Monthly Archives: November 2008

‘Tis the Season Already?: Murakami’s Overt Commercialism

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Walking to work on 57th St. in Manhattan, I cross 5th Avenue and with it, a slew of the gorgeous shop windows remind me that the holiday season is upon is. (It’s useless to protest that its not even Thanksgiving yet.) Tiffany’s glistens in a classically elegant way, while Loius Vuitton exuberantly flashes.

If you want to combine art and fashion in your luxury gift giving this year, why not get that special someone a Murakami Loius Vuitton purse. As a purse, I find it beyond tacky, but the artist behind the new and exclusive print is a marketing genius, and his flat pop art tackles Japanimation and kitsch with a flatly sardonic flair.

To the left is Murakami posing in front of some of his flower images. I first became aware of his work during his summer show at the Brooklyn Musuem of Art, where in a unusual gesture a Loius Vuitton botique was installed in the midst of the gallery space. He’s often called Japan’s Andy Warhol, and his flat and colorful images loose some of their big-eyed innocence once once you throw in nuclear disaster and a creepier side to anime figures, like the one below.

If any of you yearn for the old-fashioned days of sweaters and fruitcake, instead of neon-lit luxury goods featuring creepy anime beings, well, you’re not alone.

Pal Joey Bewitches, Yet Again

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Soap operas would have me hooked, if they had all the showbiz oomph
of this musical revival of Pal Joey, a 1940 Broadway show (and a 1957 movie with Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, and Stockard Channing ). The glitzy, fun essentials are there. That’s about it, but that’s all you would need for a great night out, dreaming of old Manhattan and the days when show business was showbiz! and hoofers got by on wits and charm.

The plot is similar to one of those cheerful Italian operas, all melodramatic revelations are lustily or tragically belted out. Set in Chicago in the late 1930s, Pal Joey is the story of Joey Evans (Christian Hoff of Jersey Boys fame), a plotting song and dance man with dreams of owning his own nightclub. Joey breaks the heart of the wholesome Linda English, to seduce a rich, married older woman, Vera Simpson (Stockard Channing). It works, and Joey begins building up his own nightclub. One of the performers, Gladys Bumps (Martha Plimpton) has a grudge against Joey that she pays back in a twist even Joey can’t worm his way out of. The showbiz, song and dance routine of the entertainment industry turned inside out is fun to watch even now when it has changed, from the backstage flirtations to frou-frou burlesque costumes.

(Blurry Iphone photos of Pal Joey)

The production delivers just what it should from such a musical: pure entertainment. Honestly, I was jealous of the performers, it looks like so much fun to perform. I thought one of the numbers, “Zip”, was awkwardly introduced, so that the audience didn’t get the full joke of the song (in which a stripper recalls the intellectual musings in her head while she unzips.) Channing’s delivery of the infamous “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” can’t compete with Ella Fitzgerald, bu then who can? This tried-and-true crowd pleaser doesn’t bring anything new to stage, indeed it seems dated rather than shocking (as the conniving predator Joey was originally considered). No matter; some swinging old fashioned nostalgia ought to go down well over the holidays.



Rita Hayworth’s “Zip” gratis, so you understand what its all about.

Directed by Todd Haimes in association with Marc Platt. Musical score by Rogers and Hart. With: Stockard Channing (Vera Simpson), Christian Hoff (Joey Evans) , Martha Plimpton (Gladys Bumps) and Jenny Fellner (Linda English). At the Roundabout Theater’s Studio 54 on 254 W. 54th St. through February 15, 2009.

In Which I Die

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Egads and achoo,
Oh what should I do?
Alas and achoo,
I’m dying of flu.

Yes, gentle reader, tis true. Tis a pity its true, and tis true its a pity. However, I sense, as do those poor souls within germ-range of my snivels, that I am dying. I was going to tell you of other early deaths of literary luminaries, such as Emily Bronte who produced Wuthering Heights and promptly died of tuberculosis at the age of 30. And then poor, imaginative John Keats, whose lyric poetry suffered an onset of tuberculosis. However, startling and terrible research from the trusty google search must take precedence.

A study entitled The Cost of the Muse: Poets Die Young (from this article in The Guardian) says just that. Associate Professor James C Kaufman of California State University researched 1,987 deceased writers from four different cultures. Kaufman writes that:

“the image of the writer as a doomed and sometimes tragic figure, bound to die young, can be backed up by research. Writers die young. This research finding has been consistently replicated in a variety of studies.”

You see? I’m doomed. And it gets worse….the article writes that “a poet’s life, on average, is about a year shorter than that of a playwright, four years shorter than a novelist’s life, and five-and-six-tenths years less than that of a non-fiction specialist.”

Here, I am, on my death bed, penning away. Just like Bronte over Wuthering Heights, if one considers it metaphorically, and then extends the metaphor to include a whiny blogger. On the other hand, I might not need to worry about a poet’s shorter life span, judging from the poetry above.

Ah, onward Thursday! Heigh ho!