Obit watch.

May 20th, 2010

Arakawa, of the team Arakawa and Gins, passed away on Tuesday at the age of 73.

I’ve previously linked to discussions and commentary about Arakawa and Gins. Briefly, they were conceptual artists who became obsessed with the idea that they could use architecture to stop or reverse the aging process.

Their most recent work, a house on Long Island, had a steeply sloped floor that threatened to send visitors hurtling into its kitchen. Called Bioscleave House (Lifespan Extending Villa), it featured more than three dozen paint colors; level changes meant to induce the sensation of being in two places at once; windows that seemed too high or too low; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an absence of doors that would have permitted occupants even a modicum of privacy.

All of it was meant, the couple explained, to lead its users into a perpetually “tentative” relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young.

Posted in Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Question for the masses.

May 19th, 2010

By way of the FARK Showbiz tab:

How does an obscure Vegas magician get 54 MILLION dollars in debt?

I can sort of understand the $6+ million he owns to the Miracle Mile Shops; it sounds like he may have been four-walling the venue, but I wonder why they would have let him get that deep in the hole.

Harder for me to understand are the mobile home dealer he owes $5 million, and “businessman Steven Tebo in Boulder, Colo., and a company he is associated with, owed $30 million.” I’m guessing this is the Tebo in question, though he appears to spell his first name Stephen.

Posted in Clippings | Comments Closed

She’s filing her nails while they’re dragging the lake…

May 19th, 2010

The good folks over at The Rap Sheet are running a contest asking folks to name their four favorite private eye novels. It seems like a fun idea, so I’m sending in my entry. But while I was working on that, it occurred to me that I could get a blog post out of it as well; especially if I didn’t limit it to just four.

So here’s a list, in no particular order, of my ten favorite private eye novels, with some comments. The ones I included in my list for The Rap Sheet are marked with a (*). If nothing else, I hope this stimulates some discussion.

  • California Fire and Life, Don Winslow. (*)
  • Free Fall, Robert Crais. What I love most about this book is that the heart of the plot is a love story about two people who wind up walking through the fire. They don’t come out without scars, but Crais leaves you with the feeling they came out stronger for the experience.
  • Gone, Baby, Gone, Dennis Lehane.
  • Promised Land, Robert B. Parker. Here’s what I’ve said about this novel previously.
  • When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, Lawrence Block. (*) A sad, beautiful, elegiac private eye novel. I’m glad the series didn’t end with this one, but if it had, it couldn’t have ended any better.
  • Pale Gray for Guilt, John D. MacDonald. (*) More than just a stand-in for all of the Travis McGee novels, this is my favorite because:
    • It is a very personal novel; McGee is out for revenge on the person who killed his friend, and to protect his friend’s widow.
    • The Christmas setting. I like to pick this up and re-read it every Christmas, so I can get in the mood for the season.
    • It is a novel about dealing with loss.
    • It features Meyer, who I like almost as much as McGee. More to the point, it features Meyer in a key role, and makes good use of his specific talents.
  • Farewell, My Lovely, Dashiell Hammett Of course I know this was a Raymond Chandler novel; that was a copy and paste error. I know this is kind of a conventional choice, but there’s just something about Moose Malloy, and especially the last line of the novel, that gets to me.
  • The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett. (*) Another kind of conventional choice. There are people who would say that I picked this because of my romantic attachment to Bogart and the movie. There may be some truth to that. But the book existed before the movie did, and I picked this one (rather than Red Harvest) because, I think, this is the Hammett book most concerned with honor; what it means, and how to live with honor in a world without honor.
  • The Red Box, Rex Stout. Some other folks have cited books as stand-ins for entire series. This is my stand-in for all the Wolfe books. I have fond memories of some of the other books (Too Many Cooks and The Black Mountain in particular), but those are atypical books. The Red Box is the most typical of the Wolfe books; all the routine is there, but it comes late enough in the series that it feels more polished than the early books.
  • The Far Side of the Dollar, Ross Macdonald. I’m not as well read in the Archer books as I would like to be, but I felt like he belonged on the list. Of the Archer books I’ve read, this is the one that made the strongest impression on me.

Honorable mention: I considered putting The Fools in Town Are on Our Side, by Ross Thomas, on this list. In the end, though, I decided that as much as I like that novel, it isn’t what I’d consider a private eye novel. I’m not sure what to call it, but I don’t think it fits that category.

The subject line is a hattip to Lawrence, who complained last time I quoted Mr. Costello’s song that I didn’t use that line.

Posted in Books | Comments Closed

On the whole…

May 19th, 2010

…I’d rather have the Informal Courses back.

(Previously.)

Posted in Clippings, Music, Politics | Comments Closed

Art, damn it, art! watch (#9 in a series).

May 19th, 2010

This 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.

Posted in Art, Clippings, Gehry | Comments Closed

Iron Crossed.

May 18th, 2010

For the record: the lawsuit against Variety by the producers of “Iron Cross”, previously noted in this space, has been dismissed.

(Hattip: Jimbo.)

Posted in Movies | Comments Closed

Obit watch: May 18, 2010.

May 18th, 2010

Walker “Bud” Mahurin.

“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.

Posted in Clippings, Obits, Planes | Comments Closed

Random notes: May 17, 2010.

May 17th, 2010

So 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.

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law, Loser, Media | Comments Closed

Catastrophe theory.

May 16th, 2010

LAT 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”.

For L.A., director Achim Freyer conceived the opera’s final sequence as a Brechtian peeling away of stage artifice to reveal the inner workings of the production.

…

Competing for stage space amid the Brechtian swirl are the Rhine Maidens, the villainous Hagen, the corpse of Siegfried and a chorus of Gibichungs waving their lightsabers.

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.

Posted in Clippings, Music, Wagner | Comments Closed

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of aspiring actors cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

May 14th, 2010

Obit watch: “Law and Order”: Original Recipe, aka “The Full Employment for Aspiring Actors and Actresses In New York City Program”.

By one estimate, more than 8,000 people in the city are employed, directly and indirectly, by the series and its two spinoffs. The franchise has been especially important to the many Broadway and Off Broadway actors who make appearances on the shows.

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):

Brandon Bird's "Night Away".

(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:

Posted in Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Götterdämmerung.

May 13th, 2010

I’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.

In separate interviews, British tenor John Treleaven, who plays the hero Siegfried, and American soprano Linda Watson, who plays Brunnhilde, said German director Achim Freyer’s avant-garde staging — which features a steeply tilted stage, bulky costumes and oversized masks — interferes with their acting and singing and poses excruciating physical burdens.

…

Watson called the set “the most dangerous stage I’ve been on in my entire career.…Your whole neck is tipped wrong. It’s very painful to do it for hours.”

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.”

Posted in Clippings, Music, Wagner | 1 Comment »

Obit watch.

May 13th, 2010

Little Orphan Annie.

Posted in Clippings, Obits | Comments Closed

Leadership secrets of Non-Fictional characters (Part 3 of a series.)

May 13th, 2010

One 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.)

Posted in Clippings, Food, Law, Leadership | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

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.)

Posted in Food, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

Hackwork.

May 11th, 2010

I’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.

  1. 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.
  2. Shales spends three and a half paragraphs ranting about…computer viruses? before getting into the actual subject of his review.
  3. 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.

Posted in Clippings, TV | Comments Closed

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