SharedThought

The New York Times has a positive review about an off Broadway play called Matt and Ben (How off Broadway? It’s being staged at P.S. 122!). It’s a play set at the time Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were working on the script for Good Will Hunting. In the play, the script falls into their lives as a completed work, and Matt and Ben have to decide whether to use the material as their own. According to the review there’s lots of juicy celebrity bashing in the play. And Ben Affleck thought the bad press was over?

ESPN is announcing today that Rush Limbaugh will join their NFL pregame show to spark debate. I can’t believe it. It’s hard enough to watch television news these days and stomach the creeping influence of radical conservatism there. Now we have to put up with Rush Limbaugh on ESPN? Sports programming should not be politicized! It’s the one thing everyone, regardless of political affiliation, should be able to watch in peace.

Want to complain? Write an email to ESPN.

Bravo is debuting a new show starting Tuesday night at 9pm called Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Here’s the premise:

Five gay men, out to make over the world one straight guy at time.

They are the Fab Five: an elite team of gay men who have dedicated their lives to extolling the simple virtues of style, taste and class. Each week their mission is to transform a style-deficient and culture-deprived straight man from drab to fab in each of their respective categories: fashion, food and wine, interior design, grooming and culture.

The New Orleans Times Picayune has a short (positive) review of it here. In the ever more crowded field of reality television this one stands out as a potential laugh riot. I can’t wait for Tuesday night!

I have been neglecting the cultural side of this blog for awhile, and thought it was time to post something to try to even the scales. So when I heard a story on NPR yesterday morning about wine ratings, I figured that was it. Yesterday, however, I had other things to rant about. So, today I tracked down a link to the NPR story. You can listen to an archived version here.

The basic point of the story was that numerical wine ratings are a fairly new invention. In the decade or so they’ve been in use, consumers (not surprisingly) have adjusted their buying habits to reflect the ratings. However, the ratings are not as objective as you might think. Ratings are determined by an individual who is assigned a specific wine region. So the 93-rated Cabernet Sauvignon from California that Wine Spectator says is a great deal was tasted and rated by only one person. You can see how ratings are apt to be skewed by the preferences and palates of a few people. Wine makers lament that the rating systems limit the range of wines being made because you have to make a certain kind of wine to get the right rating. Wine sellers have also been known to mislead consumers by posting inaccurate shelf tags under wines. To get a bit more information about the different numerical ratings available check out this site.

Ks Weblog has a link to the Discovery Channel story about how Van Gogh’s Moonrise had been time authenticated using astronomical techniques. I had also heard the story on NPR last week. Check out that story and other related links here.

The LA Times (registration required) has a story about what happens when student artwork is perceived as crossing the line into criminal threats or intimidation. Here’s an excerpt:

Deciding on the right response is not easy, as a school district in Oconto County, Wis., learned in 1998 when a 13-year-old boy committed to paper a homicidal fantasy about a teacher.

The teacher, nicknamed Mrs. C., had assigned her students to write a story. The boy, identified in court records only as Douglas D., was talking in class, so she sent him to the hallway to finish his work.

Douglas’ story depicted Mrs. C. as “an ugly old woman” who angered a student named Dick by kicking him out of her classroom. With crude spelling, Douglas went on to describe how “Dick” returned to school with a hidden knife.

“The next morning Dick came to class & in his coat he conseled a machedy,” the boy wrote. “When the teacher told him to shut up he whipped it out & cut off her head. When the sub came 2 days later she needed a paperclip so she opened the droor. Ahh she screamed as she found Mrs. C’s head in the droor.”

Douglas apologized but was suspended from school.

I’m sympathetic to an artist’s need to express extreme feelings, but I have to admit after reading the story that I think the schools mentioned in the article acted appropriately. The tone of the article is surprisingly non-committal on the right to expression issue. It would have been easy to write a story that said the schools just don’t get it. They are punishing kids for creating art they don’t understand, etc., etc. The LA Times, to its credit, recognized that schools after Columbine are paying much closer attention to what students are writing (and painting).

In a previous entry, I reported that I was unable to find an image of Eugene Carriere’s Mother’s Kiss from the Pushkin Exhibit anywhere on the web. The Pushkin Exhibit is now showing at Atlanta’s High Museum. I had worn out Google trying to find a copy of the painting. Then I ran the search in MSN’s search engine and up popped a link to the web page of another fan of the painting who had taken a photo of it while it was showing in Houston. Here it is!

I recently had a chance to visit the High Museum in Atlanta and visit their exhibit of French masterpieces from the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

The exhibition surveys three centuries of French art, beginning with masterpieces by seventeenth-century artists Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, progressing through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and concluding with early modern works by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. Of the 76 masterworks on view, 52 are being shown in the United States for the first time. This was a nice show. The High Museum has a pretty plain permanent collection and relies on traveling exhibits, such as this one, to bring in visitors.
I saw the exhibit on Mother’s Day, so it was pretty crowded. As usual, the exhibit’s first rooms were bunched up. By the last room however, there was almost nobody around. The show covered a pretty wide range of time so there wasn’t much depth in any particular period. The fact that the exhibit was arranged chronologically worked out well for me. The earlier rooms devoted to French classicist works were crowded while the later rooms devoted to Impressionists and Modernists (my favorites) were not.

I came across an artist that I had not seen before. His name was Eugene Carriere. His painting called “Mother’s Kiss” was especially moving. Unfortunately, I can’t find any images of it to share.

Update! Here’s the painting:

I got it from the website of another Pushkin exhibit viewer who liked Carriere’s painting.

See the Atlanta Journal Constitution review of the show here. For a discussion of art check out this page before taking in your next exhibit.

It’s getting close to the time that the next Harry Potter book is due to be released (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix). The links in this post will take to Amazon UK where you can preorder the next book in advance of its June 21, 2003 release.

If you’re interested in checking out the other books in the series to see how the UK books are different from their American counterparts you can buy a boxed set of the novels here.

If you’re feeling silly about reading these books because you’re not in junior high anymore, read this dialog from Slate. You might feel better afterwards.

The Da Vinci Code is the latest from Dan Brown. A real-time thriller that takes place over the course of about 12 hours (Brown’s specialty. Check out Angels & Demons and Deception Point for others by Brown). This book is moving up the bestseller lists, but I think the earlier Angels & Demons is a better read.

Forever: A Novel by Pete Hamill is the opposite of Dan Brown’s real-time thrillers. This novel takes place mostly in New York City, but over the span of several centuries. The book follows the life of a man granted eternal life — as long as he stays on the island of Manhattan. This is a great idea for a story, but I mainly felt unsatisfied when I finished. It’s hard to fault Hamill, however. How can anyone pull this off in a single volume novel. There’s too much history to cover without leaving important events out.

John Irving is my favorite writer, and with this book I’ve finished reading everything (in book form) that he’s written. The Imaginary Girlfriend covers similar autobiographical ground to the recently published Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it thoroughly.