This week’s Daily Office photos were taken last week in Carl Schurz Park, by the East River. Last week’s pictures, as I hope Friday’s would make quite clear, were taken the previous week in Santa Monica, at the Huntington Museum, and in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

Morning 

¶ Weekend Reading (Babies): I had a look, yesterday, at the Times Magazine for a change, intrigued, against my better judgment, by Russell Shorto’s cover story. As a piece of journalism, the piece embodies unfortunate trends in general-interest reportage, especially the whiff of apocalyptic gunsmoke (“No more European babies! No more Europeans!”) that is inevitably dissipated by gusts of common-sense exposition later on. Editors seem to like to front-load the drama and shove the useful information to the back end, whether to spare lazy readers or to reward diligent ones it’s hard to say.

Noon

¶ JVC Jazz: On Friday night, Kathleen and I went to a sold-out jazz concert at Carnegie Hall, featuring (first) Dianne Reeves and (then) Al Green.

¶ BookSaga: Down in Georgia, a fellow by the name of Perry Falwell runs an on-line bookshop. He scours the thrift shops for finds that he speeds along to interested customers. (Somebody’s got to do it, if Goodwill won’t.) His new Web log, BookSaga, is compulsively readable. I plan to stay tuned.

Night

¶ Gondry:  A few weeks ago, at brunch, a friend insisted that I rent and see Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind. This evening, I got round to it. A great, great train wreck!

Oremus…

Morning, cont’d

§ Weekend Reading. A caption to the artwork idiotically asks, “Dying Breed?” Well, that’s exciting! More interesting, and not, upon reflection, any less exciting, is the following nugget:

Meanwhile, the same economic forces are at work in both northern and southern Europe — it’s just as hard to make ends meet in Madrid or Milan or Athens as in Oslo or Stockholm — which gives the predominantly two-income families in the northern countries an edge. This in turn leads to another disparity between north and south. In Scandinavia, thanks in part to state support, the more children a family has, the wealthier it is likely to be, whereas in southern Europe having children is a financial sinkhole, which drags a family toward poverty. Such an analysis flies in the face of social conservatives, who argue that simply encouraging people to have more babies will raise the population and add fuel to the economic engine.

The populations of the culturally Roman Catholic nations of Southern Europe are dropping because women in these countries are still expected to stay at home once they have children, starving them of interesting lives and making them dependent on the single income of a spouse. The real thrust of Mr Shorto’s story, then, is not the melodramatic possibilities of European population decline, but the complexity of modernization, something that Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece have embraced half-heartedly at best.

Noon, cont’d

§ JVC Jazz. Is it the impact of hip hop and rap? How else to explain Al Green’s presence at a Jazz Festival?

§ BookSaga. Jason Kottke linked to BookSaga today. It’s interesting to note how look it took for the linked entry, which is dated 7 June, to reach him. You’ll see why it has been passed around when you get to it, but don’t let the naughty bits drown out Mr Falwell’s genial voice. (I’m gonna get me some watermelon annihilators…)

Night, cont’d

§ Gondry. A train wreck, by my definition, is a film with a deeply incoherent plot, important strands of which neither match up in any satisfactory way nor flow in comfortable parallel. In Be Kind Rewind, there is what we might call the “Fats Waller” matter, and then the “Sweded” matter. The urgency of saving an old building that is erroneously believed to have been the great organist’s birthplace never really connects with the antic attempt of classically mismatched buddies to recreate a library of erased VHS cassettes, in homemade versions that they describe as “Sweded.”

Train wrecks, however, can be monumentally entertaining — as Nineteenth-Century Americans who paid to watch staged ones would agree. The “Sweded” part of Be Kind Rewind is very, very funny, featuring Jack Black at his manic, “paranized” best. (“That is so non-sequitary!” he complains, at one point, as though he would know consequence if it hit him on the head.) Anybody who loves movies will delight in the outrageous remakes of known and loved titles, from Driving Miss Daisy to The Lion King. What’s a bit harder to swallow is the immense appeal that these productions are supposed to have for the good people of Passaic.

I couldn’t believe it when Sigourney Weaver showed up, as the dry and dastardly intellectual-property lawyer whose henchman calculated that the offending knock-off makers would be liable for 63,000 years in prison. She has a wonderful moment, motioning the steam-roller to crush the contraband videos just one more time.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 3:30 pm and is filed under Big Ideas, Blogosphere, Lively Arts, Music, The Hours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.