The film critic and bearded sage David Denby and I go “way back,” and over the bumpy decades, through summer torpor and winter malaise, I could almost always be found loitering loyally on the sidelines, heckling. Denby considers me fundamentally unserious (facetious is perhaps the word I’m not groping for), and I’ve always found his prose and stance a bit on the pedagogical side (stuffy may be the other word I’m not groping for), hence fun to tease. To David’s great credit, he takes teasing very well in person, with only a minor snort of irritation, as contrasted with those grievance nurturers who deliver death stares at parties and pivot on their heels over long-ago, barely remembered slights. And I can personally and professionally attest that he is generous and extending, unlike most of the bastards you try to avoid on the sidewalk. So over the years, as I’ve matured and mellowed (or, to be candid, “run out of fresh material” where kidding certain parties is concerned), I’ve come to appreciate what a mensch Denby has, and what a monster I.

He has been such a peripheral presence during the course of my time in Manhattan, with intervals of direct, foreground interaction, that I was more taken aback than most when word came over the telegraph wire of Twitter that Denby was stepping aside as film critic of The New Yorker, where he has appeared regularly in Rea Irvin typeface for sixteen years, never to darken the darkened screening rooms again.

This, as you can imagine, ignited a flurry of whoa on Twitter, a great flapping of tiny wings. Some bid respectful adieu, others got in a few last jabs, some wondered if he voluntarily resigned or got the old heave-ho, and of course there were popcorn of pops of speculation as to whom his replacement might be.

As an experienced detective on the media scene, I was more immediately puzzled as to how this news snuck out of the bag. Given Denby’s position and tenure, such a top-rank byline move would normally be made by an official announcement from the magazine, but this broke on a Friday night from Denby’s colleague, the theater writer and Tennessee Williams biographer John Lahr, who blurted farewell in a tweet, a jaunty, pier-side salute (“Power to your pen!”) that seems to have caught everyone by surprise, including Denby. 

Denby immediately clarified that he was not retiring from The New Yorker, only from his position as film critic, and that he would have an office at Conde Nast’s new offices in what I lovingly call the Willard Tower and work on longer pieces for the magazine, at which point my glazed eyeballs fell out of their sockets in rabid anticipation. Then The New Yorker’s director of communications explained in what I assume is a rare weekend communique that not only would Denby continue writing for the magazine but that he would not be replaced—Anthony Lane would now be the sole movie critic, wearing a fresh carnation in his lapel to indicate he means business.

Perhaps it is uncollegial of me to venture an opinion—i.e., open my trap—on how this all played out but I have to say that I believe The New Yorker bungled it from a PR perspective, bungled it badly. They could have milked this transition for all the phony-baloney drama for all it was worth.

Instead of making Anthony Lane sole ruler of Neptune, they could have left the co-pilot position open and had a contest along the lines of America’s Next Top Model to choose America’s Next Top Film Critic. Hosted by Alec Baldwin, the perfect comeback vehicle for him, this Bravo series—tagline “Do YOU have what it takes to be American’s Next Top Film Critic—would winnow down 12 avid, talented contestants from a pond of applicants who are “really into movies” and looking for that big break that’ll enable them to catch up on their car payments, and put them through a series of challenges, quizzes, staged breaches of screening room etiquette, and feats of butt-sit stamina (roll the credits for Satantango while Alec Baldwin chuckles evilly off-camera). Their turned-in copy will then be edited and fact-checked by actual New Yorker copy editors and fact checkers, and held up for marvel or ridicule. The chosen winner would then take his or her exalted place on a platform with Anthony Lane as the final triumphal music of Star Wars blares.

That’s the direction I would have gone. I’m just crawling with ideas. Unfortunately, The New Yorker decided upon the safe, anticlimactic option, a “smooth transition” that offers absolutely no entertainment value whatsoever.

I dimly recall (meaning, I can’t locate the precise details on the Internet but I know it happened) a theater reviewer creating a small piss storm after she wrote about giving a homeless person her press ticket after she walked out of a production during intermission. Producers and theatrical press agents were understandably upset at this blithe gesture of prankish disregard, which was not only unprofessional and petty but potentially dangerous (suppose the person she described as homeless was schizophrenic or disrupted the performance?). The reviewer claimed she had just been joking, but it was a tinny defense, and even if it was a joke, it was a poor one--one the conveyed she didn’t take her job seriously. A job that at the time was quite coveted and today almost non-existent (being paid to review high-profile Broadway and off-Broadway productions).

But that incident caused a minor flurry compared to the one that broke out after cultural journalist Joanne Kaufman wrote a chirpy confession for The Wall Street Journal titled “Confessions of a Broadway Bolter” (paywalled, I’m afraid), in which she described making like The Flash for the exits at the intermission of many top-named shows. "I recently saw three Broadway shows in a single week. Actually, as is my unfortunate tendency, I'm overstating things a bit. To be scrupulously honest, I saw half of three Broadway shows. Intermissions came and I went." She went on to cite eight recent Broadway productions--including Matilda, Pippin, KInky Boots, and It’s Only a Play--that incited a speedy getaway up the aisle and into the tonic noise and congestion of Times Square, abandoning ship after ship after ship rather than subjecting herself to act two.

Temperamentally, metabolically, I share this bolting impulse. Over the years I’ve split many a show at intermission, taking my inspiration Philip Larkin’s feeling of liberation at deciding leave Synge’s Playboy of the Western World at interval rather than return (“I’ve never watched such stupid balls”), but the difference is that these were all shows whose tickets I paid for out of my own pocket. I don’t like wasting money but I hate even more wasting time, or feeling as if my time’s being wasted, and I’d rather eat the price of a ticket rather than sit through the remainder of something that isn’t working for me.

(The one time I was thwarted was when I decided to tiptoe away from a balcony that was already deserted during a preview of Comedians, starring the then up and coming Jonathan Pryce, which I found very shouty and didactic, and as I reached the hallway leading to the exit, there was the show’s director, Mike Nichols, standing, pacing a bit, listening to the rhythms of the dialogue, and looking fretfully alert. Though he wouldn’t have known me from any other lump of humanity, I just couldn’t bring myself to walk by him and have him see me leaving a show he had directed during its tense pre-opening run and so, like the Pink Panther, I tiptoed back up to the balcony and reseated myself.)

On those rare occasions where I have received complimentary tix, I always stay for the duration because it would be a professional discourtesy and insult not to, seats are expensive (the theater could have just as easily sold that seat to a paying customer), and, besides, I only ask for shows where my interest is keen, and these almost never turn out to be washouts.

It’s different for Kaufman. She isn’t bolting as a civilian with her ass in a slingshot. As Ken Davenport puts it in his theater blog The Producer’s Perspective:

“What’s upsetting to me, and to all those folks that got in touch with me about her full disclosure, is that she is a member of the press, and is given free tickets to all of these productions.  What’s worse is that she even admits to being “embarrassed by how unembarrassed” she is of walking out of shows.

“Frankly, it just doesn’t sound like she enjoys the theater that much.

“And if you don’t enjoy the theater?  You shouldn’t be working in the theater.  You have a responsibility to take yourself out of the game, Ms. Kaufman.  This article screams out like a cry to be fired . . . to be taken off the beat . . . and I truly hope your editor does just that.  But the stronger move, the move that we’d actually respect much more than this article, is for you to say, ‘Hey, this art form deserves respect . . . these writers, these actors, these designers, stagehands, ushers, and yes, these Producers deserve respect . . . and I’m just not giving them that right now, so let me give this post to someone who actually gives a sh@t.’”

A more cannon-booming response came from Rick Miramontez of the Broadway PR agency O&M., which was excerpted on the Broadway World site.

"...when your columnist, Joanne Kaufman, penned her piece entitled "Confessions of a Broadway Bolter," in which she boasts about the sheer number of times she skips out of the theater at intermission (trying, she tells us, not to get "spotted and caught out by the press agent who provided me with the tickets in the first place") I couldn't help but feel a bit like a chump for having accommodated the woman so many times over the years."

""Joltin' Joanne" Kaufman makes it sound like an unbearable hardship to have to sit through the entirety of a Broadway show. As the overwhelming majority of her colleagues manage to sit through (and often rave about) the very shows she bolts from, I have to think that this is less a reflection of the quality of the works and simply indicative of a woman who loathes the art form. It seems to me that a theater reporter who hates theater would be well served to find another beat."

"Well, let me be the first of what I hope will be many press agents to unburden Joltin' Joanne from her hardship. She will never be invited to another show by my office. If she deems a show of ours worthy enough for her (fleeting) attention, she is more than welcome to call us to arrange tickets -- but she had better have a credit card handy."

Admitting that you’re poor is more shocking in America than confessing to a sexual trauma or owning up to a slight or slur committed in the past that’s been digging spurs into your conscience ever since. The poor in this country are supposed to remain in the dingy, weedy background, mute and meek, while the smug mug of Donald Trump and the prancing glitter and gloss of millionaire entertainers and reality-TV showboats kick money in our face. A candid expression of poverty violates a major taboo in this country’s success culture, where you’re only allowed to talk about being down and out when you’re on the ups again and you can treat the poverty past as character-building. What makes William McPherson’s personal essay for The Hedgehog Review, “Falling,” so somber and revelatory is that the author is giving us the park bench perspective of what it means to be old and poor now, with no hope of reversing the downward trajectory. And, more importantly, what it feels like. And what it feels like is a daily scalding of shame, humiliation, and being disregarded as a nobody.

The author used to be a somebody--that’s what gives his destitution an extra shock effect for anybody who recognizes his byline. He wrote for decades for The Washington Post, where he won a Pulitzer Prize, and part of his retirement income is a pension check from the Post. At one point, “the Post suggested I come back to work or, alternatively, the company would allow me to take an early retirement. I was fifty-three at the time. I chose retirement because I was under the illusion—perhaps delusion is the more accurate word—that I could make a living as a writer and the Post offered to keep me on their medical insurance program, which at the time was very good and very cheap.

“The pension would start twelve years later when I was sixty-five. What cost a dollar at the time I accepted the offer, would cost $1.44 when the checks began. Today, what cost a dollar in 1986 costs $2.10. The cumulative rate of inflation is 109.7 percent. The pension remains the same. It is not adjusted for inflation. In the meantime, medical insurance costs have soared. Today, I pay more than twice as much for a month of medical insurance as I paid in 1987 for a year of better coverage. My pension is worth half what it was. And I’m one of the lucky ones.”

He also receives a Social Security check, but Social Security and a pension unadjusted for inflation aren’t enough to make up for the money he lost over the years and keep him afloat.

How did the money end up in “money heaven,” as the legendary investment writer Richard Russell has dubbed it? McPherson is quite candid about his mistakes. He spent years on a reportorial mission abroad to write about Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a series of trips rich in experience but otherwise unlucrative, and he made some disastrous investment decisions, mostly due to laxness. “I turned my brokerage account into a margin account for someone else to handle, and I left the country again. A few more dips into the well, a few turns in the market, a few margin calls, and when I went back for another dip, the well was empty.”

It’s easy to fault McPherson for his follies--I’ve never gone anywhere near margin accounts in my years of investing, or left my investments for someone else to handle--but what’s the point? He acknowledges his mistakes and the fact is that even if you do everything right, something can go horribly wrong. In McPherson’s case, “a major heart attack...led to congestive heart failure, a condition that greatly reduced my physical resilience and taxed my already-limited income.”

Poverty isn’t a state of mind, as his mother used to tell him, but a daily gantlet where every effort becomes difficult and exhausting. Poverty may possess a holy simplicity in the Bible or the peasant reveries in Tolstoy but in a modern bureaucratic society it is an arduous climb sideways just to avoid falling any steeper. “Dealing with the system—’the Man’—is frustrating, exhausting, and takes many hours of waiting for bus and subway, of shuffling back and forth from one office to the next, one building to the next, one bureau to the next, filling out forms and generating a growing stream of paper along the way.”

And setbacks that nearly everybody else can take in stride can be catastrophic if you’re poor.

“Your hard drive crashes? Who’s going to pay for the recovery of its data, not to mention the new computer? I’m not playing solitaire on this machine; the hard drive holds my work, virtually my life. It is not a luxury for me but a necessity. I need dental work. Anybody got $10,000? Dentists are not a luxury. Dental disease can make you seriously ill. Lose your cellphone? What may be a luxury to some is a necessity to me. Without that telephone and that computer, my life as I have known it would cease to exist. Not long after, so would I. I am not eager for that to happen. Need to go to a funeral hundreds of miles away? Who pays for the plane ticket? In the case of the funeral, my nephew paid for the plane ticket. My daughter and son-in-law paid for the dental work. Sometimes, I find it deeply humiliating that I am dependent on such kindnesses when I would prefer that the kindnesses flow the other way. Most of the time, though, I am just extremely grateful for the help of family and friends. It’s not so much humiliating as it is humbling, which is a good thing.”

Maybe, but the uber-rich sure never make a virtue of being humbled--they don’t even bother faking it.

I can imagine some readers finishing McPherson’s essay and thinking, “Well, too bad for him, but that’s never going to happen to me.” They may be practicing some of the same denial that McPherson admits doing. They should read Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and see, though the character of Hurstwood, how quickly fortune can come undone. I try to keep Hurstwood’s example in mind whenever I’m feeling foxy, which, believe me, isn’t too often.

Main link: "Falling," by William McPherson, The Hedgehog Review

Congratulations to friend, comrade, and contessa of cinema Farran Smith Nehme on the publication of her first novel, Missing Reels, where the romance of the city meets the romance of old movies, tango'ing between the rich palette of the Hannah and Her Sisters 80's and the patchy, velvety monochrome of silent classics. Remarkably assured, neatly plotted, deftly paced, and charming as all get out, it may be the first novel with the churchly soul of a revival house, taking us back to the glory days when the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Elgin, and so many more theaters were running double features of Hollywood and foreign favorites, and film buffs partook of a movable feast. 

FSN and czarina Molly Haskell, whom I've had the pleasure of having drinks with at the Algonquin, which I mention only to make everyone envious, share thoughts about the novel, the lost world of the revival house, and sleuthing quest for lost films at the Criterion site in a conversation titled "Downtown Screwball."

Molly Haskell: First of all, congratulations on a terrific novel. It’s wonderfully fresh and original, a combination of screwball comedy and mystery story. And like you, and your heroine, Ceinwen—who also happens to be a southern transplant!—it’s in love with silent cinema. Tell me how the idea came to you and how it evolved.

Farran Smith Nehme: Thank you so much. I hadn’t intended to write a novel, but some friends—perhaps in a spirit of mischief, considering the work involved—had been telling me I should try. There was one problem, though: I didn’t have a plot. I stumbled across an idea by accident, and here I get to name-drop Kevin Brownlow, one of my heroes. I was fortunate enough to be invited to a dinner with him in New York, during which we heard many stories about the world of collectors and the strange ways Brownlow has tracked down the elements of the films he’s restored. I said to him something like “I guess collecting attracts some strange characters.” He leaned in and said, with a big grin and a twinkle, “You have no idea.” 

[snip]

MH: I love the Brownlow story. I remember traipsing down to the East Village, and the Theatre 80 St. Marks, with Andrew [Sarris] in the ’80s. Although I thought they had mostly talkies, from the early ’30s. Also, Bill Everson used to show movies fairly regularly at the New School. He comes into your novel, as do other real people, along with the buffs and geeks. Ceinwen is so poor and disenfranchised, she doesn’t have a license or a passport, and presumably no membership to MoMA, where she really could feast on silent films. She has a kind of tunnel vision; she’s hooked on the past, which allows you to ignore a lot of cinematic activity that was going on around that time—the critical spats, Cahiers du cinéma in English, foreign films.

FSN: Yes, I don’t think Theatre 80 ever screened silent movies, although they certainly showed some rare talkies. Literary license is one of the perks of novel writing, as opposed to my blogging, where I labor to check every fact. Ceinwen sees her old-movie habit as a hobby and an escape, but she isn’t plugged into the scene, as you say. One thing that Raquel Stecher mentioned in her review of this book is how old-movie lovers crave the company of like-minded people, and how difficult finding such company could be in the days before the Internet. Ceinwen eventually solves the problem by meeting some folks, and just plain drafting some others as foot soldiers for her obsessions. By the end, as she’s matured, you can see that her movie taste has expanded, too.

MH: Yes, buffs sought each other out. I wrote in my Andrew memoir [Love and Other Infectious Diseases] about the Huff Society, an informal group that met to see this or that utterly obscure film in odd, makeshift places, NYU classrooms . . . There would be people like your novel’s NYU professors Andy Evans and Harry (though the latter is a little too normal). Andrew used to joke that they would rather see a film that nobody had ever seen than a truly good film—indeed, the criterion for “goodness” would be unknownness...

Without their archeological zeal, so much more of our perishable film heritage would have been lost forever. 

But apparently it needs to be said, and Daniel Larison at The American Conservative makes it plain enough for any dope to see:

The U.S. Lost the Iraq War

Pete Wehner writes a typically delusional response to a recent George Will column:

On Iraq, he’s simply wrong. Because of the success of the surge, the Iraq war–unlike, say, the Vietnam War–was won [bold mine-DL].

This is just pitiful. Bush loyalists will believe whatever they want to believe, but their self-serving spin has to be rejected for what it is. The Iraq war may not have been “the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history,” as Will claimed, but it ranks among the four or five worst blunders in the annals of the United States. It was an unnecessary war, it had nothing to do with securing the U.S. or its allies, and it has manifestly made the region less stable and secure than it was before the invasion. The U.S. paid an appalling price in thousands of lost lives, tens of thousands wounded, and trillions of dollars wasted on a fool’s errand to “disarm” a government that had been disarmed years earlier. American soldiers were sacrificed year after year in the name of creating a democratic government in Iraq only to usher in a sectarian, semi-authoritarian regime whose abusive misrule helped to create the current conflict. Along the way, millions of Iraqis were displaced internally or forced into exile, over a hundred thousand died, and most of the rest have been living in a failed state for more than ten years.

It is one of the great indictments against our political system and our citizenry that almost no thought or pity has been expended on those millions of Iraqis whose lives have been ruined, blighted, or destroyed by a U.S. invasion intended to show the Mideast who was boss, when it turned out that sure as f-uck wasn't us; but even today there's more Beltway concern and trumpet soloing over our "standing" in the world, the size of our Victor Davis Hanson manhood, than the reckless resolve and puffed-up hubris that resulted in such an ongoing debacle--a debacle that was a neverending moral wrong. George Bush's post-presidential foray into painting isn't going to paper over the bloody mural that is his legacy. Larison:

Bush will never own up to his responsibility for this disaster, and apparently neither will many of his supporters. That is their failure. No one else has to share in it.

Of course, the reason Bush loyalists claim that the Iraq war was "won" is so that they can blame Obama for losing it...for betraying the achievements of the surge. Because God forbid they should ever look inward. 

About three bricks Shia LaBoeuf--this must be the worst pun or play on words I've perpetrated on the blog, which is saying something. It has no relation whatsoever to Roy Blount's classic book on the Pittsburgh Steelers, nor the slightest connection to the actor and co-star of the just released film Fury, but I had to title this post something, and that's what I went with. Someday you may find yourself in the same predicament, though probably not. 

As you may have seen or heard, unless you've been stuck in a Diver Dan helmet, the gifted young actor Shia LaBeouf, who made his first splash as a Disney Channel favorite (Even Stevens), intensified into a serious dude of post-Method role immersion, and landed major parts in mega-international franchises (Indiana Jones and Heartbreak of Psoriasis, those Transformers recombinative crunchers), had a somewhat "off" year where he fell from grace with a thud. Or I should say a serious of thuds down the stars to the basement. In the introduction to his Interview interview with LaBoeuf, Elvis Mitchell provides the rap sheet:

...his 2013 dustup with Alec Baldwin during rehearsals for the play Orphans, from which LaBeouf was later ousted, and...his recent arrest in New York City for criminal trespassing, disorderly conduct, and harassment, after disturbing a Broadway performance of Cabaret. In 2013, when it turned out that the plot of LaBeouf's short filmHowardCantour.com (2012) had been purloined from graphic novelist Daniel Clowes's 2007 comic Justin M. Damiano, the actor-director responded with a series of tweet apologies that also appeared to be shoplifted.

Then there was the spectacle of LaBoeuf on the red carpet at the premiere of Nymphomaniac in black tie wearing a paper bag over his head on which was written "I Am Not Famous Anymore." 

What Elvis delivers here isn't so much a celebrity interview as a combination psychoanalytic session and unburdening confession, and a real self-accounting, not the usual public-figure act of contrition feathered with vapid affirmations. About that ill-conceived night at Cabaret...

...I was reading about [pioneering performance artist] Allan Kaprow happenings, and performance art of the '60s and '70s. So I thought, "All right, I know a little about that." We're all involved here. It's not just you on your stage. We're all in here and we're all part of this. I was wrong. The New York crowd didn't see it the same way, and I totally understand that. So I see the error of my ways. But that moment actually saved my life, forced me to look at myself. And when you're in a cell with a fucking mask on your face and a lead jacket, you can really see that some of your life choices were skewed wrong. And for some people it does take that. I still am a very stubborn, hardheaded person who is theatrical by nature. 

MITCHELL: Well, hearing you say this makes me wonder why you're not doing theater.

LaBEOUF: I've thought about it. I rehearsed Orphans for three years with [Al] Pacino and Emile Hirsch and was so down to do it when [Alec] Baldwin, [Daniel] Sullivan, and Tom [Sturridge] jumped in. That's a heartbreak I still have not been able to recover from. I have since made amends with Baldwin, Sullivan, and Sturridge, and Ben Foster, who I never had a problem with—I love that motherfucker. Baldwin and I butted heads hard. I came in method. I was sleeping in the park. I'd wake up, walk to rehearsal. I was so scared to do the play that I had memorized it before ever coming to rehearsal. And my whole goal was to intimidate the fuck out of Baldwin. That was the role. That was my job as an actor. And it wasn't going to be fake. I wanted him to be scared. So I went about doing that for three weeks of rehearsal, to the point that, in the end, it was unsustainable. I've made peace with Baldwin. He was the first dude to hit me up after I got out of court. He sent me an e-mail. It's really beautiful. I was crying on an airplane. And I hadn't talked to him since I got fired. I stayed in New York for a month. I was following him home. I was completely broken, and still in [character]. I didn't know what to do. I started boxing. I was trying to take my mind off the play, but I couldn't do it. So I would follow him from rehearsal to his home. I needed to have closure. I saw the first show, watched from the front row. And after the show, I got up and clapped for him. And I'm crying, they're crying. And Ben was the bridge. He came up to me and shook my hand from the stage, man. And that's all I needed. Because I always felt like I'm not good enough. I've felt that way my whole life. And I was so desperate to be good in that play that I overdid it. It became competitive in the wrong way. "Not only am I good enough, I'm better than you think I am." And then that became an aggressive thing. Fight rehearsals turned into fights. And it is unsustainable. You can't put your fist through a door. I was prepared to break my hand in that show. I was going to do the show that I had in my head every single night. And every rehearsal we did for three weeks, we had to get a new door. [Orphans playwright Lyle] Kessler was with it, and Sullivan was with it, but the producers and the backers, they weren't having it. And only in retrospect could I find peace with that. But at the time, I was out of my mind.

MITCHELL: How much of that competitiveness, that insecurity, is you feeling as though you have to be as real as possible?

LaBEOUF: It's everything. Because I don't think I'm a good actor. I think I'm a shit actor. And so a lot of it is overcompensation. I remember going on [Late Show With] David Letterman, and [he and Baldwin are] friends, and Letterman was asking me questions, like, "Tom Hanks said ... television is for writers, film is for directors, stage is for actors. So why did you get fired?" I'm sitting there, and I've got this insecurity that I'm not a good actor. And now I'm facing the world and I've got Letterman about to eat me up. I almost wanted to cry, man. I didn't know what to say. 

Obviously as a person and an actor he needs to lighten up, but that's easy for me to say, I sitting here at the desk with a cat sleeping near my elbow, making it hard to move the mouse. Not exactly high-stakes drama under this roof.

It's a very long interview but unfailingly interesting, with zero fluff. 

I'm very interested in seeing Fury, in which LaBeouf co-stars with a manly man cast topped by Brad Pitt, though I was initially disappointed that this wasn't going to be an adaptation of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, which is no doubt immature on my part. When I learned that it was going to involve a single US tank battling impossible odds, I held out the even fainter hope that it would be the screen version of "The Haunted Tank," one of the odder WWII comic books ever, yet rather affecting in its forlorn, gallant, cockamamie way. But it is a tank movie, and although I don't hold tank movies as in high a regard as I do submarine movies (Run Silent, Run Deep), it does promise a similar claustrophic danger and intimacy, so what the hell.

Primary link: Elvis Mitchell with Shia LaBoeuf, Interview magazine

When I'm asked (and I never am, I'm speaking hypothetically) whom I consider the three most fascinating men in history, my answer is: Dr. Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George Balanchine.

No doubt you have your own choices. Some night at the sports bar we can all debate our favorites over pitchers of beer while some meaningless college football game plays on multiple flat screens like electronic signposts of alienation in a mid-period Don DeLillo novel.

As for the three most fascinating women in history, we can discuss my fixation on mystic nuns and Maria Callas another time.

What makes a historical figure endlessly fascinating is that we know so much about him, have still more to know, --can never know enough. The facets of their personalities and achievements form fractal reflections that seem to multiply the more one looks.

George Balanchine is more than the greatest choreographer of the twentieth century. He was godhead creation incarnate, but not imperious, Faustian, hubristically willful, mankind-scorning; he was witty, superabsorbent in his perceptions and amusements, not stiff and full of dicta but adaptable and airily pragmatic--a Mozartian genius, but one who lived long enough to elegize and reconjure elegant phantoms of the past.

In Balanchine and the Lost Muse, Revolution and the Making of a Choreographer, dance historian, memoirist, and teacher Elizabeth Kendall delved into the shrouded maze of Balanchine's upbringing, creative budding, and first sorrows. "In her preface," recounts Laura Jacobs in her review of Balanchine and the Lost Muse in London Review of Books, "Kendall writes...

"...that as a cub critic in 1981 she was sent by the Ford Foundation to interview Balanchine, then 77 (he died two years later). Having finished her questions she prepared to leave--but no, he wanted to keep talking. He told Kendall of his life in 1920s revolutionary Petrograd, 'tales about starving, and sewing saddles and playing battered pianos in movie houses just to get food.' It was a long way from there to the early 1980s, but not in his mind. It's to these years that Kendall has returned, almost as if Balanchine had placed her on the path that afternoon.

"But she returns with a pas de deux. Alongsodie the story of the young Balanchine is the story of his classmate Lidia Ivanova. Those who know her name at all tend to know it in one context. Ivanova was a Mariinsky soloist, one of the five young dancers--an inner sanctum that inculded Balanchine; his wife, Tamara Geva; Nikolai Efimov; and the soloist Alexandra 'Choura' Danilova--who were all ready and waiting to leave Russia for a summer tour in Europe, if only their exit visas would come through. On 16 June 1924, Ivanova was killed in a freak boating accident. The next day the visas arrived. On 4 July, four dancers left, never to return. Ever since, Lidia--Kendall refers to her in the diminutive, as Lidochka; Balanchine called her Lida--has been a tragic footnote in Balanchine's life: his slipping, like mercury ffrom a broken glass, out of Soviet Russia and into the West.

"No one in Ivanova's circle...believed her death was an accident. The mystery of how and why Lidia died has continued to haunt many in Russia and beyond. Kendall sensed there was a reason to know more about her. After all, how could the sudden death--and passionate life--of a much loved friend and fellow artist not bear on the poetic young Balanchine?"

And the Sherlock Holmes pursuit is on through the archives and the tangled roots of revolutionary Russia, the result being, writes Jacobs (whom I'm married to and can now see dragging a garden hose through the back yard of our Jersey retreat on this gorgeous October day), that Kendall's "portrait of Balanchine's first twenty years will now be the standard reference for the period" and "her portrait of Ivanova...is mesmerizing."

So bite on that, ye possessors of pinched nostrils and petty grievance nursers in the dance world who went all schoolmarmish about this book and whose bylines I would cite if I weren't trying to "keep it classy."

To read Laura's review, register here. It's easy and you don't have enter a password or anything annoying like that.

Related: From her plush seat at a performance of Balanchine's Chaconne, Haglund marvels at the "hyper-energized, mega-vitalized" glorioso dancing of New York City Ballet this fall season.

Breathes there a soul so pure and fair that it does not take relish and delight in the unfurling exploits of the Palin clan--Sarah, Todd, Toody, Tripod, Terracotta, Bristol, and Brylcreem?* The latest installment of Palin Family Fight Club is the most epic yet, a boisterous party turned Riot-on-the-Sunset-Strip when the Palins rolled in like badasses and before it was over Bristol whaled away her her fists of fury, the Real Housewives of Anchorage piled on, Todd did his impression of Viggo Mortensen fending off orcs, and Track dove into rescue his father like Ricky Nelson in defense of Ozzie.** And where was Moose Empress Sarah, pray tell? Presumably in the Palin gangsta limo that was parked outside, checking her emails while all hell was breaking loose on this now-historic boogie night.

Read Rebecca Schoenkopf's recap of the police report and the boxing highlights at Wonkette, and give thanks that we were spared the spectacle of a McCain presidency and the Palins brawling on the White House lawn, with Charles Krauthammer assuring us on Fox News that families work out problems and express affection in ways that effete eastern seaboard liberal elitists just don't understand while Fred Barnes grins and catches a fish in his mouth.

*Hat tip to TBogg, who totally owns the creative pride of ownership of the random Palin name generator, which I couldn't resist deploying.

**I apologize for the historical references that may strike some as arcane and covered with lint.

The charming and ebullient writer, photographer, blogger, and gal-about-town Miss Manhattan--I could call her "the Divine Miss M" were not the title already taken--hosts her monthly non-fiction reading soiree this Monday night in the East Village (all details below) and her guest of honor will be, guess who, me, making this perhaps the greatest pairing since Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett decided to join tonsils and duet.

I shall let Miss Manhattan, in her own inimitable manner, describe how this summit meeting of the minds came to pass.

...After about four months or so of scheduling and rescheduling dates and times, we were to have lunch on the Upper West Side on an April afternoon. I looked forward to it all week, mentally compiling the sorts of questions I'd ask. And what would I wear? I worried that I would laugh really loud, which I do all the time, especially when I'm nervous. What sort of food would I order? How would James Wolcott feel about me ordering a thick, juicy burger? Was I better off on the chic, dainty salad route? The day of, I felt my heart pounding in my chest as I arrived at the restaurant. I was early, saw him enter, and went up to offer my hand which, to my relief, was not sweating profusely.

Rereading this now, I fully acknowledge what an super-nerd I am. But if you met someone who is at the top of the field to which you yourself aspire, I'm sure you'd feel exactly the same. So just own it, and you'll be fine.

To my (further) relief, the conversation went smoothly. We talked about television, writing, his work at Vanity Fair, dance, photography, and a multitude of other subjects, seamlessly bouncing from one to another. I ordered a Cobb salad and a Diet Coke. He ordered the burger. He was a human, just like me, and very funny at that. In a moment of supreme nerdery, I asked him to sign my book; in it, he wrote 'Forward Ho!' urging me, in pioneer slang, to keep going with my career. (I told my friend Ben about this later, to which he joked, 'James Wolcott called you a ho?' NO, BEN. Though what a story that would have been, no?)

I also spoke about my reading series (The Miss Manhattan Non-Fiction Reading Series, if you are not acquainted!) and without being prompted, he said, "You know I'm a very good reader!" Well, I said, I would love to have you! Eventually, we nailed down a date and now, I'm excited to say, if you haven't seen already, on Monday, October 6 at 7:45pm at Niagara Bar in the East Village (112 Avenue A at 7th Street) I will be hosting a special Miss Manhattan Non-Fiction Reading Series event, An Evening with James Wolcott. Mr. Wolcott, now a 2014 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award Winner for the Art of the Essay, will be reading a few of his non-fiction pieces, discussing his writing process for each of them, followed by a Q&A with me and then with the audience (a little bit James Lipton-style, a la Inside the Actor's Studio, if you will).

I just hope no one in the audience gets confused by the Inside the Actors Studio format and asks questions like "How do you prepare for an audition?" and "What was your favorite role?," because I really don't have any showbiz wisdom to impart, despite my many years as prop master on The Young and the Restless. 

It'll be fun, of that I am certain, and I'm thrilled to be doing something literary and journalistical that doesn't involve going to Brooklyn, where all sorts of troll turmoil has broken out, making every reading a possible stage for Phantom of the Opera melodrama, and who needs that?

More information on the reading here.