Today in Adorableness, The News From Poland

In Western Poland this week, a three year old girl wandered into the cold. Temperatures dropped below freezing, and Julia was feared dead. The next morning she was found lying on a nearby marsh, frostbitten but alive, her life saved by a mongrel dog who spent the night huddling against her, like a Tauntaun that didn't have to be cut open.​

From the BBC:

The child, Julia, vanished on Friday and was found lying in marshes several kilometres from her house on Saturday morning, with the dog by her side.

She is now in hospital in western Poland, suffering from frostbite after temperatures fell to -5C (23F).

Firefighter Grzegorz Szymanski said the dog kept the child warm enough to live.

​I'm working all day, and won't have time to post anything substantial, so may that heartwarming nugget keep you warm in my absence.

Stevie Spielberg To Revive "The Best Movie Ever Made"

Oh-ho-ho. Madman Stephen Spielberg announced this morning that he has decided to do the impossible. Picking up where Stanley Kubrick left off four decades ago, Spielberg is going to film a sprawling mini-series biopic of Napoleon​. Spielberg is a genius at bringing impossible films to life—he made Tintin​, for god's sake!—but so was Kubrick, and the little Corsican beat him. I just wonder if maybe Spielberg shouldn't have started with something easier—like bringing Kubrick back to life. 

Why was the project snakebit?​

Rare among visionaries for actually making his epic dreams come true—consider 2001, Spartacusand Barry Lyndon—with Napoleon, Kubrick reached higher than ever before. Over two years of intensive research, he employed dozens of assistants, eventually producing thousands of pages of notes and tens of thousand location stills—a treasure trove that was recently assembled in a very expensive, very pretty book. In a typically modest letter to his producers, he made the famous claimthat, “It’s impossible to tell you what I’m going to do except to say that I expect to make the best movie ever made.”

To defray the cost of his cast of thousands, Kubrick planned to film his interiors in France and his battle sequences in Romania, breaking production up into thirds to allow for added planning time. His plan was to “shoot with available light” and “exploit the fully dressed interiors of the period which are readily available in France,” suggesting the movie might have had the dreamy look he later used to bring Barry Lyndon’s eighteenth century alive. His proposed budget was $4 million—impossibly low, considering that the comparatively simple 2001 cost over $10 million. Sensing madness, Hollywood finally pulled the plug.

​More at Bullett​. 

Although I haven't read any of that very expensive, very beautiful book, I've been curious about this movie for a long time. I'm not sure if I'd rather Spielberg fail to finish the movie by attempting to do justice to Kubrick's vision, or succeed by ignoring all of the dead man's hard work. Thankfully, it's not my problem.

One of Brooklyn's Finest Theaters Faces The Abyss

I wrote last fall about an Ugly Rhino production at the Brooklyn Lyceum, a onetime public bathhouse on Fourth Avenue, in Park Slope.​ The last performances of that play—a Halloween spectacular complete with booze, dancing and 1970's sleaze—were cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. Now, the theater itself faces something far more daunting: bankruptcy.

For the last few weeks, theater owner Eric Richmond has been proclaiming doom. After more than two decades of ownership, he has run into serious debt, and could be foreclosed upon as early as this month. I live around the corner from the theater, and thought of seeing it go dark makes my heart hurt. God knows how Richmond must feel.

In a February memo to supporters, he wrote that the Lyceum, "has always been a work in progress."

The fees from rentals and admission barely covered the cost of basic maintenance and the electricity to run the building.  All the infrastructure work—including the creation of new theater spaces—came out of sweat equity or cash raised from the mortgage. (That of course is part of the legal dispute.)

My goal was to make this tremendous hulk of a space available to striving artists. Many people have appreciated the Lyceum’s roughhewn beauty. Some wanted a more polished space, but that is kind of a Catch-22: maybe that desired space would not be affordable.  We were/are a big wreck of a building that gets better each year.

That wreck could be facing the wrecking ball. Well, not literally—you can't just go around tearing down landmarked buildings. But the space's future as a theater is in doubt. Richmond warns of a culture lover's worst case scenario: that the grandest theater south of Flatbush could be converted to condos or, worse, a Duane Reade.

Tonight came an update, and it is no more rosy. Richmond writes:​

The Lyceum is not closing. The Lyceum, however, is fighting for its very existence. What got us here is subject to much speculation.

Our  current financial problems result largely (but not exclusively) from  legal battles with our former architect, Jean G. Miele, regarding a development deal that encompassed the Lyceum, the lot next door and the development rights shared by both properties. We believe we're victims of price gouging: up to $800,000 in questionable expenses that frustrated our ability to complete the deal and led to our predicament.

Richmond writes with passion, but not clarity. His message has the intensity of someone whose legal troubles have made him an amateur lawyer against his will. I'm not really sure what's going on at the Lyceum, but it doesn't sound good. I hope Richmond is exaggerating, but my gut tells me he's not. I'm going to start looking into it tomorrow. I'll let you know if I learn anything interesting. 

I'm Not Wild About The New Bowie, & I Hope I'm Wrong

Today, people are having opinions. Lots and lots of opinions about David Bowie, a man whose media attention has, in the last few years, been at an historic low. Good or bad, The Next Day​ merits having some opinions—and just that is a triumph, I think. Like everyone else, I listened to the album this afternoon on iTunes, and I don't like it very much.

The new David Bowie is currently available to stream for free on iTunes, and the question on everyone’s mind is, “How sad should this make us?” The Next Day is the onetime superstar’s first album since 2003′s indifferently-received Reality, and it hasn’t been hotly anticipated so much as warily watched out for. If this were Springsteen or the Stones, no one would worry too much. We know they’re doing fine. But Bowie made his bones as an artist, and just because he hasn’t made any good art in decades doesn’t mean that his ambition is gone. This is a man whom we don’t want to fail.

The question is what constitutes failure for Bowie. Should we treat this as a serious attempt, and trash it? Or do we let him coast on his name, and give him another pass? It depends on whether or not you still take Bowie seriously as an artist—or whether you think he takes himself seriously. It's a big question, and one that I am way, way, way under qualified to answer. ​One thought I had though—for every article you see about this album (including my two), take a look at the accompanying photos. If every picture you see is from the '70s, well, that says more about this album's importance than I can.

I'm going to give the album a few more listens this week, and hope it grows on me. Heathen ​and Reality​ both did, although I haven't really listened to them much since high school. You'll feel much less conflicted about The Next Day if you like the album straight off, as Gothamist​ does. I hope everyone feels the same way they do. I hope I am completely wrong.

Today in, "Oh No They Didn't," The USPS Takes On Dolly

All right, so the post office isn't really going to war with the woman who wrote "Jolene," "9 to 5" and "I Will Always Love You."​ They'd have to be goddamned fools. But they are screwing with her charity, and I don't like that one bit, so I wrote a doodad about it:

As if the United States Postal Service didn’t have enough trouble, a little-noticed news item ran this week that suggests they are about to make a powerful new enemy: East Tennessee’s favorite daughter, Miss Dolly Parton. In 1996, Parton founded the Imagination Library, which sent a free book every month to children in Sevier County, the forever-impoverished mountain community where she was born in 1946. (Huh. Never thought of Dolly as a baby boomer.) In 2000, she took the program nationwide, partnering with local libraries and community groups to spread the love of reading across the United States. It’s an uncontroversial charity, because everyone likes reading.

Everyone, that is, besides the Post Office. The local newspaper from Maryville, Tennessee, reported this week that the Post Office has begun throwing out Imagination Library books that were returned due to a bad address. Although the local Kiwanis Club was once allowed to pick these books up free of charge, Uncle Sam has changed his mind. Post Office flunky David Walton said:

They are wanting to go pick those books up without paying that return fee. We can’t afford that. They are wanting to … bypass that fee that most other mailers pay. For some time, they have been getting away with that. It’s costing us money.

For the Post Office, I predict this will prove a fatal mistake.

Read on, if you'd like to know more about why I love love love Dolly Parton.​ Is this a Tennessee thing, or do people nationwide find her incredibly inspiring? I don't know the answer, but I do know that if I have a few too many beers tonight, this is the song I'm putting on the jukebox:

The Porter Wagoner Show

Stop The Brooding! A Plea For Happy TV Cops

I'm a budding Miami Vice​ fan, and in 2013 that means that, eventually, your father will give you the complete Crime Story​ on DVD. A short-lived Michael Mann joint that premiered in 1986, Crime Story​ was stylish, ambitious and—as soon as it was pitted head-to-head against Moonlighting​—doomed to fail. Two things struck me about the show's movie-length pilot. First, "Runaway" is an awesome theme song. Seriously. Take a look:​

Features Del Shannon - Runaway

But I was even more pleasantly surprised by the relationship between Lt. Mike Torello—played by the expertly mustachioed Dennis Farina—and his wife. ​Namely, they had one. In the first few episodes, they fight about, the screw a bit, and they decide to have a kid. It's honest, everyday stuff—and a nice contrast from the nihilistic battle against crime that occupies the rest of Torello's waking life. Of course, it doesn't last.

Because the TV gods demand sacrifices, the Torello's happy partnership goes on the rocks quickly, and they're broken up by episode ten. This is a shame not just because Dennis Farina has the kind of sad-guy face that makes you want to give him a hug, but because there are nearly no good cop marriages on TV, and I think that's a shame. Let's consider some candidates for happiness:

• Vic Mackey, The Shield​. What starts as a surprisingly durable marriage—able to survive the pressures caused by two autistic children and Mackey's incredibly bald head—eventually cracks under the weight of his sadism. I'm surprised it lasted that long.
• Kima Greggs, The Wire​. When we meet Kima, she and her longtime girlfriend Cheryl are happy in a very realistic way. Because it's The Wire​, that can't last. Over the next five season, they have ups and downs—mostly downs. It's an honest depiction of a relationship dying, but that's not what I want. I want one that's thriving.
• Hank Schrader, Breaking Bad​. Hank's marriage has been held together by the strongest adhesive imaginable: a fiendish duct tape of denial and borderline behavior. The marriage endures, but it's certainly not happy.

I realize that being a cop's husband or wife is famously difficult. The irregular hours, constant danger, and likelihood that your loved one will turn into this guy​ make it difficult to keep a marriage going. But not impossible. I don't know cops, but the law of probability states that somewhere in the United States, there is a cop with a good marriage. Somewhere. One of them.

Put that guy on TV. ​

I want just one show where the cop's home life is not a major source of conflict. Where difficulties arise and are dealt with like adults. Where nobody goes to bed angry. Basically, I want Tami & Coach, but they solve murders. Only one TV detective that I can think of—and I've been thinking of this for fifteen or twenty minutes!—comes close. Who may it be? Let's play a little guessing game.

He and his wife bicker, but he only rarely gets kicked out of the house. He rides his kids hard, but they respect him—even though they seem to get raped, abducted and (nearly) murdered all the time. ​He's bald, burly and angry, and he really, really doesn't like men who don't respect women. Ladies and gents, I give you Elliott Stabler:

If that's the happiest cop on TV, I think we can do a little better. ​

At The Public, An Honored Brit Has The Time Of His Life

The Detroit riot of 1967 started in the wee hours of July 23rd, when police launched what was supposed to be a routine raid on an after-hours club, or "blind pig." Expecting an ordinary late night crowd, they stumbled onto an 82 person party given in honor of two returning Vietnam vets. Rather than back off, the police attempted to arrest the entire group, setting off a five day riot that left forty-three dead.

Yesterday, the Public Theater started previews for Detroit '67, a new play by Dominique Morisseau that begins during the run-up to the riot. A Public Lab production, ​Detroit '67 runs through March 17 before zipping uptown to the Classical Theatre of Harlem, where it will run March 19 to April 14. Set in one of Detroit's blind pigs, it offers political drama by way of family comedy, backed up by the kind of lush Motown soundtrack one would expect from after-hours Detroit. This morning, Astor Place Riot spoke to director Kwame Kwei-Armah, an Englishman who makes his home in Maryland, where he is the artistic director of Baltimore's Center Stage.

What appeals to you about this play?

From page one, I was laughing my head off. By about page four, I wrote a note, "Please don't let this play be bad. I love this." Some plays do that—you read the first half and it's great, and then it all collapses. So first and foremost, the thing that attracted me was the wonderfulness of the script. Without that, there's nothing.

This play asks about why, in Detroit in '67, people reacted the way they did. Why was there this automatic combustion? But more importantly, it is a brother and sister play. One is a dreamer, and the other is a pragmatist, and the play beautifully explores how those tools both hinder or perpetuate one's life.

And it's got music! Marvin Gaye, the Temptations, Smokey Robinson—this brother and sister have quite the 8-track collection.

Correct! Oh my God. The truth is that we did a couple of workshops and readings of the play before we went into production, and I never used the music, because I didn't want any of us to think that somehow the music can save us. The music is the icing, but the play does 99.9—no, the play does 100% of its own work. I don't want people leaving the theater saying that the music was wonderful. They walked in knowing that the music was wonderful. They need to leave talking about the play that just punched them in the stomach.

And this is going up around the same time as Motown: The Musical. 

Yes! It is, isn't it? And the funny thing is, we share a costume designer.

I saw that you were made an OBE this year. Tell me a little about that, for Americans who might not be familiar with the honor.

Basically, it's the Queen's jubilee honors. Twice a year, the Queen invests and gives honor to people across Britain whose work—it's like your freedom medal, that the President gives. It's not just artists—it's a bit difficult to describe. It's the one they give you before you go to to Sir or Lord, if you continue to be a good boy. At Center Stage, we call it Knight Light.

How did it feel?

Magnificent. It's a tremendous honor. In fact, the day that it was announced in the media, I didn't say anything about it, and I got maybe five hundred hits on Facebook. It made me cry three times. The outpouring of love that I received—everyone should receive that in their lifetime, and not just at their funeral.

Why did Oskar and Mandy think you were right for this?

In Dominique and I's first meeting together, she asked the same question. I threw it back to her, asking, "Are you actually saying, 'Negro, what the hell does your British ass know about Detroit?'" And she laughed at that.

I think the reason is that, as a playwright, I had written a similar play. It's not similar in its dialogue, in its story, in anything that happens in it, but it is similar in theme. Oskar's brilliance is that he said, "I think you know where Detroit '67 is."

Oskar Eustis knows how to put people together.

And what a beautiful combination! I have had the time of my life. We really have developed the play over the course of the year. One of the great things about Dominique—not only is she a wonderful writer, but she's a wonderful rewriter.

Forgive me for repeating myself, but I've had the time of my life. I'm a man of my theater. The Public does ten shows a year. I do seven. So it's not like I don't know what it takes, but I tell you, god the Public is run well. They know how to look after a writer, they know how to look after a director, they know how to look after a play. I've learned a lot, watching them, about how to run my own company.

Anything in particular?

New play development. How one invests in new plays. How one nurtures writers through the process. How one communicates. It's small things, but they made me go, "Uh-huh." Clarity of leadership, and clarity of communication about aims and objectives.

I'm seeing masters at work.

Dammit, Maisie Dobbs, You Let Me Down Again

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Few pieces of art stay mindblowing for long. A great TV show is only red hot for a season or two. ​A favorite band releases dud albums. Most novels sag in the middle; most great movies let us down in the end. And a play that's brilliant one night may be flabby the next. It's no surprise. Brilliance is a passing thing.

We live in an era of media glut. Hollywood may be making less movies than ever before, and the major publishing houses may be spewing out less fiction, but music, TV and small-scale theater is as fertile as a farmer's daughter in the springtime. (I'm not sure what that means, exactly, but it's an appealingly filthy image.) This means we don't have to be satisfied with anything less than brilliant entertainment. Once a piece of amusement becomes less than perfectly satisfying, we can discard it, and move on to something else, like a bored Roman emperor ordering a pair of gladiators killed so he can skip ahead to the next fight.

It's hedonistic. It's fun.​​ And there's nothing sadder than having to move on to the next thing.

There is an acute sense of disappointment tha comes when we realize that, shit, this thing I like isn't perfect any more. I've written about it before as regards television, and this weekend I encountered it again, this time in print.

I'm in a dry stretch as far as fiction goes. My preferred vice is crime fiction, and aside from the relentless pleasure that comes from reading Ed McBain, I haven't read anything truly wonderful since I picked up Larry Block's When The Sacred Ginmill Closes​ last summer. This is partly a problem of genre. A devotee of a form that lends itself to formula can hardly be surprised when he goes months or years without stumbling over something original. But I'm not looking for a reinvention of the form. All I wanted was something well-written, amusing and fresh—something that didn't have to do with serial killers.

(As an aside, is there anything less interesting than a serial killer? I can enjoy it once in a while, but in general, they're just crackpots. Crazy people do crazy shit. Where's the fun in that? Stories about serial killers aren't even really murder mysteries—they're butchery, and it makes me yawn.)​

​On vacation this weekend, a book called Maisie Dobbs​ caught my eye. A mystery starring a plucky young woman in 1920's London, whose only weapon is keen observation and an empathetic sense forged in the trenches of World War I France? Might it possibly be a real detective novel, and not a suffocating cozy mystery? The praise quote on the front—from the New York Times​, no less!—told me to "be prepared to be astonished." I decided to take the chance.

I'm coming quite late to this party. The first in a ten book (so far) series, Maisie Dobbs​ was published in 2003. Lots of people have heard of, read and loved this series—as my bookseller informed me, it's her mother in law's favorite. If Jacqueline Winspear's work had passed me by, it's just because I make a habit of avoiding mystery novels written by people with names like Jacqueline Winspear, for fear that I might be wandering into another Agatha Christie trap. 

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate cozy mysteries?​

But Maisie Dobbs​ is no cozy, and it charmed me immediately. The hero is plucky, but not insufferably so—a battle-scarred nurse who has put every shilling she has into a detective agency, and spends much of the book's first hundred pages pinching pennies. (I like my detectives realistically broke. Every PI novel starts with a complaint about how little work the snoop is getting, and yet he never has trouble paying for his car, women, or booze.) Her first investigation is peppered with hints of a traumatic past—hints that make us interested in Maisie without slowing down the action. The book is quiet, mannered and grim, and I found myself getting my hopes up. "This is brilliant," I thought, "and there are nine more in the series!" And then, around the hundred page mark, the narrative comes to a howling halt.

As if not confident that her heroine was holding our attention, Winspear decides to dive into young Maisie's origin story, leaping back to the day of her mother's death, some decades before. Maisie is taken into service by a kindly, progressive London Lady, and what follows is chapter upon chapter of wheezing Upstairs, Downstairs​ action that is as deflating as one of the more predictable storylines in Downton Abbey. ​What was fresh turns sour, and the pages of my attractive little Penguin edition, I find, begin to turn much more slowly.

It was around the third chapter in Lady Rowan's London house that I began to feel it creeping in. Disappointment had returned. I'm still going to finish Maisie Dobbs​, and if the ending is more Sherlock​ than Downton​, I'll probably pick up the sequel, in hopes that it avoids dallying around the Christie-fied manner house that I loathe so much. But the balloon is popped. This isn't going to be My New Favorite Thing. I'll have to move on to the next bit of culture.​

The Last Thing I'll Write About The Oscars In 2013

I was so proud of myself for skipping the Oscars that I turned it into a self-righteous, poorly spell-cheked, one-man movement. Apparently, the world did not listen. All morning, the whingers of the Internet have bickered about an unsurprisingly tasteless host, an unsurprisingly dull series of montages, and an evening of television that was all-around awful in a thoroughly unsurprising way. The Oscars were awful—who'dve thunk?

But no one is asking the important questions. The insane questions. The questions that don't need to be answered because they were too stupid to have been posed in the first place.​

No one...but me.​

Today I’m wondering if Argo might have been better off not winning Best Picture. Take away that honor, and the film remains an underdog—forever remembered as the little (big budget, star driven) movie that could. Argo was a fun movie, but calling it the best picture of 2012 only underlines. It’s been pointed out elsewhere that Argo is wildly inaccurate. God knows I don’t give a damn about historical accuracy, but even for those whose tastes run towards the swashbuckling, the last twenty minutes—when gritty tension explodes into cartoonishness—were too much for me.

The movie is remarkable not because it’s great, but because it’s well-made, clever and exciting—three things Hollywood does far too rarely these days. That’s nifty, but not transcendent. Put the weight of best picture on this flimsy little movie, and it falls right to pieces. Argo is a good movie, but if it’s the best of 2012, then Hollywood is in worse trouble than I realized.

(Let us take this moment to gaze upon the evening’s finest gif. Watch that for ten or fifteen minutes, and proceed to the next paragraph once your brain begins to function again.)

​You can go read the rest of that harebrained rant over at Bullett​. On Astor Place Riot, ​I'd like to talk a little about gifs. Specifically, this one:

It's pretty good, isn't it? You can't look away.​ It's strange, repetitive, endless—showing you something bizarre that you might not have noticed if you were watching it in full speed. It is, in short, everything a gif should be. And it's the first good gif I've seen in months. 

Animated gifs have been around for so long that, when I was in high school they were considered passe. In the last couple of years the form has made a comeback, and with ubiquity comes laziness. After any major event, cesspits like Buzzfeed​ and supposedly worthwhile news outlets like the Guardian​ flood their front pages with crap like this, overloading our web browsers and dulling our capacity for rational thought. 

Does anyone think a page of forty or fifty sluggishly-loading animated gifs is funny? Or are we being held hostage by traffic-hungry web editors who haven't had a good idea since 2009? An endlessly-repeating, half second video clip can be mesmerizing, even beautiful. Anything less is a waste of your bandwith.​

With that, I give you the only two other gifs I've loled at in the last six months. For the sake of your browser's sanity, I'll link to them.

Buttfumble​

Owl trapped in car grill

Also, holy hell—the Chrome browser spellcheck is okay with "loled." Civilization is dead, isn't it?​ Why didn't anybody warn me?

Here's A Week Old Story About 'Star Wars' Fandom

Hey you!

You like pictures, don't you? Pictures of awesome imaginary space stuff? Then why don't you stroll over to Bullett​ for more pictures like the above shot from one man's unbelievable 140 square foot Hoth diorama?

Click through the above slideshow, and you’ll see he’s got built-in explosions, built-in laser fire, built-in smoke and enough action figures to populate a completely unnecessary remake of Small Soldiers. Squint at the pictures and, because the original film was made with models, it’s easy to pretend you’re looking at screenshots.

What kind of man would devote himself to such a creation? Big surprise: he’s a goofball. In a video released to his friends on the forums, Barry shows off his “dio,” spending less time on technical specifics than he does on nerdly jokes about being a pornstar. He’s geeking out in a totally safe space, refusing to even take the time to brag about the incredibly awesome thing he’d made. He built this for him, and you’re welcome to take a look at it.

​The words are whatever. But the pictures, oh my. The pictures are divine.