…I’d rather have the Informal Courses back.
(Previously.)
Archive for May, 2010
On the whole…
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010Art, damn it, art! watch (#9 in a series).
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010This is also the Torment Lawrence Watch.
LAT architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne reviews the new Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, located in Las Vegas and designed by Frank Gehry.
I was going to complain about the lack of photos in the article. Looking online, though, it doesn’t look like there are that many photos of the building itself elsewhere, either; I suspect there may be photography limits imposed by Gehry, the Clinic, or both.
Iron Crossed.
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010For the record: the lawsuit against Variety by the producers of “Iron Cross”, previously noted in this space, has been dismissed.
(Hattip: Jimbo.)
Obit watch: May 18, 2010.
Tuesday, May 18th, 2010“Bud Mahurin was the only Air Force pilot to shoot down enemy aircraft in the European theater of operations and the Pacific and in Korea,” [Doug] Lantry [a historian at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Ohio] told the Los Angeles Times. “He was known as a very courageous, skilled and tenacious fighter pilot.”
…
His knowledge of the resistance made his potential capture in Europe too dangerous and he was grounded, but would fly again in the Phillipines and finished the war with over 20 aerial victories. His later service in the Korean War brought the number to 24.
I have not been able to find an obit online yet, but a reliable source emailed me that noted aviation writer Robert J. Serling has passed away. This seems to be confirmed by his memorial site and Wikipedia. I’m planning to update this post as I find out more information.
Edited to add: NYT obit here. Comments forthcoming later today or tonight.
Random notes: May 17, 2010.
Monday, May 17th, 2010So when Gourmet folded, lots of other magazines apparently thought, “Great! We’ll pick up their subscribers and advertisers!” Yeah, about that: not so much.
Half a year after Gourmet’s final issue, in November, the Gourmet readership and ad base seem to have largely vanished.
I didn’t get a chance to blog this on Friday, as I was distracted by other things, but: the City of Austin released the full, unredacted report on the Quintana shooting incident, blogged here previously. Link goes to a PDF version of the report on the Statesman website.
Edited to add: Also forgot to give the Houston Astros update on Friday, so let’s take care of that now: 13-24, .351 winning percentage, projected 56.862 wins over the 162 game season.
Catastrophe theory.
Sunday, May 16th, 2010LAT subhead: “Pulling off the climax of Richard Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ will be a technical feat at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.”
Apparently, they don’t mean it will be a technical feat if they manage to avoid killing the singers who play Siegfried and Brünnhilde, as you might have expected. Instead, the LAT piece concentrates on the mechanics involved in staging the climax of “Götterdämmerung”.
Is it just me, or does someone seem to have a Brecht obsession? And lightsabers? WTF?
Note to self: next time I put together a DVD order, I need to make sure to add Sing Faster – The Stagehands’ Ring Cycle
I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of aspiring actors cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
Friday, May 14th, 2010Obit watch: “Law and Order”: Original Recipe, aka “The Full Employment for Aspiring Actors and Actresses In New York City Program”.
I’ve watched various incarnations of the series and spinoffs, but I could never get into the original after Michael Moriarty left; Sam Waterston, to me, has all the charisma of a bowl of oatmeal. I’d still tune in from time to time and watch the first half just to see the late Jerry Orbach work, but after he died, so did my last tie to the show.
Still, the show deserves some kind of tribute, and this gives me an excuse to present some of my favorite L&O related art.
Brandon Bird’s painting, “A Night Away” (hotlinked):
(Larger, better quality version.) Supposedly, this was a private commission; if Bird would make prints available, I’d snap one up. In the meantime, here’s a link to Bird’s “Law & Order: Artistic Intent” and some related L&O art. I’m also kind of fond of “Lennie Grabs a Dog” and “A Tough Day at the Office“.
Stolen from FARK threads:
And the single biggest “WTF?” moment in the history of “Law and Order”:
Edited to add: Now that I’m back home and not behind a filter, here’s Sam Waterston at his best:
Götterdämmerung.
Thursday, May 13th, 2010I’ve been following the L.A. Opera’s staging of the Ring Cycle, and the associated “Ring Festival L.A.”, avidly. I’m excited by the idea of someone other than the usual suspects doing complete stagings of the operas, and I love the various events that have been arranged to go along with the staging.
But I wasn’t expecting Siegfried and Brunnhilde to openly revolt.
…
As the LAT notes, this kind of public criticism during a production is rare. I’ve never heard of any performer claiming that a staging is actually physically dangerous, as Watson and Treleaven are. This makes me wish I had money and time to fly out to L.A.
Watson currently is the reigning Brunnhilde at the Bayreuth Festival
That must be a fun fact to drop at parties. “What do you do for a living, dear?” “Oh, I’m the reigning Brunnhilde at Bayreuth.”
Obit watch.
Thursday, May 13th, 2010Leadership secrets of Non-Fictional characters (Part 3 of a series.)
Thursday, May 13th, 2010One piece of writing that changed the way I thought is Seth Godin’s “Why Are We Willing To Tolerate Bullies?” essay in Fast Company issue number 41. If you have not read that essay, I commend it to your attention.
That essay is the first thing I thought of when I read this entry in the “Diner’s Journal” blog at the NYT: “Why I Got Kicked Out of a Restaurant on Saturday Night” by Ron Lieber. The short version: Mr. Lieber and his party sat down to dine, and were treated to the chef loudly berating one of his staff members. After this went on for a while, Mr. Lieber went into the kitchen and informed the chef that he was disrupting the dining experience, as well as being a bully, and asked the chef to stop. The chef responded by asking Mr. Lieber and his party to leave.
My reaction is that Mr. Lieber did the right and noble thing; he stood up to a bully. I would expect people to be backing him up. Instead, many of the comments at the NYT site seem to take the chef’s side, talking about the kitchen being “sacred” space, or making Gordon Ramsey comparisons.
The kitchen is sacred space, and Mr. Lieber shouldn’t have entered? No, not when I’m paying for the dining experience, and you’re disrupting it. Once what goes on in your “sacred space” overlaps into my space, you’ve lost any right you have to privacy.
Yes, kitchens are rough places to work, as Anthony Bourdain will tell you. But he’s also made it clear that there’s a difference between normal kitchen behavior, where people blow up at each other and get over it in a few minutes, and this kind of pathological yelling at staff.
Gordon Ramsey does it? Maybe he does; all most of us have seen is his TV persona, and I’ve seen damn little of that. I’ll tell you something else about Gordon Ramsey, though. Bourdain tells a story about what happened when Ramsey quit one of the restaurants he was working in; the entire staff quit. Not just the back-of-the-house kitchen staff who were closest to Ramsey, but the entire front of the house staff as well. Can you inspire that kind of loyalty in your staff? Then maybe you can get away with yelling at them like Ramsey.
When we tolerate bullying behavior, even if it’s just putting up with a chef yelling in a restaurant, we’re moving down a slippery slope. One day, it’s just someone yelling at his staff. But tolerate that long enough, and eventually you’re tolerating prosecutors and judges trying to railroad innocent defendants. At some point, we need to draw a line and stand up to the bullies. And we need to backstop each other when we do.
Well done, Mr. Lieber. Shame on you, Marc Forgione.
(Hattip: Mom for the NYT article. Popehat has the best short summary I’ve found of the Tonya Craft trial, with plenty of links to other coverage. Reason’s “Hit and Run” blog has been on the case as well.)
Quote of the day.
Wednesday, May 12th, 2010“It is actually very difficult to overdose on Vitamin D, but two million IU a day is a good start.”
By way of Lowering the Bar.
Edited to add: Quote of the day #2.
“Right off the bat you know this is not your usual capital case in that the defendant’s middle name is neither ‘Wayne’ nor ‘Dale,’ which standing alone is probably enough to support a claim of actual innocence.”
(Via The Volokh Conspiracy.)
Hackwork.
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010I’ve been a big fan of Tom Shales since I started reading the WP online. Only a small handful of people – Roger Ebert, Shales, and possibly a few others – can do a negative review well.
But this review of the PBS series “Need to Know” is lousy hackwork.
- Starting off with a riff on A Tale of Two Cities is a cliche you’d expect from a lousy writer such as myself, not a Pulitzer-prize winning media critic.
- Shales spends three and a half paragraphs ranting about…computer viruses? before getting into the actual subject of his review.
- His main point seems to be that computers and the “digital revolution” are responsible for displacing Bill Moyers. I won’t get into my personal feelings about Moyers, and I never watched his show. But Shales seems to be basing much of his dislike for the show on his idea that Moyers was forced out.
I realize that this is a popular conspiracy theory, but it isn’t true. As PBS Ombudsman Michael Getler has noted, more than once, “Bill Moyers Journal” ended because Bill Moyers wanted to end it. Shales may not believe that, but it would be nice if he at least acknowledged there was a difference of opinion on the subject.
“Need to Know” may indeed stink. But Shales hasn’t proven it.