Dispatches from the Theater

Macbeth 
This production of The National Theater of Scotland stars Alan Cumming playing all the major roles in this fabulous play by William Shakespeare. This is a modern adaptation, and so it takes some liberties, like framing the action at a modern mental hospital where a man, Macbeth, relives the trauma of his story. In contrast to other attempts at modernizing the Bard, this one does not feel strained or arbitrary. It allows the thick and oozing darkness of the play to seep through. This is one bloody, ominous, godless, violent and dark play, and that shines through in this production, directed with verve by John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg.
The set design is a cavernous cell in a mental hospital with an observation window where a doctor and a nurse keep an eye on the madman. A trio of closed circuit cameras help the witches appear, and the use of simple props like three chairs and a metal table to create the banquet scene; a mirror, to have a conversation between Macbeth and one of his soldiers; or just a towel, to change him into her, is witty and effective. The production is riveting. It is alive, full of energy and power.
Mr. Cumming is wonderful. It is a total tour de force to be on stage for a full two hours with no intermission, playing Macbeth, the Three Witches, Lady Macbeth, Duncan, Banquo and a couple of others. If he sometimes slides into a bit of campiness, this is one instance where indicating with body language actually helps understand which character is being played.
Cumming, thankfully, does not change voices. He does change accents once in a while, sporting a strong Scottish brogue for Macbeth, something more dainty for the Lady and a plummy British accent for Duncan. He is extremely adroit with the text. We were sitting in the next to last row of the mezzanine and we could hear every word, except when he spoke a bit too fast.
It helps to be a bit familiar with the plot, but the program has a synopsis and a cast of characters. If you go, read it. This Macbeth, a play about the violence of ambition, feels like powerful, concentrated, totally relevant Shakespeare.

Orphans
A lame attempt at conflating Pinter and Mamet, it is beyond me why anybody would want to re-stage this weak, derivative play by Lyle Kessler. But it has a cast of thousands, (actually three) so we went. Alec Baldwin is good as Harold, the gangster who insinuates himself into the home of two brothers, Treat and Phillip, played by Ben Foster and the impressive Tom Sturridge. But this play, albeit entertaining, makes no sense. Phillip (Sturridge, in a tour de force performance of kinetic energy) is mentally feeble; Treat is a petty thief who lords over him. He brings a drunk Harold into the house, finds out he is rich and decides to kidnap him, and then the tables are turned. The whole thing, as directed by Daniel Sullivan, has the feel of a toothless sitcom. And that is not the reason why one goes to the theater. I did not get the point of the play. Ben Foster, who is a talented movie actor, disappoints as Treat. However, he is an extremely welcome substitute for Shia Leboeuf, a man who if I had my druthers, would be banned from appearing on the face of Earth.

The Big Knife
Yes, it's old fashioned, yes, it's none too subtle, but I love hearing the language of Clifford Odets. Even if the play is deeply flawed, there is such heart in the writing, it's as rich as an extravagant dessert. This production is uneven, with great turns by Richard Kind, Rachel Brosnahan and Reg Rogers, and pretty much all the supporting cast, but a very miscast and lost Bobby Cannavale and a stiff Marin Ireland in the main roles, as a huge Hollywood movie star and his wife. We spent the intermission trying to recast Cannavale's part. They don't make them like they used to. 

The Assembled Parties
This was fun, entertaining, if slightly befuddling. It's the story of a goyish Jewish family in the Upper West Side and some of its secrets through the years. The cast is great, in particular Judith Light, the foremost expert in playing Jewish cantankerous matrons. Richard Greenberg's one liners are elegant and funny, but I cannot tell you that I left the theater with much more than that.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Brecht, even in his most feverish agitprop mode, had a rapier wit and a strong sense of irony. But this production with new music by Duncan Sheik feels like Brecht Lite. The lyrics by W.H. Auden still pack a punch, but the music, except for one song, is like generic pop music, totally wispy and forgettable. And this kind of political theater, which is not aging very well, deserves music with far more bite.
The first act is very enjoyable but the second totally fizzles out, and it goes on forever. This is one play that could use a bit of trimming and a much, much faster pacing. The cast seems to need a good jolt of caffeine. Mary Testa plays all her different characters the exact same way, wasting her considerable talent. Elizabeth A. Davis, who plays Grusha, the heroine of the play, is perfectly serviceable, but she should be more formidable. Even though one can understand the casting of the quirky Christopher Lloyd as the singer and the judge, he delivers a rambling, one note fest that gets tiresome pretty fast. He has some moments but he takes forever to say his lines. It's a long slog.

Here Lies Love
Evita Perón is conceived in her musical as a hick from the provinces with a bit of a lethal backbone. Nobody pretends she had a heart of gold (except herself). But Imelda Marcos, who did nothing to inspire the poor people of the Philippines except to go on obscene shopping sprees and carouse at Studio 54, is treated in this musical by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim as some sort of romantic heroine who could not resist the riches her bastard of a dictator husband bestowed on her, and hence turned into an unfeeling, distant, frivolous first lady. There is a lot to be mined in these rag to riches stories of women of low origins who seduce tyrants and then become tyrants themselves. I bet they were all Grade A bitches from the day they were born, but this is not necessarily what makes them great dramatic heroines, and don't look for profound human psychology in this frothy play.
I was down for the ride until the play ended on a sunny, preposterous note, even after the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino. The real Imelda Marcos was a joke, an embarrassment to her country, deeply unconcerned by her country's woes, if not worse. Here she is romanticized, a bystander to corruption and cruelty, rather than a perpetrator, which is troubling. Yes, she denies her origins and behaves like a c--t sometimes, but why does she get the last laugh? If you need to put a disclaimer on the program that the Marcos couple were two evil bastards, what gives?
Some of the music is lovely and the best songs throb with a catchy, funky pulse. The title song is a horror, and unfortunately, it happens twice. The strained staging by Alex Timbers, which has the audience standing on the floor of a nightclub, and being manhandled by production assistants, while immersive and riveting at times, is also annoying. The cast is nimble, young and spirited. They deserve all the love.

Now Showing At A Theater Near You

Back to the future with Lincoln and Anna Karenina.

Favorite Vidalisms

Goodbye, Gore Vidal, and thanks for these remarks:


"A good deed never goes unpunished."


"The United States was founded by the brightest people in the country — and we haven't seen them since."


"The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return."


"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."


"Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little."


"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."


"The four most beautiful words in our common language: "I told you so."


"There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise." 
(My sentiments exactly) 

Clerk: "Have a nice day". Vidal: "I have other plans".

Other Desert Cities

Due to popular demand (that is, my friend Scott asked), I will tell you what I thought of Jon Robin Baitz's play Other Desert Cities, directed by Joe Mantello and with a stellar cast comprised of Stockard Channing, Judith Light, Stacy Keach, Justin Kirk and Rachel Griffiths.
First thing that takes your breath away is the set by John Lee Beatty. It's the living room of a mid-century home in Palm Springs and it is so perfect in so many ways, that every time my attention flagged I just marveled at the set. The lighting is spectacular too, for there is a high window behind which you can see two palm trees, and the color of the desert sky changes completely accurately from morning to dusk to night. I could write an entire paean about the set decoration, but I don't even know how to call things. However, if you ever perused an Architectural Digest from the seventies, you will immediately recognize the style. Modern, cream colored, trying hard to be tasteful.  A living room that wishes to soothe and to offend no one.
And so it is with this wealthy Republican family, the all-American Wyeths, living their retirement glory days in Palm Springs. Stacy Keach, who is excellent, plays a retired actor who was chums with Ronnie and Nancy Reagan, the astounding Stockard Channing plays his wife Polly, who insists on brandishing a goyish Texas twang even though she's Jewish, the extraordinary Judith Light plays her fucked up ex-alcoholic sister Silda Grauman (both were in showbiz in LA), Justin Kirk (from Weeds) who gets better as the play goes along, plays their son Trip, who produces a reality law show were the judges are celebrities, and Rachel Griffiths plays their daughter Brooke, an unabashed liberal who has fled to the East Coast and written a memoir about a family tragedy that threatens to tear the family apart.
Brooke's role is tough to nail. Baitz wants to confound the expectations of what he knows to be his smugly liberal audience by making Brooke's parents very charming and funny while the daughter is a monster of whining. As played by Griffiths, the one element in the production that is a tragic mistake, Brooke is a pill, and she is so grating and unconvincing, that I almost switched party allegiance on her account. There are American actresses Griffith's age who could have better understood the passage from a California golden child to a depressive, insufferable East Coast neurotic. Mary Louise Parker, a talented actress I find hugely hammy, comes to mind. That I'd rather watch her than endure Griffiths' reaching for emotion, not able to find the sympathetic nugget at Brooke's core, is saying something. Martha Plimpton, Laura Linney, Cynthia Nixon, Edie Falco, Lily Taylor, we could go on. I did not believe Griffith's grief, nor did I believe her adopted East Coastness, too blunt and unsubtle. She seems to be trying really hard. And because she is at the tragic center of the play, if you don't believe her pain, the play is thrown off balance and all the artifice in it shows.
However, the greatest joy of the evening comes from watching a trio of amazing veterans who are truly electrifying: Channing, Light and Keach. They all find layers of nuance into the broadness of their characters: Peppy Palm Springs Society Matron, Over The Hill Hollywood Drunk, Ex Handsome Bad Actor. Channing in particular blew me away. Her Polly is a no non-sense wisecracker, trying to out-goy the goys, with the core of a lioness. Light is also fiercely funny, sad and brave as crazy Aunt Silda, and Keach is sweet and thundering, totally believable as an old Hollywood star, now swaddled in wealth and grief. They are all pitch perfect. Even Justin Kirk, who at the beginning is slightly grating, finds his footing, leaves the shtick behind and delivers beautifully in the second act.
The play is well written and has many funny moments. It straddles a very thin line between comedy and melodrama. For the most part, director Joe Mantello balances the jokes with the pathos admirably, which is no small feat. Sometimes the tone falls into his particular brand of shtick where all the characters speak in weird, affected cadences that try to be naturalistic and sound extremely theatrical. This is annoying, but it seems to go away as the play progresses.
My problem with the play is that the second act is one beat stretched to the limit, with a couple of bombshell revelations thrown in to spike it up. So Brooke wrote a tell-all where the parents come across as evil, selfish people who are just interested in keeping their political connections; but different points of view reveal the fragile nature of the "truth". The truth according to whom? There is a final twist in which Brooke learns she does not know the first thing about what really happened, and in the end the play is about reconciliation. I thought the ending was a cop out. Turns out that the parents did everything they did for selfless reasons. Republicans? Selfless? Oh, dear. Maybe it's the times, and maybe Baitz is a better man than I, but I find reconciliation with Republicans to be essentially impossible and thoroughly inadvisable. Who wrote this play, Barack Obama?
I commend Baitz for not writing the liberal screed his audience wants to cheer for. I commend him for going for nuance and complexity and attempting to shed light on the myths and versions of the truth that are at the core of every grieving family. But like they say in Mexican wrestling, when I go to the theater: "Quiero ver sangre!" I want to see blood!

Spacey the III

Don't think I haven't noticed that my posts involving Shakespeare are suspiciously popular.
All ye who intend to "borrow" this for your term papers, use quotation marks or relent!
In any case, this is a review of the production of Richard III currently at BAM, starring Kevin Spacey and directed by Sam Mendes.
Kevin Spacey is a great actor. Richard III is a great villain and William Shakespeare is the greatest writer that ever was. So how's the production? Good, but uneven. Mendes has conceived a very sparse production with contemporary overtones. The costumes are modern Elizabethan (and rather boring), the stage is mostly bare, surrounded by many doors symbolizing the many victims of this proto-mass murderer. For Richard is a political serial killer, reminiscent of a Stalin, or a Mao. Thirsty for power, he kills what he fears, and because he kills so much, he fears everybody, so he has to dispose of everybody.  Homicidal tyrants have existed since day one, but it takes Shakespeare to make one into a character that clearly defines a complete psychological space.
Richard is deformed, prematurely born; it is said of him that he had teeth before he had eyes. To hear him tell it at the beginning of the play, everybody's happily carousing in times of peace,

But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up...

(Has anybody ever written so beautifully about ugliness?) Since Richard cannot carouse, he has to scheme. He is physically a monster, and perhaps because of the cruelty of nature and society towards him, he is cruel himself. Poor Richard lived long before political correctness and bleeding hearts (a phrase that comes from this play!). One can imagine the bullying he endured. The play hurls spectacular insults at him, but fortunately Shakespeare is not from the age of pitiful self-justification. He is not as cheap as to want us to feel sorry for the guy. He makes him human, and therefore one ends feeling a pathetic sort of pity for him. What a waste of intellect, what deformity of purpose, which is what one always thinks about people who use all their mental energy for destruction. Think Assad Jr. now in Syria, or Ghadaffi, or any totalitarian monster of our age. There is a wonderful soliloquy when Richard is finally visited by conscience, which expresses the psychic isolation and engorged ego of the sociopath:

Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
What do I fear? myself? there's none else by:
Richard loves Richard; that is, I am I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am:
Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack. I love myself. Wherefore? for any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself!
I am a villain: yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well: fool, do not flatter.
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

I shall despair. There is no creature loves me;
And if I die, no soul shall pity me:
Nay, wherefore should they, since that I myself
Find in myself no pity to myself?

Excuse me while I plotz.  This profile could have been written, less adroitly perhaps, by one of those forensic psychologists at Quantico. Its modernity blows me away.  Everything is I with this man. He is alone and apart from human society. A classic sociopath.
Well, Spacey goes to town, emphasizing Richard's duplicity and his terrible need for attention. It is a powerful performance, a bit shticky, in my view, very Spacey-like, which is not bad, since he is the master of dripping sarcasm. My biggest problem with this characterization is that he screams like a maniac. Many times, the screaming obscures the words. This is unfortunate, because Richard is one of the most verbally compelling characters in all of Shakespeare. This is one Richard hell-bent on garnering attention, full of mercurial fury, but it would be more interesting if he would connive more quietly and let his fury seethe inside his crooked frame. As you saw above, Shakespeare goes to beautiful lengths to describe his physical weakness, which serves as a stunning contrast to his robust capacity for evil. It should surprise everyone at court that this pathetic cripple harbors such gigantic homicidal tendencies, but Spacey is not a wee man, nor is this a quiet performance. He wears a polio brace and has a crooked leg and a bent foot, the iconic hunchback, relies on a cane and is totally misshapen. As he ambles up and down the stage he looks suitably grotesque, but it would be far more chilling to see his power come, not from throwing tantrums, but from a powerful tsunami of a mind inside a shriveled frame. After more than three hours, the outbursts get annoying and lose effectiveness. I will confess, this reminded me of my Mom and Dad's dueling parenting techniques. Mom was a frequent hell-raiser, while Dad was a quiet seether. Guess which one sent me into paroxisms of fear? One look from my Dad's silent anger was enough to make me wither in my chair, whereas my Mom's operatic outbursts eventually caused my sisters and me to roll our eyes.
Less is always more.
Spacey shows off his verbal dexterity and riffs around with the rhythms interestingly and at breakneck speeds, if not always eloquently. Still, he has some incredible moments, as when, in a mediatic event reminiscent of the putrid piety of today's Republican candidates, he pretends to pray in church (holding a Bible as a prop, of course) as he orchestrates his usurpation of the throne. Here, he reminded me of Newt Gingrich. Richard has members of his clique actually beg him publicly to become king as he feigns modesty and surprise. This is done through a live video feed on a big screen so we can see what Spacey does best, which is to show us what he's thinking through the most minimal gestures. At one point, he coyly averts his eyes, but there is more than false modesty in this tiny act; there is a weariness which encompasses everything that has happened up to that point and everything that will happen next. Mendes equates Richard's appetite for power with the megalomaniac personality of a totalitarian dictator. It makes perfect sense for our day and age.
Spacey is valiantly over the top for the entire play, giving a physically generous, possibly quite painful, exhausting and unsparing performance that has him sweating buckets, and in a clever use of his real sweat, Richard is constantly wiping his brow, which adds a layer of sliminess to the character, sweaty like a Tricky Dick.
Alas, just as Richard's monstrous ego takes up all of the play's space, Spacey takes up all of the stage. Most of the actors are nowhere near his level. The men are mostly inconsequential. The women fare better, but except for Gemma Jones, excellent as Queen Margaret, and the actress who plays his poor mother, the rest of the actors are left in the dust, and this smacks of headliner vanity to me. Why are the two young princes Richard kills portrayed by young women? The horrifying shock of their murder is grossly diminished by this arbitrary piece of casting.
Still, for the most part, the production is visceral and bracing. Mendes has some cool visual ideas, particularly towards the end, when Richard and the good Richmond share a dream, sitting on opposite sides of a long table as all the spirits of the murdered appear to haunt one and inspire the other, and a fantastic coup de theatre when a finally dead Richard is hoisted up from a meat hanger, feet first, to dangle like a piece of butchery, himself reminiscent of all the blood he spilled.
So how is Richard human? We know he has suffered, he is unloved and worse, incapable of love himself. Shakespeare was too cool to change Richard's nature just to appease the audience. He shows how human nature is, not how it should be. There is something heroic in Richard's determination to stay true to himself, in his relentless quest for some sort of social redress. He has never known love, how would he change? I am I. He is pitiful for his ignorance of human restraint, for his incapacity for mercy. He knows what he is, and this must be so painful.

God Damn!

I am lucky to have such fabulous friends that they give away tickets to the opera.
To 6-hour operas, to be exact. So I dropped everything I was doing to see the new Met's production of Gotterdammerung, by Richard Wagner. This, as far as I could gather from the program, is the last of the operas in the Ring cycle, which lasts about 17 hours total. Apparently the guy had not yet heard of "cut to the chase".
To be honest, I could care less about German mythology*. There is always some magic potion to blame for all the chaos. It's not a character flaw; not someone made a tragic mistake but somebody drank the wrong brew without knowing.  Siegfried, who is in love with Brunnhilde, takes a magic potion and falls out of love with her and in love with another woman. Disaster ensues.
I was curious to understand why Wagner is an endurance contest for both audiences and singers alike. I believe I have the answer now.
The new production by Robert Lepage has been very controversial, because it is very modern. It's hard to describe, but the stage is dwarfed by a huge contraption of wooden planks that move as the scenes change. Projections of water, fire, a forest, are screened on the planks.  Apparently, at the beginning the machinery was clunky,  causing great grief to the humans on stage, but now they seem to have worked out the kinks. I liked it, once I got used to it. But after 6 hours, the novelty wears off. And I'm thinking, if you have people sitting for 6 hours, you may want to change things a bit. Keep 'em entertained.

I think the problem is that the singers have little to do but stand and sing. I was sitting way up there in Valhalla, so it was hard to see the acting. Still, it seems that all the energies were dedicated to figure out the staging of the machine, but not that of the singers, who are extremely static, screaming to the winds. Then again, if you have to sing for 6 hours straight, you may not want to be running around the stage.
I welcome less literal productions of operas, because Opera, a bizarre mix of the sublime and the ridiculous, can always do with less of the ridiculous. To wit, there is a plot point in this story, where Siegfried runs around with a schmatteh over his head. It's supposed to have magic powers, but it still looks like a schmatteh.
So now that technology allows for great magic onstage, instead of cardboard forests and cellophane flames, new productions should be fun. But, at least in this instance, something about the grandeur of the stage machinery stifles the colorful imagination of the story. The German mythology has very powerful images, like dragons, flying horses, water nymphs, women with shields, etc. A lot of that is left to the imagination through the singing, provided that you read the useful but pedestrian sounding supertitles. If instead of being dark and brooding and too intellectual, this whole spectacle would be more dreamlike, as is the quality of myth, I would have been more transfixed. But it felt a bit cumbersome, while this enormous work needs some agility. 
The Met orchestra, splendidly conducted by Fabio Luisi, sounded great, the singers as far as I could tell, were pretty awesome, particularly Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde. That woman can sing. And sing. And sing. And the guy who played the meanie was amazing too. Major bravos for him.  Siegfried sang beautifully but the singer needs to get lessons in deportment. He moved like a slob from Jersey. 
I won't pretend that I did not doze off a couple of times. I was awake for all the good parts, including an awesome fight between two sisters (Deborah Voigt and Waltraud Meier), the part of the chorus, which is gorgeous, the beautiful music when Siegfried finally bites the dust, among others. At the end, Brunnhilde sings like for 15 minutes with little interruption. It is truly an amazing feat of vocal power.
But there were these incongrous plaster statues (the Gods) that looked totally kitschy, and at the end their heads blow off (or rather pathetically pop out like popcorn) in the most incredible display of self-annihilation by a director I have ever seen. For 6 hours we finally bought the planks and the projections and the drab  costumes and the stern minimalism and endured 6 hours of Wagner to reach the apotheosic conclusion and Lepage closes with the cheesiest effect, thereby undermining everything we saw and breaking the spell, in what I can only assume he mistakenly thinks is an ironic comment about the fragility of the gods. It was so ridiculous people were laughing, and not in a good way.
It was slow, exciting, ridiculous, magnificent, crazy and very, very long.
I'm glad I saw it.


*I resent that major Jew hater Wagner and his obsession with Teutonic myth. He can stick the braids and the horns and the breastplates up his ass. The music is great though.

Pen World Voices Festival

I have been invited to blog about this interesting annual literary fest, taking place this week in our fair city. This post appears at the Pen page, but I post it here as well for my dear readers:
Opening Night for this festival used to be at Town Hall, which was cavernous and felt too big for something as intimate as literature. Last night it took place at The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, overlooking the coast of New Jersey and the Hudson river, which was very nice. The evening's theme, as far as I could tell, had to do with water, and that had something to do with freedom, though it is unclear to me exactly why. The concept was "Written on Water". I'm not sure I understand what this means. To me, whatever you write on water will disappear as you are writing it, and literature is quite the opposite, the only thing that remains of those who practice it. They turn to dust, but their written words remain. Perhaps the theme is meant as a reflection on the precarious state of literature these days, what with bloggers instead of writers, and screens instead of pages, and book shops going out of business. In any case, the Pen World Voices Festival is always a bracing reminder for us to read and to write.
   I have to confess that when I started attending this enlightening festival, I quickly discovered that I am not a fan of readings as much as I am of discussion panels, where there is more of a frisson as you listen to your favorite writers, or writers you don't know, discuss with each other (are they nasty, naughty, or nice?). The downside is the part where the audience asks questions, but that is a topic for another post.
   Perhaps literary writers do not suffer from ADD like the rest of humanity and are hence impervious to the concept of length. For some reason, the readers were seated at the back of the auditorium, and they walked down the main aisle like participants in a wedding, which made the proceedings longer. On the other hand, a festival of literature has every right to take its time; it is not a festival of twittering. It may be actually very beneficial to sit down, concentrate for a bloody second and listen to narratives of more than 140 characters.
   Happily, there was booze for sale. As a liquid, alcohol is a perfect, and very necessary lubricant for literary readings. I should have bought a drink, but since I was blogging for this august publication, I wanted to be extra sober. So to honor the the spirit of the evening, I drank water. It was very good.
   The evening started out with Iva Bittova, an artist who is some sort of a cross between Yma Sumac, Diamanda Galas and Jascha Heifetz. I thought that it would have been cooler to have an actual singer/songwriter who writes words for songs, which would have been more appropriate to a festival of writing (this is a euphemism for I wish they had cut the pretentious crap). 
   Another confession I have to make is that I came to this event because I am in love with Hanif Kureishi. It's been a while since my heart fluttered for any writer in a groupie kind of way, but this man makes it happen. And he did not disappoint. His reading was the funniest, most biting, entertaining and lovely reading of the evening. I have such a crush on him, that I spent a good while after his appearance debating whether to stalk him (I could see him standing in the side lines towards the end of the evening), confess my admiration and my passion and have a quick, torrid, fabulous affair with him. He is hot. And smart. And funny (and he has written some very nifty movies: My Beautiful Launderette, Intimacy, The Mother, Venus). As far as I'm concerned, he was the highlight of the evening. I also very much liked the poor soul who had to read right after him, Mircea Cartarescu, with a faux naive, pithy and sardonic poem about his crush on Natalie Wood as a way to escape Romanian reality.
   The foreign writers read in their own languages with a translation provided on screens. It is wonderful to listen to works in a language one doesn't understand and yet one tries to follow the inflection in the voice, or some similar words. As I speak Spanish, I could compare the original language in the poems of Gioconda Belli to the translation. I could not decide if the omission of certain words in the translation was an improvement or not. Belli likes to use words that only appear in literature: nenúfar, velamen, cardúmen, ingrimo, a word I had never heard before, and which means "alone". I also speak Hebrew, but the Hebrew in the poems of Agi Mishol was so poetic there were entire swaths of words that were new to me, even though they sounded like they came from an ancient, mysterious treasure chest.
   Malcolm Gladwell, who said he felt like the segment on Sesame Street in which there is something different from the rest, because he was the only non-fiction writer in the bunch, read a short and effective passage about planes spiraling down. Apparently, because of gravity, when a plane is in spiral descent, you can't really feel it. This will become a small comfort to me from now on every time I fly.  I may not know I am about to die until I disintegrate. Phew.
   In general, I think the writers were divided into two categories (insofar as my own personal taste): precious and non-precious. I am firmly in the camp of the non-precious. That is the reason why I stayed all the way to the end until Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg read (from Shawn's play The Designated Mourner). Non-precious is an understatement with Shawn. He read a bit in which a character describes how he urinated and then defecated on a book, simply to prove that it was possible. And that's the note the evening ended with. You want freedom? There you have it.

Strange Days

I've been doing some strange things lately that I want to share with you, my dear readers:

• I went to Cinema for The Ear, a screening of movies without images at Lincoln Center. The theme was horror, and several composers created aural movies that were very cool. We all sat,  some of us blithely munching on popcorn, in the darkened theater with no images coming out of the screen, just soundtracks in surroundsound. Many of them sounded eerily similar, compositions in dark keys but in good taste.
But there were some that stood out. One in which the voice of a soprano was mixed and layered into a disturbing soundscape of wails and shrieks and ululations, another one which took the sounds of people in movies in moments of extreme turmoil and the final one which was the soundtrack for a short of Poe's The Tell Tale Heart without the images. Spooky!
I wish the theater was pitch black dark. Spookier!

• This is so out of character for me, I'm slightly worried. I am currently watching, since yesterday, the live Hawk-Cam from Bobst Library at NYU, where a pair of red tailed hawks have built a nest on exquisite real estate, overlooking Washington Square Park and Fifth Ave. Most of the time not much happens, but yesterday about 6 pm, I tuned in and saw the man of the house relieve the mom, as she flew away for a pedicure or yoga class or something, and he sat on top of three pristine eggs, continuing to incubate them. It was awesome! Being a male, he fidgeted much more than his wife, who seems to be in a placid state of zen for hours, warming up the little eggs. It is utterly fascinating.

• I made ceviche.

Book Report

Remember in high school when you had to write a book report? Well, there is no way in hell I'm going to write a book report for you right now. I'll just write a little lazy list of some books I've read recently that you may want to check out.
• Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer. An awesome novel. Funny, deeply smart, about current art, older art, sex, love and death. Super gorgeously brilliant.

• Then We Came to The End, by Joshua Ferris. I really liked this novel. It takes place in an advertising agency, but smartly, it does not go into the minutiae of advertising, which would bore people to tears (plus, no need since Mad Men). Instead, it chronicles the human and sometimes inhuman habits of office employees, hilariously, darkly, with great style, and more profoundly than The Office on TV. I was very impressed with this book. Ferris is a former copywriter who can actually write.

• The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman. A sweet, sharp, entertaining novel about the travails of an English language newspaper in Europe (obviously the Herald Tribune). It has some great moments and it is very fun and enjoyable, but given the hype, I expected to be more dazzled.

• The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado. This is a memoir of a Jewish family exiled from Cairo in the 1950s. It is an incredible story, written without charm or style or grace. Still, Lagnado's descriptions of glamorous, cosmopolitan Cairo before the Nasser revolution and its incredible Jewish community gave me pangs of sadness at how much fabulousness was lost. It is an unbearably sad book, for the fate of the writer's family, the fate of the ancient Jewish community in Cairo, and the loss of one of the greatest cities in the world to xenophobia and intolerance. Countries that mistreat and expel their Jews are stupid. They may plunder the material riches the Jews are forced to leave behind, but they lose so much more. They lose a big part of their soul. This book made me realize the devastating loss of Jewish Levantine culture, something nobody in the Jewish world has paid much attention to. The history of modern Jewry has always been Eurocentric, perhaps because of the Holocaust, and because the pioneers of Zionism were mostly European, but the culture and the history and the heritage that were lost in all the Arab countries that expelled their Jews after the creation of Israel is irreplaceable and utterly, heartbreakingly tragic.
Let's face it: colonialism was very bad, for sure, but in places like Cairo, Shanghai, and Casablanca it was swanky and glamorous and fabulous. I wish I had been there.

I'm Not Making This Up

From the catalogue of a spiritual retreat in upstate NY which shall remain nameless:
• Wild Roots, Woodslore and Wildwoods Wisdom -- WHERE'S THE BAR?
• TangoZen™: Tango with the Buddha -- ISN'T THE BUDDHA TOO FAT TO TANGO? 
• Dance of Liberation®
• Boot Camp for Goddesses® -- EUPHEMISM FOR FAT FARM?
• Overcoming Underearning® -- BY OVERPAYING THE UNDERMINER.
• Naam Yoga™ and Universal Kabbalah -- DO WE GET TO COMMUNE WITH ESTHER?
• Detox Flow® Yoga
• Yoga Tune Up®
• Purna Yoga™ 
• Satyananda Yoga®
• Embodyoga™
• Anusara Yoga®
• Jivamukti Yoga® -- IN WHICH WE MEDITATE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ® AND ™
• Breema™ -- WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?
• Tai Chi Easy™
• ChiWalking®
• ChiRunning®
• VortexHealing®  -- VOID WHERE PROHIBITED
• The Power of Personal Vibrations -- BUMMER. I THOUGHT IT SAID PERSONAL VIBRATORS
• Mindfulness Tools for Living the Full Catastrophe -- I BET THIS ONE IS FOR JEWS.
• Awakening your Authentic Soul Signature -- IS IT LIKE MY VISA SIGNATURE?
• The Art of Extreme Self-Care -- NARCISSISTS WELCOME
• Spring Ecstatic Chant -- ME AFTER SOUP DUMPLINGS AT JOE'S SHANGHAI
• A Gentle Introduction to Skydancing Tantra -- WHATEVER FLOATS YOUR ROOT BEER
• Tree Whispering™ -- WILL I BE SUED IF I DO IT ON MY OWN?
• Social Media Training -- HUH?
• FireWalking: Feel your Fear, Find your Power -- EASY FOR YOU TO SAY
• John of God -- TOO BAD CRUCIFIXION WENT OUT OF STYLE
• How to Write and Publish Spiritual Books -- AND MAKE MILLIONS DOING IT?
• Our Lady of Weight Loss EnLIGHTens -- AMEN, SISTERS
• Creating Photo Prayers -- GIVE ME A FREAKING BREAK
• Off the Mat, into the World® -- AND STILL AN ASSHOLE AT THE END OF THE CLASS
• Self-Healing through Latin Dance -- NO MAMEN 

AND MY OVERWHELMING FAVORITE: Corporate Yogis Unite!

Alert the media!

I can't find anything to kvetch or rant about! What is happening to me? Heeeeelp!

I could comment on Rush Limbaugh's broken promise to get the hell out of here and go pester the poor Costa Ricans, but not even that is getting my goat nowadays. These pompous hypocritical, drug addled, fat assed balloons of fetid, putrefying right wing air are so stupid it's almost pointless to make fun of them.
What happened to our healthcare bill? I don't understand the dynamics so I've stopped caring. Where are we on this? Anybody?
By the way, listen to this. I made an appointment to the eye doctor because I think I need new glasses. Can't see, can't hear, quickly becoming an old fartette. Hence, appointment.
They tell me that if I want a new prescription I have to pay $40 extra, because my insurance (which charges a $50 copay) doesn't cover a prescription. What fresh hell, to quote Dorothy Parker, is this? It's like going to the ice cream parlor and they can sell you the cone or the cup or the sprinkles, but not the ice cream.
This country has become an insane asylum. Nothing makes any sense any more. Which is why I am going to Chinatown, to my beloved Mott St. Optical, to get my prescription. This is where I got my bifocals (see old fartette, above), and the saleswoman told me: "You are going to love them. You are going to see everything!".

Perhaps you can enlighten me: why do rich people have reality shows on TV? A world in which the rich behave with even more abject vulgarity than the poor thoroughly depresses me. There are no standards anymore.
Same goes for fucking Lady Gaga. I saw her video with Beyonce (she does not depress me, somehow). Call me an old fartette, but no I didn't like the video. I like the song, but the video's trashy aesthetic is all over the place. What really disgusts me is that it's product placement central, what people in my farkakte business call, with no hint of irony or shame, branded entertainment. That even a music video today has to have product placement makes me gag. So did Virgin Mobile pay for this extended musical masturbation? Or what? Look, motherfuckers, I ain't drinking this Kool-Aid, okay? (unless you pay me handsomely to do it. I'm in advertising after all).
I saw Logorama, the animated short that won the Oscar. This is our world now, and it is not a good thing.
Hey. Looks like I got my kvetching-ranting mojo back.
:)

More Literary Fun

I got this on Facebook. It's purportedly by Oscar Wilde:

"Just be yourself. Everybody else is taken".

He was the best.

On Pina Bausch

Well, it's good to know that there are some luminaries of the intelligentsia that get expressions of collective mourning as passionate as those intended for poor Michael or Farrah.
Facebook is ablaze with grief over Pina Bausch. In her case, I must say, I'm incapable of feeling anything because I have seen limited amounts of her work and it's cool but I just don't care. Let's say Expressionistic German modern dance is not my cup of tea. I was utterly annoyed at Almodovar for sticking one interminable piece of hers in the middle of Hable con Ella. It was like cinematic namedropping: P.R.E.T.E.N.T.I.O.U.S.
I respect all of those who are shedding tears over her demise. Some of them are my best friends! Seriously, many of them are people whose tastes I respect. I guess there is no arguing with taste.
But Bausch seems to be one of those cultural icons that one is supposed to admire, like Tarkovsky or Meredith Monk or Robert Wilson (or most of BAM's programming), or if you will excuse and forgive me, Godard: artists with difficult reputations and insufferable works, yet that furnish you with instant cultural cred. It's a bit like eating broccoli or eggplant or tofu, not altogether palatable but supposedly very good for you.
So call me a Philistine.

Recent Faves from The New Yorker

As I really am at a loss on what to tell you, darlings, here are two links to recent pieces in The New Yorker that I liked.
The first one is one of the only truly funny comic pieces in the humor section Shouts and Murmurs, which is usually insufferable. This litte gem is by Noah Baumbach (whose movies are usually insufferable) and it is about a bee on blow.
And this one blew my mind. It's not totally available yet on the net, but it's on last week's issue.

Chimp Change

photo: AP

Travis, a trained chimpanzee, was killed by the police after he mauled a friend of his owner, who had done nothing to provoke him, except apparently, wear her hair differently.
Travis (last name Bickle by any chance?) lived, not where he should, in the bush in Africa, but in a house in Hartford, Connecticut (no wonder he was pissed).
When he was younger, he was put to work on commercials for Old Navy and Coca-Cola and even tried out for a TV pilot. To judge from the photo, like pretty much every other American, Travis was grossly overweight and underexercised. He looks like a couch potato.
He lived in a cage inside the house. It may have been a big, pretty cage with many toys and his owners probably loved him but still, this is not right. Why should a chimpanzee live in the human world? And make money for his owners? Why should he be paraded in town wearing diapers?
Below, the news item. My comments in bold:

"There was no provocation that we know of. One thing that we're looking into is that we understand the chimpanzee has Lyme disease and has been ill from that, so maybe from the medications he was out of sorts. We really don't know," Conklin (chief of police) said.

Colleen McCann, a primatologist at the Bronx Zoo, said Tuesday that chimpanzees are unpredictable and dangerous even after living among humans for years.

....The chimpanzee... went after several of the officers, who retreated into their cars, Conklin said. Travis knocked the mirror off a cruiser before opening its door and starting to get in, trapping the officer.

That officer shot the chimpanzee several times, Conklin said.

The wounded chimpanzee fled the scene, but Conklin said police were able to follow the trail of his blood: down the driveway, into the open door of the home, through the house and to his living quarters, where he had retreated and died of his wounds. It's very moving that he went back to his lair to die. So sad.

Herold and two officers also received minor injuries, police said.

Conklin told reporters the chimp was acting so agitated earlier that afternoon that Herold gave him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Probably not a good idea. Conklin also suggested the animal may have attacked Nash because she was wearing her hair differently and perhaps wasn't recognized.

Police have dealt with him in the past, including an incident in 2003 when he escaped from his owners' vehicle in downtown Stamford for two hours. I'd be pissed if they left me in the car too. Officers used cookies, macadamia treats and ice cream in an attempt to lure him, but subdued him only after he became too tired to resist. Just so you know, if that happens to me, hold the macadamias.

At the time of the 2003 incident, police said the Herolds told them the chimpanzee was toilet trained, dressed himself, took his own bath, ate at the table and drank wine from a stemmed glass. He also brushed his teeth using a Water Pik, logged onto the computer to look at pictures, and watched television using the remote control, police said.

I heard he also made a mean martini. He was my friend in facebook. Geez!

Well, this may seem very cute to us, but it's not right. Chimps are very smart, but why should they ever come in contact with a Water Pik? People should leave animals alone. If you must live with an animal, it should be a dog or a cat or a goldfish. Everybody else in the animal kingdom needs to live in their own habitat with their own animal friends and foes. People abuse animals with the excuse of protecting them. With the excuse of love and companionship too. Leave them alone.

If I was the mauled friend, I'd seriously think of suing Travis' owner. She could not control him and there is no reason why those people should have an ape living at home. They were profiting from him too, no matter how expensive his upkeep.

By the way, why do we have to own animals? Who gave us the right to sell them and breed them for our own amusement? You see, I go PETA (which I loathe) one better. As part of the animal kingdom, we should kill animals for food (and shoes maybe). Everything else -- zoos, circuses, aquariums, performing animals and pets -- is not okay. Although I must say, I like zoos and aquariums because that's the only way we get to see the animals we keep extinguishing. The circus I hate.

You can't eat your animals and have them too.

Neat Lego NY

Check out this amazing post in the New York Times from Christoph Niemann, making NY out of Legos but not in the way you imagine. It's lovely, accurate, brilliant, and fun!

Poor Randy Newman...

He got a really bad review of his concert at Carnegie Hall by Ben Ratliff of the New York Times.
It was a bad review, badly written and really incoherent, mean spirited and ugly.
To wit:

The best way to hear Randy Newman is alone. Hearing him at home with someone else snickering along to his jokes isn’t much pleasure. Hearing him live, with other people around you, is peculiar torture. He’s an excellent torturer. Not that that he’s a bad performer, or that he makes bad art. It’s the opposite of bad art — done in fine strokes, with unreliable narrators, several kinds of irony and proud resistance to musical trends.

Huh? What is the opposite of bad art? Good art? Good bad art?

Mr. Ratliff apparently cringed all night long. The audience's laughter made him cringe, the songs made him cringe. I don't know what hair he had up his ass, because as much as I love Randy Newman I can tell a bad concert or a bad audience when I see it, and in this case neither was it. Newman was not his usual ornery self and the audience were not a bunch of adoring monkeys either. It was a classy affair. Newman's songs, it's true, resemble one another a lot. He does use a relatively limited repertoire of mostly old fashioned pop styles. But his lyrics are sharp and funny and many of the melodies are wonderful. More venom:

The other songs, like “Marie” or “Feels Like Home,” were professionally guileless songs of pathetic love, friendship or regret, perfect for movies: beautiful melodies engineered to elicit sloppy tears. A few communicated a standardized pathos about American poverty — snapshot properties with place names: “Baltimore,” “Louisiana, 1927.”

It just shows the bad blood of the review that Ratliff takes a song like "Louisiana, 1927", that has become the de facto Katrina anthem because of its accurate and haunting description of the situation, as if it was just another song in the Newman catalog of songs about cities ("Baltimore", "Birmingham", "I Love LA"). You have to have a heart of barbed wire not to be moved by some of the love songs. And I am the greatest despiser of sentimentality there is. Pathetic? Standardized pathos? Sloppy tears?
Was Ratliff under the effects of PMS? Drug deprivation? A toothache?

But the piece de resistance:

The audience did what all crowds do: it laughed and cheered. But even that felt icky. Any crowd’s approving reactions to songs like “Rednecks” (about the moral haughtiness of Northern liberals sung from the standpoint of a Southern racist) or “A Piece of the Pie” (a lazy, pessimistic observation of class inequality in America) are slightly embarrassing. It’s clubbish agreement, in-on-the-joke smugness. The only good reaction would be silence and an honest attempt to figure out how many layers of irony he might be applying.

Who does this pisher think he is?
Yeah, we were your run of the mill Celine Dion/Hannah Montana audience. The audience, in fact, was comprised mostly of people Newman's age. From the looks and sounds of it, I can tell you it was not the bunch of morons that Ratliff describes. The lazy writing, the smugness and the pissy, contemptuous superiority are far more evident in the reviewer than in the reviewed and they're way below the standards of the New York Times.

Randy Newman at Carnegie Hall

In a nutshell: He fed my soul for more than two hours.
His lyrics are so smart and funny and sharp, so there was a lot of laughter. And his serious songs are deeply moving, impressionistic and extremely poignant.
It was him and his piano, unencumbered by a band, which really helps the act of listening to the words and appreciating his talent for melody.
The audience was composed mainly of people his age, some of them with children. Man, younger people should get into Randy Newman, it's unlikely they've heard anything with this class, wit and grace.
He started out the evening with "It's Money That I love" ("a good song to play tonight", he said). And he built up from there, playing his greatest hits like "Short People" and "Rednecks", 'Sail Away", and even the song from Toy Story, together with material from his new album and other recent great songs. He alternated between the ironic stuff and the gorgeous, haunting, serious stuff, all the while saying extremely funny things. I love this man.
This is a case in which the standing ovation is totally deserved.

All Points West: Fascist state

I love order and civilization. That is one of the reasons why I live here. I love the fact that you can go to a rock festival and everybody is so orderly and people are on their best behavior. I love the fact that you can put concert goers on a ferry and the boat is not going to capsize due to disorderly conduct or disorganization. The event is extremely well organized, the bands appear on time, all is lovely. Because I come from Mexico, where people have yet to understand the concept of forming an orderly line, I am always astounded at the civility of young Americans. These are the best behaved people in the world (at least in their own country).
So why are the organizers compelled to establish a host of rules that are insulting and ridiculous? To wit: Everybody gets carded for booze. 65 year-old weathered hippies have to show their id in order to get a freaking beer. Everybody gets a bracelet, like inmates in a mental institution, like newborn fucking babies in the incubator, just so that God forbid nobody who isn't 21 fucking years old (don't get me started on the minimum age) can get a sip of beer. You'd think they are selling Absinthe with a heroin chaser, for crying out loud.
Still, my fellow Americans, meek and mild and I frankly wonder if not lobotomized, politely complain, almost in a whisper, "this is ridiculous", "this is so stupid". Nobody storms the barricades. But it gets worse. Soon after buying the beer, we realize we are penned in and are not allowed to leave the premises with our beers in order to enjoy them in the grounds at large, as we listen to the music and frolic in the grass. Hell no, we need to finish the beer inside the pen and then go back to our places. This, I have to say, IS TOO MUCH.
This is why we have a president who behaves like a toddler. Because we are treated like babies.
Adults are not allowed in this fucking paranoid puritanical fascistoid country to decide how many beers they want to have and where they want to have them. Because if you must know, the bracelet has a limited number of tabs (a generous 5) so that once the tabs are gone you cannot purchase more beer. Oh, and last call is at 8:30 pm. I have never seen anything like this. Not in the first world (Europe) and not in the third world (everywhere else). A fucking baby in a crib has more freedom. Where is the concept of personal responsibility? Next thing they're going to make you have your beers at home, before you even show up. FASCISTS.
Meanwhile, everybody's smoking pot like crazy, which is allright by me. Stick it to the Man, etc, etc.
Apparently, the Nuremberg Beer Laws are applied with a zealousness not accorded to the confiscation of doobies, which is luckily non-existent. Sheer absurdity, if you ask me.
I regret to inform you that the contact high is, sadly, a myth. But I respectfully submit that the alcohol policy of All Points West is insane, stupid, inhuman and unreasonable. Card 80 year-old people with walkers, see if I care, but let people have their fun. Nobody goes there expressly to create mayhem. People are there to chill out and listen to music. We are paying not an inconsiderable sum to enjoy a music festival, not to be treated like retards who can't take care of themselves. Not to be treated like freaking adults.
I will continue because I am drowning in my own bile:
As I stood in the pen with all those meek and mild, young and old Americans, I really thought this country has gone to pot. What has happened here is a general lobotomy, with corporations and the government administering the shocks and the numbing pills in the guise of Nurse Ratched. Conformity has won. Blandness, marketing, complacency, overconsumption, too much TV, too much contentment. I know l sound like an old hippie, but man, it is beyond pathetic. It seems to be beyond repair.
We have a war going on and young Americans killed and maimed forever, and nobody utters a squeak. We have a bunch of criminals running the country, and nobody demands their execution, let alone their ouster.
The pen where I was forced to drink my beer, which has got to be the least satisfying beer I have ever had, was right behind the Statue of Liberty, who, fittingly, was turning her back on us.

By the way, Radiohead was great.

Eco Chamber

I forsook much more important obligations to go listen to Umberto Eco's fun lecture yesterday at the satanically designed Cooper Union. I got there early so I didn't have to sit behind a column, like a third of the audience. I think it is very lovely that these Freedom to Write lectures are held where Abe Lincoln once spoke, but the hall sucks. Note to organizers: we are happy to forgo the meaningfulness of the location in favor of a better auditorium.
In any case, Maestro Eco did not disappoint with his playfulness and his erudition (rendered "lite" for the sake of the discerning audience). He basically posited that there are truths in fiction that are absolute and unquestionable (no one will ever question that Anna Karenina commits suicide, or that Superman is Clark Kent, or that Hamlet and Ophelia do not get married and live happily ever after, etc); whereas in history facts can change the moment new sources are discovered. So certain facts of fiction are absolutely true, yet their interpretation is infinite. Still, interpretation has to be borne by the text. One cannot say that D'artagnan is gay, because that is nowhere in the text. Agreed.
Surprisingly, after the lecture, Adam Gopnik asked very good questions and got a very good conversation going with Eco. At one point Gopnik mentioned to Eco that in critical studies in American colleges, you can learn theories that say that Superman is not really Clark Kent but a fantasy of Lois Lane. To which Eco replied that this is "an American disease": the misunderstanding of deconstruction as a free for all. He got a big ovation on that one. He also got into a very funny and fast riff about characters that live outside the page forever, something about hypertextuality that had Hester Prynne marrying Ishmael and someone being sold as a slave to Scarlett O'Hara. This gave me an idea for a short movie! Which is why one goes to these things. To fire up the neurons.
Eco said that all human knowledge, including science, is communicated as narrative. He also talked about the new paradigm of knowledge that is the web. He didn't seem to be too alarmed by the nature of the web, but he said that the problem with the internet is that the art of discrimination has been lost, and that this is an art that should be taught at schools, because people have no way of knowing what is a reliable source and what isn't. To the question of whether in Europe there is hostility and fear against the onslaught of English, he replied that the internet has also allowed people everywhere to come in contact with all other languages in the world, and that languages are biological and they do whatever they please (whatever this means).
He told a funny story. His translator to Russian called to ask him once "how do you say the word mafia in Italian?" And also that story about Bush having gone to France and noticed that the French do not have a word for "entrepeneur".
Eco steered totally clear of politics and devoted his very entertaining talk to literature and what it does for us. It teaches us how to die, he said. When Gopnik asked him if he cared to talk about the state of America today, he gave a pregnant and very funny pause and then answered that a man that lives in the Italy of Berlusconi has no right to comment on what goes on here.
He was delightful and I bet he is an amazing lecturer in academy. I wish I could go to his classes.