This is really cool, but is it worth the amount of time it took? I just don't know:
(via)

Labels: arts, fun stuff

Regular readers of this blog are well aware of our good friend jurassicpork's travels through the publishing industry, and of finding doors slammed in his face.

Most of those of us who write have the dream of someday holding the first bound copy of our first book in our hands. When we hear of others achieving that goal, it's hard not to feel at least a twinge of envy. My supervisor at my last job achieved a publishing deal for his memoir about his garden -- a real, honest-to-goodness book deal, with an agent and a contract and a tour and frontage at Barnes and Noble and a review in the Sunday New York Times book review section. His publisher also picked up the option on his second book as well. If you think I didn't do at least a little bit of teeth-gnashing about it, you're attributing a level of sainthood to me that I lack, for all that my Unfinished Novel In Which I Throw Everything But the Kitchen Sink at my protagonist will probably always be unfinished. The closest thing I'll ever get to a published book is when I compile what used to have a working title of The Drapes are Winning: The Best of Brilliant at Breakfast until I found that Oscar Wilde never said that. And so it goes.

There are those who have done reasonably well with self-publishing. My sister's book, Visioncrafting: A Self-Guided Journey, can be purchased on Amazon.com, just as Donald Rumsfeld's can. We mere mortals can probably sell as many books self-promoting as we're likely to get being buried in the racks at Barnes and Noble. And with Borders going out of business, the idea of Seeing Your Book In The Store doesn't have the same thrill it used to, since Barnes and Noble is going to give most of its prime space to celebrity authors.

The other nasty aspect of book publishing these days, and about one's odds of appearing on the New York Times Bestseller list, is bulk sales. Conservative book clubs often buy tens of thousands of copies of books by right-wing authors. Mitt Romney has exchanged bulk sales for speeches. Right-wing groups bought George W. Bush's memoir in bulk. This makes it next to impossible for nonfiction authors who aren't celebrities to ever make it onto that list. For fiction writers it's worse. For every Jodi Picoult, who cranked out a book every nine months for years before becoming a reliable bestseller, or Fup, a book picked off the slush pile with much fanfare by Morgan Entrekin in 1983 (and which subsequently bombed), there are tens of thousands of people who will never, ever get that first break.

But perhaps it's time to stop revering the publishing industry as the ultimate seal of approval. Celebrity book publishing has always been the cash cow of the industry. When I worked at Simon & Schuster in the 1980's, books like the Jane Fonda Workout Book and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Pumping Iron and the novels of Judith Krantz paid the bills so that Erwin Glikes could publish his neocons.

But now all you need do is be a marginal celebrity and you can be a published author, because name recognition is everything. This is how people like Kim Kardashian and Snooki and that woman who's on one of the Real Housewives show get book contracts.

Or for that matter, the barely 20-year-old Bristol Palin:

The daughter of former Alaska governor Sarah Palin has signed with William Morrow to publish "Not Afraid of Life," to come out this summer. Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, announced Tuesday that the memoir would provide "an inside look at her life."

"Bristol gives readers an intimate behind-the-scenes look at her life for the first time, from growing up in Alaska to coming of age amid the media and political frenzy surrounding her mother's political rise; from becoming a single mother while still a teenager to coping as her relationship with her baby's father crumbled publicly — not once, but twice," according to Morrow.

A listing for the book briefly appeared last month on Amazon.com and on an online HarperCollins spreadsheet. HarperCollins has published two best-sellers by Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential candidate in 2008: "Going Rogue" and "America by Heart."

Bristol Palin, 20, has become a celebrity in her own right, through her broken relationship with her child's father, Levi Johnston, and through her time as a contestant on "Dancing With the Stars."

"Bristol talks about the highs and lows of her appearance on ABC-TV's 'Dancing With the Stars,' including the aching hours of practice, the biting criticisms, and the thrill of getting to the show's finals," Morrow announced. "She speaks candidly of her aspirations for the future and the deep religious faith that gives her strength and inspiration.

"Plainspoken and disarmingly down to earth, Bristol offers new insight and understanding of who she is and what she values most."

It's a fait accompli that this tome will end up on the New York Times bestseller list, because conservative groups will make sure it does.

So if this is the company that book publishers are keeping, perhaps it's time for aspiring authors to stop casting pearls before swine?

Labels: arts, commerce, media whores

This is truly spectacular - from the China Disabled Persons Performing Arts Troupe:



The dancer in the front is Tai Lihua, who has been deaf since the age of two. She writes on the troupe's web site:

I am deaf and suffer from lack of hearing, but I am happy. There are hundreds and thousands of outstanding artists in our country. The disabled artists are privileged to perform in famous theatres in more than 40 countries. It is our country that made this possible for us and many kind people have helped us realise our dream.

My white dance shoes share my best moments in life.

My white dance shoes bring me the joy of life.

We share our experience with the world:

As unyeiding as nature may be,

so must we ceaselessly strive along.

As tolerant as mother earth may be,

so must we act within our world with virtue.

Simply glorious.

(h/t)

Labels: arts, music

Yesterday afternoon I had the privilege of accompanying the official B@B Broadway Zen Master, ModFab, to the last preview matinee of the new Des McAnuff-helmed revival of Guys and Dolls. It's a mark of the state of Broadway today that the Great White Way has decided that a million high school drama clubs can't be wrong, and that Frank Loesser's musical masterpiece is as close to a sure thing as you're going to get this year. That certainty isn't based on the idea of packing the cast with the kind of movie-audience-bait stars on which Broadway seems to rely these days, because other than Lauren Graham, the MILF from The Gilmore Girls, you have to be either a Broadway buff or an aficionado of indie character actors to recognize the rest of the cast. But I would guess that one in five Americans has either at one time or another been at least peripherally associated with one of the tens of thousands of school and amateur productions of Guys and Dolls, or has seen the terrific 1992 revival in which Nathan Lane put Frank Sinatra's Nathan Detroit out of its miscast misery forever and Faith Prince snatched the role of Adelaide away from Vivian Blaine forever.

Not even a generation has passed since Broadway last saw a revival of this show, and perhaps it's just too soon for another one, because even though they're nowhere to be seen, Nathan Lane and Faith Prince hang over this production the way the ghost of Ronald Reagan haunts the lost Republican Party. It isn't that this production is bad; after all, if tens of thousands of middle and high schools can't ruin this show, it just isn't wreckable.

But when you're planning to sell tickets at over a hundred bucks a pop, you don't want to have people like me, with seventeen-year-old memories of the last revival, and worse, 35-year-old memories of their own high school productions still fresh, shaking their heads and thinking, "No...NO! 'Nu?' is not supposed to be SUNG! It's Yiddish, dammit! Let Nathan and Faith show you how it's done..."

Oh, this production is pleasant enough, but it doesn't sing the way it's supposed to. I thought the ongepotchket neon signs all over the theatre were stolen from Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme of a few years ago, but ModFab tells me that almost identical signage can be seen ten blocks uptown at the August Wilson Theatre, where McAnuff's other show, Jersey Boys, is still playing. He says McAnuff is in love with scenery rather than actors, and in this production it shows. For some reason, the show is moved back in time to the 1930's milieu of Damon Runyon's original stories, which does give the show a certain depressing, and I hope unintentional, timeliness, but it also allows McAnuff to do things with giant hulking pieces of Art Deco buildings that look like extra pieces left over from Tim Burton's Gotham City -- a kind of Depression-era Stonehenge. Some of it is effective, but there's only so much you can do with a revolving door, and the sheer size of these pieces doesn't give the actors much room to breathe.

I had thought Oliver Platt to be an inspired piece of casting as Nathan Detroit, but he just doesn't know what to do with this role -- an astounding idea, given how hard it is to imagine any working actor not having been in one of those many high school productions of this show. I'm not old enough to have seen Sam Levene in this role, but I've heard the original soundtrack from 1955, and Platt is more like what I imagine Levene must have been -- a kind of rumpled, sad sack ne'er-do-well instead of the cartoon that Nathan Lane wrought in 1992. This is all well and good, but Platt doesn't have the comic chops to time his character's best lines properly, and throws away what makes this character appealing, leaving just a fat, unpleasant, zhlub for whom you can't imagine a sparkly creature like Lauren Graham waiting fourteen years.

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed Lauren Graham as Adelaide, though even though she's older than Faith Prince was in 1992, still looks too girlish, and therefore lacks the kind of aging-bimbo pathos that Faith Prince brought to the role. She's cute as a button, she sings reasonably well and looks to be having far too good a time to be the unhappy and frustrated "well-known fiancée".

Craig Bierko is a somewhat smarmy Sky Masterson, which I found a refreshing take on what is often a thankless, colorless leading-man role, but Kate Jennings Grant, with a distracting facial resemblance to Kristin Scott-Thomas, is somewhat colorless in the often thankless ingenue role as Sarah Brown. The Sky/Sarah romance has always seemed to me to be the least interesting and fun part of Guys and Dolls, seemingly having walked in from something by Rogers and Hammerstein, and while neither of this pair sets the stage on fire, they're certainly adequate, and Bierko's "Jake Gyllenhaal by way of Andrew Dice Clay" mannerisms take on Masterson feels fresher than just about anything else here.

The head-scratching thing about Guys and Dolls is that composer and lyricist Frank Loesser doesn't give the best songs to any of the four leads. I know this is the "hum the songs on the way out of the theatre" show to end all "hum the songs on the way out of the theatre" shows, with one great song after another (and unfortunately, the unsingable "My Time of Day" plunked right down like a giant honking turd right in the middle). But it's the Fifth Banana role of Nicely-Nicely Johnson who not only has most of the show's funniest lines, but also the best songs. So it was a little odd to see this show's Nicely, Tituss Burgess, swallowing his vocals in "Fugue for Tinhorns" and the first half of the "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat". Burgess clearly doesn't feel the whole Runyon thing, and at times his performance veered dangerously close to eye-rolling Chris Tuckerish broad racial stereotype. But when he opens up his pipes in the second half of the Big Showstopper (its gospel influence finally brought out from under the table), you wonder where the hell this guy has been for the last two hours.

Far better among the guys is Steve Rosen, who as his name would indicate, understands the undercurrent of Yiddish theatre that pervades Abe Burrows' book and in perhaps a first, it's he who "fronts" the aforementioned "Fugue for Tinhorns", which for my money is the best damn opening song in Broadway history. But for sheer scene-stealing goodness, you can't beat the spectacular Mary Testa, who carries the entire stage on her shoulders as the formidable General Cartwright. I always have a soft spot for the women who play this role, because this was the role I was "stuck" with as a snarky misfit teenager who could never appreciate how much more fun the battle-axe roles are than the sexpot or ingenue roles I coveted at the time. But as good as Testa is in her few scenes, and as hilarious and utterly Runyonesque as Rosen is, they can't compensate for the show's glum leading man, its hulking sets, and amateurish choreography by Sergio Trujillo, which put breakdance moves in a 1930's setting and made the dance numbers seem endless when they should be energizing.

But in the end it's Guys and Dolls, so how bad can it be? The question is whether it's worth a hundred bucks a pop, and the answer is that you might be better served by going to YouTube, typing in the show's title, and checking out some of the charming excerpts from the many amateur productions of this show produced every year. Like this one:


Or, you could do what Mr. Brilliant and I are doing next weekend, and support Broadway by taking in Avenue Q again. Or you could take in ModFab's latest production, Not Her (and other exiles on March 10 and 11 at Dixon Place.

(UPDATE: In keeping with the title of this review, Benjamin Ivry in the Forward has a must-read perspective, with a title I wish I'd thought of, for all GAD-ophiles on the snark behind Frank Loesser's music, and on the Jewishness of the Runyon milieu.)

Labels: arts, pop culture