Monday Scramble:
Manhattan Strait
At Portico, this week’s book page, a write-up of Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World. makes us want to show Peter Stuyvesant and his persistent antagonist, Adriaen van der Donck, this picture of the East River, just a few hundred years later. And what’s a few hundred years? Not one of the buildings clearly visible on the left bank of the river was standing even fifty years ago. And, who knows? It may become — “it” being what’s currently called Roosevelt Island — it may become the “island at the center of the world” someday. Probably not — but if you’re in the business of making cool predictions, you never say never.
Writing about Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, I could hardly stop thinking about Tony Goldwyn’s lovely 1999 release, A Walk on the Moon. So many parallels! The Catskills! Woodstock! The moon landing! Wordly actresses pretending to be old shmattatrixes! Liev Schreiber (even)! These parallels, however, only intensify one’s sense of the difference between the two films. And I hope I won’t be thought to play favorites when I say that Taking Woodstock has no Diane Lane character.
There is no Diane Lane character in The Big Tease, this week’s Home Theatre piece (and another movie from ten years ago), either. But we know that, at an earlier stage in her career — had there been one — Ms Lane would have been super in the Mary McCormack role. If only Diane Lane had spent four or five years as in supporting roles! The price of fame &c.
This week’s New Yorker story was Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fountain House.” We didn’t really cotton to it, especially when we learned that the Fountain House in St Petersburg — the Fontanny Dom — is a shrine to the poet Anna Akhmatova. Ms Petrushevskaya’s story is set in Moscow, and is about folk tales, not poetry (there’s a difference). We’re beginning to think that The New Yorker needs a scholarly apparatus department.
Speaking of apartments, we found that we’d written up a story from way back in the spring, Jonathan Lethem’s “Ava’s Apartment,” and forgotten about it. That was then. Further Oblivion Dividends are unlikely.
Last and least &c (a relatively literate issue, though!), the Book Review review.
Jonathan Groff as Michael Lang: slurp! That smile, that quiet confidence in the face of confidence. In fact, I just wrote to a troubled friend this morning that he could consider modeling the laissez-faire attitudes of the hippies and outliers in “Taking Woodstock.” No one freaks out; the drug experiments (intended — Elliot in the van — and unintended — his parents and the brownies) all have innocent and even favorable consequences. The destruction to which you refer, because it was the by-product of peace and love, wasn’t a lightning rod for even the wrath of the locals that preceded the event. No one even gets ruffled! I loved the film quality, the camera work, the homage to the original Woodstock film with the use of multiple frames. And I loved your own homage to the film in this endearing review.
The Big Tease: was the first time I saw that on “Jammie Day?” One of my favorite days in memory, and one of my favorite films. I’m glad you highlighted it here.
I was relieved to hear your confession, I few entries back, about not reading The New Yorker fiction any longer. When I was younger — much much younger — I think I only read the fiction. Then, as mysteriously as at some age I abruptly stopped hanging upside down by my knees on every parallel bar nature or man presented (presumably when I started wearing dresses?), I stopped reading the fiction. I felt impatient with it. So, OK: I’ll join you and give it a whirl. Let me catch up on these two, and then I’ll try to keep pace on a weekly basis. NEVER an easy proposition with you!