The new Brad Bird flick from Pixar/Disney is as fine a film as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., or The Incredibles, though with one difference: I doubt that little children will like it as much. This is, really, an adult film. Or, perhaps, an adult film for the whole family, one in which the children might enjoy but only at the expense of not understanding huge chunks of it. After all, it's about gourmet cooking, which is not exactly a kiddie fixation, like toys, monsters, or super-heroes.

Call me romantic, but what could be better? Paris! Cooking! Rats! A youngster realizing his individuality at work!

Besides, this has the best onscreen kiss since . . . Hot Shots, Part Deux.

The answer may be Yes. Reasons for this are ably given by Henry Jenkins in his appreciation for/explanation of the critics' near-unanimous thumbs-down to the third Pirates of the Carribean film. Actually, Jenkins trots out several interesting ideas. Here's one off the main thesis:

Watch a film with a group of critics and it is a rather chilly experience, each trying to suppress signs of their emotional response for fear of tipping their hands to their competition. They don't laugh at comedy; they don't cry at melodrama; and they don't know how to engage in fannish conversation around film franchises, which means that their professional conduct cuts them off from the shared emotional pleasures that are so much a part of how popular culture works its magic on us. For that reason, I trust film critics far more when they are writing about art films which demand distanced contemplation than popular films which desire an immediate emotional reaction.

Hat tip to Jesse Walker, who (in his post to Film Flam) calls attention to Jenkins's well-crafted first sentence:

As a rule, one should never trust the opinion of an established film critic about a movie with a number after its title — and one should multiply the level of distrust for each number over 2.

Amazon's computer emailed me today, offering for my consideration a book I'd never heard of before: The Craft of Modal Composition, by Thomas Benjamin. The author instructs readers on how music before the High Baroque style worked, most especially sacred music by folks such as Palestrina and earlier.

Which brings back memories.

In high school Music Theory class we were instructed (briefly) on classic theory, and given the assignment of an old hymn to set in four-part harmony. I set it as if I were Josquin, apparently; the teacher said I should've been born in the Renaissance.

Not long after I was composing piano music in a post-tonal, neo-modal style, where melodies and harmonies flitted around on keys rather than in them. It was only recently that I figured out the mechanisms of the classical style. This, despite my love of Haydn!

Perhaps my love of neo-classical music, with its do-it-wrong-on-purpose procilivity, infected me too early. I went from 1580 to 1920 just without much trouble.

In the mail today a number of books came in. One, I believe, came courtesy of Amazon. Here they are:

• Invariances, by Robert Nozick
• The End of Barbary Terror, by Frederick C. Leiner
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

How many are for work, and how many for pleasure? All three are for both, of course.

Dead now about a week, Charles Nelson Reilly was in life important on TV if not in cinema. From Wikipedia:

In the 1990s Reilly made guest appearances on The Drew Carey Show, The Larry Sanders Show, and most notably, as eccentric writer Jose Chung in the television series The X-Files ("Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"") and Millennium ("Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense"). Reilly was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1998 and 1999 for his performances in The Drew Carey Show and Millennium, respectively.

Because I so admire the above-cited work, I can't really agree with the title thesis of this article:

Charles Nelson Reilly played himself better than anyone
by Charles McNulty

It's quite acceptable to hate hate hate Songs from Liquid Days, a pop-minimalist fusion album of songs composed by Philip Glass. The music doesn't fit into normal and accepted parameters. It's as if a space traveller explained rock and roll and other popular American music to an alien on a distant planet, sang a few songs with air guitar accompaniment, and then that alien composed songs to obscure poetic texts from the distant planet he'd never visisted.

Alien: Is it difficult music?

Earthman: No. It's simple music! Just a few chords.

Alien: Rhythmically?

Earthman: Make syncopation integral to the music, and you've got it.

Alien: What instruments do you use?

Earthman: Well, use whatever you like. For pop music you just mic them closely and they can sound electric.

Alien: So that's all I need to know?

Earthman. So that's all you need to know.

The texts, of course, are not quite so simple. They are by Laurie Anderson, David Byrne, and Paul Simon (maybe others; I've forgotten). The title song cryptically speaks of a couple undergoing the woman's menstrual period (yes, liquid days). It's sequel, Open the Kingdom, continues the sexual references in the form of a religious parody, sung full get-out by classical singer Douglas Perry, but about the end of said menstrual period. You figure it out, what this kingdom is, and how it can be opened.

The first song on the album, Changing Opinion, has fantastic lyrics by Paul Simon, and great singing by Bruce Fowler.

The song Freezing is, for me, the gem. A brief sad epigram sung beautifully by Linda Rondstadt, accompanied by the Kronos Quartet.

The whole thing is sui generis. Most people will chortle in incredulity. It is not pop. It is not classical. What the heck is it?

As one friend of mine put it, I have no trouble with simple; but this is simple-minded! Well, maybe. But simple-minded is really nothing more than a pejorative for simple. As I see it, The Arkansas Traveler is also both simple and simple-minded, and still a lot of fun to sing. Or, perhaps more in a minimalist spirit, think of Rolling Over the Billows.

The world has a lot of room for a lot of different stuff. Stuff to fill our heads and our lives and chill the spine a myriad ways.

Freezing chills my spine even today.

Even today, listening to the album on my old LP.

Even even today, listening. To the album. To the songs. On vinyl. An old LP. Repetitive? Yes. But not too.

Mr. Brooks was given a fairly positive review by Richard Roeper. So I went to see it. I had been feeling sick all day, and needed a distraction.

Mr. Brooks was not the right distraction.

It's not that I don't enjoy seeing the occasional splatter of blood.

It's just that I want my thrillers to feel a little more aesthetically challenging and centered than that classic soft-core late-night Showtime spectacle Body of Influence, and, if at all possible, a little less lurid.

But the new film does have an A-list cast: Costner, Hurt, Demi Moore. The fact that Demi Moore has trouble making a convincing character brings it back to Body of Influence level.

Really, there's nothing here to see, folks; move along. Next movie.

Oh, sure, Costner and Hurt have fun. But that fun barely passes to the viewers. The kitchen sink gets passed, along with nearly every other plot element you can think of, but not the proverbiel good time.

One of the more pleasant extraneous things about going to an orchestral concert — far more pleasant than dressing up or sipping champagne from plastic glasses — is listening to the warming-up period, before the performance, and during intermissions. I like the tuning-up sound clouds, too. It's a pleasant sort of cacaphony, like a frog chorus or cicada gamelan.

Now some guy's recorded a whole bunch of these, and calls them his compositions. Oh, well . . . if John Cage can claim four minutes and a few odd seconds as his own. . . .

In the July 2007 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Ray Vukcevich ably tackles a staple of magazine sf, the short short. Fredric Brown was the master of this. Vukcevich, in this entry, Cold Comfort, adds an amusing example to the literature.

OK, maybe it's not a short short, but just a short — it's three pages long. Whatever its designation, it explores the idea of the Turing Test in an amusing way (a way I wish I'd thought of), and, were it not for the last sentence, which lays on false piety too thickly, it would be a classic.

The Firebird is the first work by Igor Stravinsky I heard as a rational being. (When I was a kid, my older sister played The Rite of Spring on the old hi-fi; but I barely remember such sessions. I was not of the age of reason, yet, and not ready to accept either Apollonian or Dionysian music for what either are worth.) Now I'm listening to Stravinsky's first ballet again, in a performance conducted by Ernest Ansermet.

Two things:

1. This is very odd music, the whole ballet. The suites constructed from the complete ballet are more sylistically uniform.




2. This performance is excellent.

It's good to get back to the beginning and re-experience delights one first had when young.

I'm nicely surprised by the performance by L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under the baton of Ernest Ansermet, of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. Lighter touch than usual. It almost feels of a kind with the Sixth Symphony, an affinity I hadn't noticed before. (I had previously bought into the idea that this symphony was enigmatic and daring and all that; not pastoral!)

I've just started listening to the new box set, Ernest Ansermet: Decca Recordings 1953-1967. The Sibelius follows performance of Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, also not bad. (The first disc featured a Bach piece, a brisk-but-elegant performance of Haydn's Philosopher, and a well-directed but not quite well-performed rendition of Beethoven's great Fourth Symphony. I'll be listening to this disc a lot, I'm sure, despite its flaws.)

I cut my Stravinskian teeth on Ansermet's interpretations of Stravinsky masterworks, on LP, years and years ago. Now it's interesting to hear Ansermet again, eons later. I can hardly wait to crack open another Decca set I just got, an eight-CD box set of Ansermet doing Stravinsky classics.

Why buy this set too? Because I just can't get enough Stravinsky? (Close.) But the answer is a bit different: I've never heard the one-act opera Mavra, and it's included. Still, I'll be keeping that as a treat; I've a lot of music to go through before I get to that final CD.

Besides, I would have to take Sibelius's Fourth off my queue long enough, wouldn't I?

Richard Shickel, a journalist who sees himself as a critic, took offense at one expression of a benign view of the decline of bookchat in newspapers:

THE MOST grating words I've read in a newspaper recently were in a New York Times report on the shrinkage of book reviewing in many of the nation's leading newspapers.

The piece suggested that this might not be an entirely bad thing. Into the breach, it argued, will charge the bloggers, one of whom, a former quality-control manager for a car parts maker, last year wrote 95 book reviews for his website.

"Some publishers and literary bloggers," the article said, viewed this development contentedly, "as an inevitable transition toward a new, more democratic literary landscape where anyone can comment on books."

Anyone? Did I read that right?

His argument, following this windup, is nicely expressed in in his commentary's blurb:

Sure, anyone with a blog can express an opinion about a book, but true criticism is more than just an opinion.

This is true so far as it goes, but two caveats are worth noting:

1. There's nothing to preclude a blogger from engaging in true criticism, and

2. The bookchat published in newspapers almost never qualifies as criticism.

Indeed, this last point makes hash of pretty much the whole of Shickel protest. And yes, it's obvious that Shickel knows this, since he admitted both points in the essay. But his concentration on what reviewing ought to be proves nothing more than a waste of column inches.

He trots out three names for our consideration: George Jean Nathan (supercilious and bad), and Edmund Wilson and George Orwell (both excellent). It should be obvious to anyone who is not himself a critic cultist that these latter two critics are not unassailable. Wilson was, as Nabokov sagely argued, too fixed on sociological and moral interests to catch the great literary fire. Wilson easily missed the point of authors grinding different concerns in a very different mill . . . Tolkien for example.

Still, it's always fun to recall, say, Wilson's characterization of The Lord of the Rings as a children's book that somehow got out of hand. This is extremely funny, if not at all just or even perceptive. It's merely funny. Which reminds us why we read critics: for entertainment.

Perhaps Oscar Wilde's Critic as Artist should be required reading for journalists who aim to comment on criticism in the newspapers.

Great criticism is in short supply these days, and under attack, I agree. But the problem isn't the democracy of the blogosphere. The problem has been — for scores of years now — the dominance of the professors in English departments whose words haunt us like a spoiled enchilada, coming up dyspeptically hours and days later, and the ubiquity of reporters and shills in the newspapers whose words we can't remember a minute after reading them.

The newspaper world is itself a vast wasteland. Not as bad as the Academy, but bad nevertheless. That Shickel worries, instead, about a purely democratic literary landscape that he sees as the real wasteland, shows, perhaps, more concern for his paycheck than his critical faculty. To assert that the Internet (for that's what we're talking about, no?) exists without standards, without maps, without oases of intelligence or delight is so ignorant that we can disqualify it without much more argument.

Of course, there are some in the blogosophere who will dissect his assertions and evidence down to the last comma. Fine for them. I'll go back to reading books. Without benefit of Shickel.

The bottom line on Shickel's column is this: It is no better, and in fact much worse, than a hundred blog entries written every day by bloggers both famous and obscure.

I just came across this, an early (ancient) play on an old theme:

Gala wants me, Gala wants me not.
Because she wants and wants me not,
To say what Gala wants, I cannot.

Amusing, no? Good recreation by Donald C. Goertz.