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A Week in Culture: Richard Brody, New Yorker Film Critic

June 30, 2010 | by

DAY ONE

10:02 A.M. The week’s first cultural object is a new, yet-unreleased film by Claude Chabrol, The Son of Summer, starring Isabelle Huppert1 as a childless, married bourgeois intellectual who has a special, foster-like relationship to a young, disabled boy whom, one day, she kills. The film is so new that, in fact, it doesn’t exist—I dreamed2 it at the end of a morning of troubled sleep.

10:15 A.M. A chamber transcription of Haydn’s Symphony no. 94, the “Surprise” symphony, is playing on WQXR3, New York’s classical-music station. It’s music I know and love—I play a spare transcription of the middle movements on recorder—but have never heard4 in this arrangement.

11:00 A.M. Twitter (and every hour or two for a few minutes, throughout the day). Love the sense of listening in on discussions at the next table when they know you’re listening. Good to chat back and forth with people I don’t know but would want to, with others I do know but don’t talk with often enough, with a surprisingly large yet tight group of fellow cinephiles. The 140 characters? A snapshot of an idea.

11:10 A.M. Heading for the subway, unusually5 late.

11:20 A.M. The Genius and the Goddess6: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, by Jeffrey Meyers on the No. 6 and the R. Anticipating something like a twist on the line from Saturday Night Fever: “Maybe he’s not so smart and maybe she’s not so dumb.”

11:47 A.M. The New York Times's Web site, checked intermittently throughout the day’s editorial duties.

3:20 P.M. Glenn Kenny’s blog Some Came Running led me to his piece at Mubi about politicized viewings of “Sex and the City 2.” It concludes with a citation from Slavoj Zizek, which prompted me to revisit Adam Kirsch’s critical debunking, in The New Republic, of Zizek’s politics (The Deadly Jester), and Josh Strawn’s debunking of Kirsch’s, at Jewcy.

7:52 P.M. “The Young Schubert,” a recording by the pianist Leonard Hokanson, a student of Artur Schnabel. Hokanson delights in Schubert’s adolescent inspirations.

8:20 P.M. NY Post: the bridge column. I played a lot in high school, not at all since then—but I read the bridge column every day. And Page Six: the item about Ron Jeremy lunching at Condé Nast. I saw him in the lobby beforehand, where lots of employees came up to greet him. Afterwards, plenty of people in the office were talking about him7.

8:30 PM. The Times: Read the front-page story with the headline, “Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price.” Put any noun in the place of “gadgets” and there would be a price to pay; that’s true of any addiction or abuse, not just of electronic stimuli. Read the op-ed piece about legislative battles8 in Wisconsin over raw milk.

9:27 P.M. Bud Powell, A Portrait of Thelonious. Powell, the definitive bebop pianist and my favorite jazz pianist, whose scintillating yet melodious right-hand runs are anchored by the dark lightning of his left hand’s chords. His later recordings (such as this one, from a Paris studio in 1961) are much and wrongly maligned. What he lost in exuberance he gained in profundity; and where they’re exuberant (Live in Geneva 1962, for instance), they’re still more profound9.

9:40 P.M. On-line Driver’s Manual and Study Guide—having let my license lapse, inadvertently, decades ago, I need to start again, with a learner’s permit: “You may not cross any railroad tracks unless there is room for your vehicle on the other side. If other traffic prevents you from crossing all the way, wait, and cross only10 when there is room.”

12:05 A.M. A few minutes of John Ford’s The Rising of the Moon, his low-budget Irish film11, from 1956.

1:11 A.M. While preparing to DVR No Sad Songs for Me (which Jean-Luc Godard wrote about in Cahiers du Cinéma at the age of twenty-one), I burn to DVD—and start to watch—High Time, a 1960 comedy directed by Blake Edwards, starring Bing Crosby as a prosperous fifty-ish businessman who decides to get a college education12.

2:48 A.M. The Genius and the Goddess. Reading about Arthur Miller’s troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee and its heinous methods, in 1956-57, even after the fall of McCarthy: “Miller said his battle with the committee was ‘a fraud and a farce, except it cost me a fortune [$40,000] for lawyers and a year’s time lost in the bargain, worrying about it and figuring out how to react to it.’” Read More »

Annotations

  1. Chabrol’s frequent muse.
  2. Dreamed the screening at which I saw it (un-subtitled); dreamed the first few scenes, of Huppert’s character in bed with her husband, of her arrival at the fairgrounds where she meets up with the boy, of her ride with the boy and other kids in a special, capsule-like car until, at a certain moment, she opens the hatch-like front door and drops the boy out of it. In the screening room, I close my eyes but hear a horrific watermelon-crush sound when he’s run over—and hear the groans of other spectators at the screening—then open my eyes to see the vestiges of gore on the tires as the camera continues to show the front of the vehicle and dollies to a close-up of a lens-like aperture there, signaling that a lengthy flashback is about to begin—at which moment I wake up. In the early eighties, I was in the habit of keeping a dream diary; every morning, before starting the day’s activities (which, obviously, were insufficient), I’d write down my dreams of the previous night. But the more I wrote them, the more I remembered, and soon found myself spending an hour and a half or more on the subject, until I worried that the recollections of dreams would grow long enough to fill the day and spill over into the dreams of the next night. That’s my secret fear of this culture diary.
  3. WQXR does a good job, but now that it’s listener-supported (the change happened last year), I miss the commercials, which, despite their intrusiveness, were more imaginative and less self-abasing than the pleas for contributions that the announcers have to deliver. Maybe, for variety’s sake, there’s a station offering all commercials, all the time.
  4. That’s what radio is good for; I’ve got plenty of recorded music, but I like to be, well, surprised, even by the “Surprise.”
  5. An unusual week—a double issue of the magazine is on the newsstands, so there’s no new issue being put out this week; it’s what we call a down week. I’ve got plenty to do nonetheless—including this diary. I’m curious to see what it will tell me about my own cultural life.
  6. I’m reading in an uncorrected advance proof that I found at the book bench.
  7. I can imagine the era, not long ago, when few might have admitted knowing who he is. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking with a young colleague about “Holy Rollers,” the dull new film about Hasidic drug dealers, and mentioned a scene in which the protagonist looks out his window and sees that his neighbor is watching Robin Byrd on TV. My colleague asked, “Who’s that?” I told her, “I don’t know.”
  8. Thought of my friend Michael Specter’s book Denialism; also thought of the word “brucellosis,” which I hadn’t thought of since I was an insufferable child who read the American College Dictionary.
  9. As Aeschylus said: Pathos mathei—suffering teaches.
  10. I am reminded of the joke about the law in (name your state) that, when two trains come to an intersection, neither may go until the other has passed.
  11. Tyrone Power, in a paean to his Irish ancestry, does an opening monologue into camera.
  12. On-campus, where he moves into a dorm as a freshman. The bumptious score by Henry Mancini prefigures his “Pink Panther” collaboration with Edwards; the strange, surreal visual comedy makes clear the profound influence of Frank Tashlin on the movies of the day.

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