
“Eh, not too much. A little
bit. I mean one of the things that struck me was as I was going back
through old sketchbooks, I found a little sketch of Ms. Lovett in Sweeney Todd
and I thought, Jesus, it looks like Johnny and Helena, you see. And I did
it before I knew her. And I mean all my sketches kind of look the same.
But it did strike me. I did a couple of drawings like that of the characters,
and I did a couple of little sketches, little barber shop sketches. Dante
[Ferretti] is such an amazing draftsman. I would do a couple of little doodles
if I had the thought.
The Desaturated
look.
We thought a lot about the color in terms
of how much color to put on the set and the costumes. It's nice to kind
of do and not to so much rely on so much post-production. It almost feels a bit
too easy, so we tried to think about it as much as we could up front. The
environment was the environment we wanted it to be.
Did Depp’s
portrayal surprise?
You know when I asked him if he would be
into it, I didn't know if he could sing or not. But I knew well enough
that he wouldn't have said yes if he didn't think he could do it. That
was good enough for me And I felt very confident that he would do
it. Which made it really nice when I first heard him. I thought he
could do it, but he also exceeded what I thought, and I just got really
excited. It's always nice when people do that: go beyond what you think
they're going to do. And it's quite an exposing thing, you know. I'm not
a singer. It was quite difficult to not rehearse people, singing. That
was a new feeling for me, seeing that.
“I hope it doesn't disappoint. It's hard to know how purists will
respond to it. I know, for me, I love the show. So it was always my goal
to keep it true to it but make it a movie at the same time. I think the spirit
of it is right. And I don't always feel that way. It's just kind of
weird experiment to do. We always felt a bit funny, kind of like almost
laughing, making this R rated musical. There was this kind of exciting
feeling on the set.
“When you see different kind of
productions of this done, there all over the shop in a way, aren't they?”
Continue reading "Sweeney Todd: Razor cuttings from the newspaper floor" »
Posted on December 17, 2007 at 07:34 AM | Permalink
I think it was John Stewart (did you know his real last name: Leibowitz?) speaking to a supermodel years ago on MTV when I first heard the joke. The model discussed her ethnic background: she had "a little Native American in her," some Indian, some Scottish, some Brazilian. Stewart then asked her if she had a little Jew in her. The model said no. Stewart countered: Would you like to?
It was a funny moment, and it was a joke that Stewart could make, being Jewish, or at least of Jewish heritage. I, too, am Jewish in that it's my cultural makeup. I'm agnostic but still identify as a Jew because it's a culture even if it's not one specific race. (Plus, I'm wholly Ashkenazi, and we have our own genetic diseases, which I consider a rule for determining whether or not you belong to a race or ethnicity. If you're at risk for something that can kill you because of inbreeding that led to you having one cultural makeup, well, welcome to the "having a race" club. Or something.)
But I digress. Recently, while writing a story about direct e-mail publicity and marketing, I took notice of an e-mail I frequently receive from a PR firm representing Nextbook.org, a great magazine concerning Jewish culture. I respect this publication but don't know how they found my address. Perhaps it's because I'm a writer or blogger, and they just have a good PR team that looks for coverage under many stones (including blogs where the writer might post schmaltz recipes). That's probably the case. But I also have Jewish friends who receive notices from synagogues when they move to new cities. How do congregations know when new Jews move to town? Odd.
As for Jew-on-Jew humor, I'm usually in favor of it, especially from purveyors who share a somewhat common sense of gravitas: Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, even Sacha Baron Cohen (who definitely isn't anti-Semitic by acting as an anti-Semite and showing scenes of people in America offering glimpses of their fucked-up social views). I have never felt that these jokes about Jewish life are anti-Semitic, though some of the more conservative Jews definitely get cranky about them. In fact, I make fun of what being Jewish in 2007 can be like, too--for instance, needing to eat salted cured meat on a regular basis because my body chemistry requires it to produce a specific kind of irony-fuel. Or the fact that I'm glad I didn't marry another Ashkenazi, so my children might actually have good musculature. You get my point.
One team of writers and directors who cross the line in my opinion, however, have a new biopic-spoof movie coming out soon about a Johnny Cash-like character. I'm not allowed to discuss the film before its release, so say the PR people. But I have to say something without mentioning it, and I'm sure you'll put the pieces together.
Posted on November 15, 2007 at 09:13 AM | Permalink