The Allman Brothers began their annual ten-night stand at the Beacon, 74th and Broadway, last night, and since it’s their 40th anniversary they’re dedicating the shows to Duane Allman, who as you know was a ridiculously unbelievably good guitar player who, like Natasha Richardson, died for lack of a helmet, and because of the special occasion Eric Clapton played an entire set with them, six songs (including Little Wing and Layla) in an hour.
God, that sounds pretentious, doesn’t it? Sorry. At least I didn’t spell it “theatre.”
So I went to see Neil Labute’s new play, “Reasons to be Pretty,” at the Lyceum on 45th Street last night, and I have a few (but just a few) thoughts about it.
1) Along with God of Carnage, this is the second drama about domestic turmoil I’ve seen lately. I wish theater could tackle broader social themes more often.
2) Reasons to be Pretty is ostensibly about how people are insecure about the way they look—that’s how the play is being marketed on posters all over Manhattan—but kind of not really. It’s really more about the relationship between two very different couples.
3) That Piper Perabo sure is pretty. I’m glad she survived Coyote Ugly.
4) I’m startled sometimes by how mainstream the use of ostensibly obscene or vulgar language has become in theater. Reasons to be Pretty is cock chock-full of “cocksucker” and “motherfucker” and “cunt,” and I think even ten years ago you probably wouldn’t have found that in a Broadway theater. (You—yes, you, fuckhead—all you swears to the Lower East Side!) The good thing is, such language tends to scare away the hard-candy crowd. But what will playwrights do to be shocking when swearing grows trite?
5) Neil Labute sure does like his rock music. At The Shape of Things, which I saw a few years back, he used music to transition between scenes, so loud that it was almost painful. Here he used Arcade Fire, Cracker, and Radiohead…. Hearing “Low” really loud reminded me of how good Cracker is, so I’m putting the video below.
6) I’m always amazed/startled/perturbed by how violence and vulnerability makes people deeply uncomfortable and, in turn, they laugh. This happened at several moments and after one key scene in the play—moments so raw that they’re meant to leave you more or less gasping for air, punched in the stomach. But the audience loved ’em! The laughter was loud and uproarious.
I don’t mean to sound holier-than-thou, but WTF is up with that? I just find it such an odd reaction.
I think that, when Neil Labute watches his plays and sees this reaction, he must be smiling and thinking, “Told you so….”
Okay, I told you—a few thoughts on theater. Now, a little Cracker.
Let me set the scene: Small, crowded club, hot summer night, cold beer in a plastic cup, pretty girl next to you, the lights go down, and this opening riff….
As Harvard mag reports, the university has announced that endowment distributions will be cut 8% for FY 2010.
…the magnitude of the change in endowment support for operations—apparently the result of a recent Harvard Corporation decision, deferred from last fall, when the credit crisis and recession were just unfolding—is larger than many units had anticipated.
How bad is it and what will it mean for everyday life at Harvard? You tell me….
—a Columbia University spokesman addressing a report that actor/student James Franco is inadvertently causing mob scenes when he leaves his writing class.
Like the New Republic, yesterday’s Times also posed the question of whether American business schools contributed to the current economic crisis.
…with the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades.
“It is so obvious that something big has failed,” said Ángel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. “We can look the other way, but come on. The C.E.O.’s of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, ‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’ when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership”
It’s obvious that business schools and their professors need to have ties to the institutions and people they’re teaching about.
The question is really, have those ties gotten too cozy? Are the profs so financially entangled with the private sector that they lost all perspective on what they were supposed to be teaching?
While searching for something completely unrelated, I came across this bit of social anthropology from a different era—an NYT story about a “Sweet 16″ party in 1999:
The guys gaped at Nicky Hilton, a tall size 0 blonde, whose waist and shoulders also played peekaboo in a black tube top, as she tugged on her Patricia Field cowboy hat, pretending to care less.
When the music ended, she signaled to her friend, Olympia Scarry, who was dressed every bit as stylishly — and as skimpily — and both teen-age girls grabbed unsuspecting boys from the crowd to kiss them. Three minutes later, they ended the make-out sessions and pushed the boys away, then returned to dancing with each other….
On TNR. com, Bradford Plumer looks at the role business schools have played in the current financial crisis.
…the usually prim Financial Times mocked the champagne-swigging alumni at Harvard Business School’s 100-year anniversary gala as they quietly squirmed over their responsibility for the mess. (“We will leave the talk of fixing the blame to others,” Harvard’s dean assured the gathering.)
…across the country, business-school faculties are grappling with the possibility that they’ve been instilling generations of students with a naive faith in free markets, teaching them to focus solely on short-term profits, and justifying some of the more outrageous executive-compensation schemes that have become Exhibit A in the case against corporate America.
And as with Harvard Medical School, part of the problem at HBS is how the close ties that biz school professors have with industry have corrupted influenced what is taught there.
Nor were faculty members sounding as many warnings about Wall Street as they could have. “Our tendency was just to get excited by the novelty-and by our belief that markets could do no wrong,” says Jay Lorsch, a professor of human relations at Harvard Business School. Lorsch points out that most MBA programs have to maintain friendly ties with the corporate world-professors often consult on the side and work closely with companies to develop case studies, while business schools depend on big firms to send students to their executive programs. “This all created a tendency to go along with the business community, to not be too critical.”
Pretty damning, and good for Jay Lorsch for being candid.
One thing that Drew Faust could do, might make her a great president, is to launch a university-wide examination of Harvard’s relationship to the private sector—a soul-search, if you will.
Given the economic crisis the university is undergoing, and the way in which the nation is reconsidering basic aspects about capitalism it once took for granted, this would be an opportune time to commence such a project.
Like I would know. I can’t even get this one to stop having technical difficulties and refusing to delete duplicate posts. (Tech guy! Help! Where are you?)
But the website 43 Folders, created by San Francisco writer Merlin Mann, has a nice list of six nine things that help make a good blog. Or a blog good, whichever you prefer.
Among his criteria: Good blogs have a voice, they have obsessions, they have…paragraphs.
Blog posts are written, not defecated.
I couldn’t agree more! And, as a matter of general principle, I try not to defecate my blog posts.
Here’s number six:
Good blogs are weird. Blogs make fart noises and occasionally vex readers with the degree to which the blogger’s obsession will inevitably diverge from the reader’s. If this isn’t happening every few weeks, the blogger is either bored, half-assing, or taking new medication.
This blog does not make fart noises. Technically, we’re just not there yet.
However, I do have obsessions.
Perhaps it is time to talk about the finale of Battlestar Galactica, the fact that I just bought Depeche Mode tickets for August, or today’s Fuck You Penguin.
Did you know that the UN is hosting a panel discussion about Battlestar Galactica? No, it’s true. Not that any of my friends who work for the UN (you know who you are) invited me….
Blogging for Portfolio, Felix Salmon makes some smart points about Noam Scheiber’s wretched profile of Larry Summers in the New Republic.
In particular, Salmon challenges Scheiber’s argument that Summers has insufficient power; that we should get out of the way and let him work his magic.
But in fact there’s precious little evidence that when it comes to policy prescriptions, Summers has any particular special ability to alight upon exactly the right course of action at any given time. He’s good at asking pointed questions, but I don’t see many people standing around right now and saying “if only we’d listened more to Larry.”
And Salmon echoes something I’ve written (and he probably has before as well): the idea that Summers’ columns in the FT were, essentially, meaningless pap. (Is that redundant?)
Although Scheiber picks on one particular FT column of Larry’s as indicating that he might be more inclined towards bank nationalization than Tim Geithner is, the real lesson of Summers’s tenure as an FT columnist is that most of his policy prescriptions tend to be carefully-hedged conventional wisdom, the kind of thing that most left-leaning economists would be hard pressed to disagree with. I was econoblogging for the entire time that Summers spent at the FT, and I almost never found anything worth blogging in his columns: they struck me as being made up mostly of hot air and self-importance, with very little of actual substance.
Carefully-hedged conventional wisdom is exactly right; the other point to make about them is that they manifest what seems like a calculated move to the left, calibrated, perhaps, in order to appeal to presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They are columns written not to provide insight, but to serve as a job application.
How Obama handles Summers is going to be an interesting and important test of the man. If he’s smart enough to understand how to use Summers well while at the same time keeping him under control, that would suggest a level of confidence, intelligence and insight that could make Obama a great president.
If he’s one of those people who sits back in awe of Summers’ great brain, we are in trouble.