Christiern

Op-Ed Contributor April 7, 2006 The Last Picture Show By NORA EPHRON WE went to the movies the other night. We live in New York City, where it costs $10.75 to see a movie, which doesn't include the $1.50 surcharge for buying the tickets ahead of time online. I love buying tickets ahead of time online. One of the miracles of modern life, as far as I'm concerned, is that moment when you enter a movie theater, stick your credit card into a machine and it spits the exact tickets you ordered straight out at you. Every time it happens, I just want to say, I don't believe it! This is great!! Wow!!! On the other hand, it turns out that there's a new technological advance in the buying-tickets-ahead-of-time department that takes all the fun out of it: you can now print out your confirmation at home, skip the machine and go straight to the ticket taker. The ticket taker then scans your printout and prints the tickets right at the entrance to the theater, thus holding up all the people behind you in the ticket line and eliminating the one miraculous moment you used to be able to count on when going to see a movie. But the other night, as it turned out, we didn't have to give our printout to the ticket taker, because when we walked into the theater, there was no ticket taker. The entrance to the theater was empty of personnel. The other customers just walked right in without giving their tickets to anyone, and we did too. We trooped two flights downstairs to Theater 7, expecting to bump into a ticket taker on our way to the theater, but we never did. We had also hoped to buy something to eat, but the lower-level refreshment counter was closed and the popcorn was just sitting there, getting stale, in a big cold pile. I should probably say at this point that the theater we went to was the Loews Orpheum 7, at 86th Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan. I should probably also say that the Loews Orpheum 7 is owned by AMC, but it used to be owned by Loews Cineplex Entertainment Corporation, and when it was, I was on the company's board. This was a sad experience in my life because I had modestly hoped, in my role as a board member, to do something about the unbelievably low quality of the food sold in movie theaters. As it turned out, no one at Loews cared about what I thought about the food sold in theaters. So I dutifully attended the board meetings and was subjected to a series of PowerPoint presentations that were meant to validate the company's policy of building costly, large cineplexes, most of them conveniently situated right across the street from other costly, large cineplexes being built by rival theater companies. One day, about two years into my tenure, I was staying in Los Angeles, in a hotel, and I attended a Loews board meeting by telephone; it was so boring that I decided to leave for a while and get a manicure downstairs. When I got back to my room, only 20 minutes later, everyone was screaming at one another on the telephone. I didn't want to admit I had left the room — and by the way, no one had even noticed — so I listened for a while and realized that while I'd been out having my nails done, the company had gone bankrupt. This was a shock to me and to everyone else on the board. I never did find out why the news hadn't been mentioned earlier in the board meeting, but that of course was one of the reasons everyone was screaming at one another. I mean, there were people on the board whose companies owned shares in Loews who had just found out that they'd lost hundreds of millions of dollars as a result of a bankruptcy no one had even had the courtesy to warn them about. It wasn't even on the agenda! A few months later some investors from Canada and California bought Loews at a bargain basement price. A couple of years later, AMC Entertainment took over, and as far as I can tell it has done nothing whatsoever to improve the food sold at the refreshment counter or anything else. Anyway, the other night. We passed the shuttered refreshment counter, went into the theater and sat down. The ads were already playing. There were quite a few of them, including a diet cola ad involving trucks and motorcycles that was so in love with itself that it actually recommended going to a special Web site that explained how the ad had been made. Then, suddenly, the sound turned off and the screen went completely dark. Several minutes passed. The theater was three-quarters full, but no one moved. In some strange and inexplicable way, I felt responsible. I stood up and went two flights upstairs. A ticket taker had materialized and was now taking tickets. I told her that the system in Theater 7 had shut down. She looked at me blankly. I asked her if she would tell someone about it. She said she would and went on taking tickets. I stood there waiting. After a couple of minutes, when the customers had all passed through, she yelled out, "Projection, is there something wrong in Theater 7?" I went back downstairs. The system started up again. The trailers began. I noticed that there was a large band of white light across the bottom of the screen and that the images of the actors were all cut off in the middle of their eyeballs. I left the theater and walked upstairs again. The ticket taker was still there. I asked her if she would ask the projectionist to reframe the movie. Once again she looked at me blankly, so I asked again. She promised she would. I waited until she walked off in the direction of the unseen projectionist. By the time I got back to my seat, the image on screen had been reframed, although not perfectly, but by then I was too exhausted by my heroism to complain further. The movie began. It was out of sync, but hey, it was a good movie. And it was only slightly out of sync. Besides, there was a huge amount of cutting and action, so you could sort of live with its being out of sync. Then, in the last 20 minutes, the movie became noticeably, extraordinarily, unbelievably out of sync. But it was almost over. And I didn't want to leave my seat for fear I might miss something. Afterward, on my way out of the theater, I asked if I could speak to the manager. She turned out to be on maternity leave. I asked if I could speak to the assistant manager. There was no assistant manager on duty. So I ended up with my old friend, the ticket taker, who was, as you can imagine, thrilled to see me again. I told her that the last reel of the movie we had just seen was out of sync and that they might want to fix it before the next show began. She promised me they would. Nora Ephron is a writer and director.

From Crouch's obit: "With the arrival of the World War II bebop generation, musicians collided with the entertainment conventions that were wrapped up in minstrelsy." Huh? The dwelling on McLean's drug problem and cursory mention of his later, positive efforts detracts from this obituary--shades of Ken Burn's twisted tabloid mentality priorities.

Aren't you 4 days late with this?

It is SNOWING in Manhattan!

Dan Gould: "Can't wait to see Rainy Day come out of the shadows to berate us as sexist pigs." This time, at least, she won't be able to play her race card!

This either demonstrates how clueless the CBS News management is or the general decline of network news. I have yet to see a female anchor woman who can hold a candle to Linda Ellerbe.

Looks like someone in power at the Austin PBS station has good taste, for if the series is anything like the abomination some of us saw earlier, it is nothing more than a sequence of embarrassments.

With Larry Rosen involved, one can't even expect medium jazz value. He and Dave Grusin produced some of worst jazz/pop mishmash of another era on their GRP label. Didn't we discuss this show before? I seem to recall one with a truly horrendous performance by Nancy Wilson.

I never thought Martin was gay, but--given the era in which I knew him, and the jazz world's homophobia--it would not surprise me if he was closeted.

Yes, and Gloria was very much Nora Desmond when Bill was around. He used to call me and say, "If Gloria calls for me, I'm at your place and out walking your dog." She inevitably called and I always played Bill's game. When I told Bill that all Gloria needed was a swimming pool, he nodded with a weak smile. Apropos "Sunset Boulevard," I have never had as many goosebumps as Gloria gave me one night when she told me about an aborted (Paramount killed it) musical project based on "SB." She had actually performed one number from it on the Steve Allen show, the one where she slithers down the staircase to face the cameras. She gave me a sample, looking me straight in the eyes as she slowly approached me (I was seated on a sofa) with her right hand stretched out in my direction and those fingers working their magic. The hand and those mesmerizing eyes gave me a moment I shall never forget. Yes, I love Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard."

Helen and Martin? Having known both of them, I just can't imagine that coupling. Martin was a very nice guy, but--at times--he was also quite eccentric.

I never saw that side of Helen, but it is not difficult to believe that it existed. Toshiko's remark is not at all surprising, she is very warm person. From what I have observed over the years, female agents/managers have a tendency to become bossy beyond reason. The same often applies to relationships wherein one partner has celebrity and the other doesn't. I spent considerable time around Gloria Swanson, mostly at her apartment, and the way she acted around Bill Dufty (kinda parental) always brought to mind Helen's mommying of Bill Evans. Did I invent a new word? Of course, Bill's previous wife, Maylie Dufty, was a dreadful, pushy woman who must have been a daily nightmare. Ever meet Maylie, Chuck?

What prompted that question? No, I don't think Martha is a racist if so, she has an odd way of showing it.

Good luck, NOF, here's hoping for a speedy return to good health and the Big "O"

OP-ED COLUMNIST March 25, 2006 On Campus, a Good Man Is Hard to Find By JOHN TIERNEY When a boy opens his acceptance letter from college, he now has to wonder what most impressed the admissions officers. Did they want him for his mind, or just his body? The admissions director at Kenyon College, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, published an Op-Ed article this week revealing an awkward truth about her job: affirmative action for boys. As the share of the boys in the applicant pool keeps shrinking — it will soon be down to 40 percent nationally — colleges are admitting less-qualified boys in order to keep the gender ratio balanced on campus. This week's revelation did not please Kim Gandy, the president of the National Organization for Women, who told me that she might challenge the legality of affirmative action for male applicants. She and I are not normally ideological soulmates, but I have some sympathy with her on this policy. It's not fair to the girls who are rejected despite having higher grades and test scores than the boys who get fat envelopes. It's not fair to the boys, either, if they're not ready to keep up with their classmates. Affirmative action just makes them prone to fail, and is probably one of the reasons that men are more likely than women to drop out of college. After consulting with the federal Education Department, I can confidently report that this discrimination may violate the law — or then again, it may not. Either way, I agree with Gandy that public colleges shouldn't practice it, because the government shouldn't favor one group over another. Gandy's also wary of allowing private schools like Kenyon to discriminate, and she's skeptical of their justification: that they need a fairly even male-female ratio on campus to attract the best applicants of either sex. I'm not sure if that's true, but I trust the colleges to know better than me or Gandy or federal lawyers. As long as a school is private, let it favor whomever it wants — men, women, alumni children, Latinos, African-Americans — without any interference from the Education Department. What the department should be doing is figuring out how to help boys reach college. The gender gap has been getting worse for two decades, but the Education Department still isn't focusing on it. Instead, it has an "educational equity" program aimed at helping girls and women. The department is paying to encourage African and Slavic girls and women in Oregon to pursue careers in science. There's a grant to help women in West Virginia overcome "traditional, outdated 19th-century attitudes" by pursuing jobs in blue-collar trades. Another grant aims to motivate women at the Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn to study math. Those are all noble goals. I'd be glad to see the women in Brooklyn take up advanced calculus. But the chief "equity" issue at their college is the shortage of men, who make up barely a fifth of the student body. What happened to the boys who didn't make it? Boys are, on average, as smart as girls, but they are much less fond of school. They consistently receive lower grades, have more discipline problems and are more likely to be held back for a year or placed in special education classes. The Harvard economist Brian Jacob attributes these problems to boys' lack of "noncognitive skills," like their difficulties with paying attention in class, their disorganization and their reluctance to seek help from others. Those are serious handicaps, but they could be mitigated if schools became more boy-friendly. A few educators have suggested reforms: more games and competitions that appeal to boys, more outdoor exercise, more male teachers, more experiments with single-sex schools. But those ideas have gotten little attention or money. Schools have been too busy trying to close the gender gap in the few areas where boys are ahead, like sports and science. No matter what changes are made to help boys, they'll probably still be less likely than girls to go on to college, simply because girls' skills and interests are better suited to the types of white-collar jobs that now require college degrees. Boys will remain more inclined to skip college in favor of relatively high-paying jobs in fields like construction and manufacturing. There's no reason to expect a 50-50 ratio on campus — and certainly no reason to mandate it. Boys don't need that kind of affirmative action. What they could use, long before college, is equal attention.

Good to see you back, Simon W. I liked Crash, perhaps because I did not assume that it was intended as an accurate reflection of real life, but rather as a microcosm. Everything we saw in this film does take place in the real world, but not in as condensed a way as Crash has it--that's where the film divorced itself from absolute reality, IMO. Last night, I saw Brokeback Mountain, somewhat disadvantaged by all the commentary, opinions, and hype that preceded my viewing of it. Still, I thought it was a fine film, visually stunning and--considering the story line--tastefully handled. The two films are so different that I find it difficult to make a comparison, but I think both deserved the recognition awarded them.

The original question concerned itself with overdubbing and how prevalent it is in jazz. It was never common practice. Cutting and splicing (not "pasting") was more common, and both methods relate only to the roughly 3 decades when tape was the medium. The use of multiple tracks (beyond 2-track stereo) opened new possibilities, which were taken advantage of. The advent of digital recording opened the doors to all kinds of manipulation and ways in which to make it seamless. I am repeating this only because it would appear that this thread has moved away from the question that started it. Here is a fragment of extensive notes taken by the producer at a Armstrong Columbia session. No overdubbing in this case, but suggested splicing:

Glenn Gould once suggested that all the parts of a session ought to be sold as a kit for the customer to assemble according to his or her fancy.

$ sent via PayPal.

Overdubbing is archaic and--I suspect--not ever employed. Bechet's one-man-band was created through heavy overdubbing and each dub caused deterioration in sound. Some splicing took place in the tape era (none before that, of course). A bad intro on an otherwise good take was often re-performed and substituted, for example. With multi-tracks and digital recording, splicing days are long gone, but it we have long been able to re-record parts of a take without affecting the rest of it. I recall numerous times when Laura Nyro, unhappy with her vocal, did it over--sometimes just a fragment of it.

My cordless keyboards and mouses are Bluetooth devices. There are also cordless Bluetooth printers. BTW "Bluetooth" was a Danish king.

Well, at least it wasn't due to a cluster of my misplaced, offending pixels! BTW I, too noticed the absence, but had pretty much figured right re reason (saw your shadow).

And he may be the only cast member with actual criminal experience--so he didn't act right off camera, either.

Leonid Borisovich Pereverzev has died on March, 18th. This news from George Avakian about "...the death of someone you might never have heard of, an extraordinary man who was by a wide margin the most knowledgeable and perspicacious jazz writer, researcher and historian in the Soviet Union and Russia, and was far better known as a scientist of world-wide reputation, who had conducted research and published papers about such varied matters as earthquakes, oceanography, ecology, and his greatest interest, new methods of educating children. Far more information is available about this remarkable man through the organization KABA ( club_technologia@9151394.ru ). Funeral will occur on March, 22nd, in Moscow on the Vagan'kovskoe cemetery.

You beat me to it--I was about to put your thread back on track. Sorry for the side trip.