The pursuit of novelty is reaching the vanishing point on the dance stage, writes Haglund, coolly discarding the past behind only to fob off on audiences schlock of the new.

The doctrine that anything new is better seems to be pervasive as is the idea that classics need to be re-thought, re-tooled, re-imagined to make them relevant to the next generation as opposed to allowing the next generation to mature to a point where it can appreciate what has stood the test of time. Craftless art product that utilizes no acquired basic skills and disciplines, but hurls into being like some creative vomit, is cheered by its makers as the true art of our times. Is this art product actually art any more than "cheese product" is actually cheese?

Where aspiring artists have no original ideas, they simply and boldly take someone else's genius and re-manufacture it as their own. The results are things like Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and Mats Ek's Giselle. If Matt and Mats called their pieces something else and did not try to capitalize on the geniuses and successes of Petipa, Coralli, and Perrot, would the ticket-buying public pay any attention to them? Would notable ballet dancers even pay attention to them?

And then there are the matters of what dancers need and desire in order to express themselves and nurture their talents.

Haglund believes that ballet dancers should do whatever they want or need to do to fulfill their artistic souls. If they need to go off and engage in contemporary, unballetic, edgy, experimental performances, they should certainly do so. Just don't expect your audience to follow you. Your audience was in love with ballet before you came along and it will be in love with ballet after you are gone. Don't confuse the audience's love for the art form as a love of you, and do not be disappointed, resentful, discouraged, angry or confused when your audience does not follow you on your path. As a performer, you may know what is best for yourself, but it's not likely that you know what is best for the audience or the art form. It is not your responsibility or duty to "shock" the audience, to expand the audience's interpretation of what ballet is or to "educate" the audience in any way...

The shock tactics and didactic instruction seem drawn out of the same academic file--the catering guide to (post)modernist art that no workshop can be without. An academic mentality toward art fosters thesis-statement art with a little mess thrown in for authenticity. The result is that so many contemporary dances seem to be running on the same Blade Runner tracks, or going the opposite direction and punishing the body with Artaud-ish Abu Ghraib contortions, the poor gifted dancers racked this way and that in yet another creative-department editorial depicting alienation/non-communication/the mute bondage of gender stereotypes/aversion to the Other, set to music performed live on stage by recent graduates of the falling shingles school of performing arts.

Against which true classicism can look like the most radical thing going, transcendence being so much greater a thing to shoot for than trendiness.

And in ballet the dancers never move to the lip of the stage and yell at you or laugh like lunatics*, which I for one appreciate.

*

...[Kate] Corby’s “Feeling Into” opens with repetitive, robotic movement, bandage-like costumes and a techno-inflected score by former Madison composer Ryan Smith.

In it, four women — Miller, Anna Normann, Erin Kilmurray and Michelle Scurlock — twist their torsos, leading with their arms as they spin. Independent, they often dance next to but not with one another.

Early in the piece, the dancers confront the audience lazily. Then one by one, they drop their heads and hands to their knees as though winded. Their faces morph into anger, then that cryptic laughter.

They lean together, then fall spectacularly, cackling. What’s so funny? What do they know that we don’t?

In Corby’s multifaceted language of performance, perhaps each of us must find an answer for ourselves.

How 'bout we just find a nearby bar and let everybody else look for answers?

On his WTF podcast, Marc Maron conducts a double requiem, memorializing "the passing of two comedy greats, Robert Schimmel and Greg Giraldo." I've never seen a standup who could make you laugh and squirm at the same time the way Schimmel did in one HBO special I caught, fusing comedy and clinical detail into an authentic form of sick humor, as exemplified in the title of his memoir Cancer on $5 a Day.

Another comic willing to go down the darkened stairs and shout sarcastic comments from the bottom is Louis CK, the subject of a two-part interview on WTF, the first part available for your dining and dancing pleasure here. Louis CK's routine about being on receiving end of the worst handjob in Western history is one that should be preserved on scrolls and tucked safely away in an Egyptian pyramid or, failing that, a safe-deposit box at the Luxor.

Jim Norton--he too likes to explore dark nooks and clammy crannies, sometimes preferring clammy nooks and dark crannies if they're in season. Norton's literary efforts are 'critiqued' in my latest Vanity Fair column (is that up yet?--I better check), and he's interviewed here at GQ's The Verge, prior to his pervy appearance on an upcoming episode of HBO's Bored to Death, an advance screener of which I will be inserting into my DVD player tonight and hope that it doesn't spit it back at me.

Man, I thought the average literary book party, especially when Mary Gaitskill is present (hi, Mary!), was aswim with multilayered, rippling air veils of tension, frustration, vague futility, simmering rancor, status anxiety, and hollow pleasantries--yet still fun! don't get me wrong! let me grab one of these cheese cubes--but it's nothing compared to scoping out the mood of a comedy room, figuring out where the snipers are located, sensing a hostile vibe camouflaged by chatter and glass-clinking.

In the first two parts of a three-parter, Dennis Perrin describes the arc of an engagement he played at The Village Lantern on an inauspicious evening.

Greg Giraldo's death hung over the Village Lantern, disbelief and resignation the main reactions. Giraldo was a comedian with a history of substance abuse, so checking out at 44 due to pills (albeit accidentally) shouldn't seem shocking. Still, Giraldo's early exit served as a reminder not only of mortality, but of the ephemeral intensity of comedy life.

I never met Giraldo, wasn't crazy about his roast gigs (insult trains bore me), but enjoyed many of his stand up bits, even if his manic delivery unnerved me on occasion. It seemed there were raging storms in Giraldo's head, common for many comics, but not so poetic riffs, which Giraldo produced when ignited. He was a comic's comic who defied the cliche. He railed against idiocy, complacency, and American madness, ending in a New Jersey hotel room, much like Mitch Hedberg. Maybe comics should cede that swamp to Snooki and The Situation, and seek lesser jinxed states in which to do hotel drugs.

Ray Combs and I discussed the limitations of comedy careers in the corporate state. Comics either serve the machine or get trampled, though one's service is no guarantee of survival. Greg Giraldo made a mark, but how long will this last? And to what end? Ray and I chewed over this and related topics at length, but well after yet another chaotic Lantern late show. There's something about that room on Wednesdays that stirs a comedian's deepest anxiety. This bears Ray's mark, which shows no sign of fading soon.

Ray ceased being an emcee months ago, but the Lantern remains very much his turf, recognized but not seriously challenged by the other regulars. This reality was in full force Wednesday night. When I arrived Ray was well into a pint, nervous smile and energy flashing. He performed in the early show and was fueling up for his late set. We chatted briefly before Ray started working the room, joking around in an oddly aggressive way. He'd been telling me that he's contemplating quitting comedy, that the New York scene is stagnant, dull, uninspired. I agree, at least the parts I've seen and experienced. But I didn't take Ray seriously. His talent is too ingrained to simply toss aside and forget.

As the room filled up, the emcee Steve opened by reading half-formed jokes from a large notebook. I haven't gotten used to this, and consider it lazy or a sign of weakness. If you can't memorize jokes or riff sans text for five to ten minutes, then you're probably in the wrong profession. Yet a fair number of comics I see have no shame in reading their bits. Like texting during another performer's set, reading material onstage is largely treated as standard practice.

Steve yelled to Ray in the audience, asking him what he thought about Steve Harvey becoming Family Feud's new host. This is delicate ground for Ray. For all the jokes about his late father Ray makes, he stiffens if anyone else takes a shot, however glancing. Ray immediately defended his father's Feud reign, noting that no subsequent host ever enjoyed the same ratings as Ray Senior, which is true. In the larger scheme, caring about which game show host captured the most eyes is superfluous, but this isn't about ratings and market share. It's about Ray's father, whose suicide continues to haunt his namesake.

I don't think that Steve meant to be mean about Ray's dad, but a dig was there, supposedly all in good fun. Ray didn't see it that way, ordered another pint, and began talking to other comics while the show commenced. It was a low murmur in the back, nothing too distracting, but evident. Then Steve called my name and I took the stage...

How did Dennis do? Well, that you can read for yourself, otherwise I'd be reprinting his entire post, which would extremely lazy, even for me.

Afterwards, everything remains less than ducky. The atmosphere in fact gets distinctly more unducky.

The noise in the back grew louder. Several new audience members had arrived, young, chatty, oblivious to the comics onstage. Two female comics on either side of me told them to shut up, which turned heads to the rear but did little to quell the talking. Ray Combs then approached them, quieting them momentarily as another comedian struggled to regain the room's attention.

Problem was, Ray used humor as crowd control, and soon they were laughing at Ray's quips instead of watching the main show up front. This threw the Lantern off balance, angering Kara Buller, the comic to my left, who kept turning and demanding that Ray and his private audience immediately zip it. They did, then didn't, then did. I wasn't sure what was going on or why, but Ray's peers, while pissed, seemed to expect it from him.

In recent weeks, Ray had tested when not trashed accepted stage behavior (including a set in the nude), which given the profane looseness of NYC's stand up scene is saying something. Now he was tweaking off-stage boundaries, part of an overall performance piece devoted to personal implosion. On one level I appreciated it, since I share Ray's disdain for the scene's provincialism. But the conservative show biz elder in me, which defers to professional demeanor and respect for other performers, however awful, was disturbed by Ray's conduct.

I wasn't alone. Several comics sarcastically "thanked" Ray for keeping the audience alert, if distracted. Kara seemed the angriest, but was easily the funniest, ripping Ray and pretty much everything else in her set (like the original SNL -- "too many Kissinger jokes" for a generation born after Vietnam and Watergate). But these animated riffs were all negatively aimed at Ray, who appeared to take each slam as his due. Clearly, this was what Ray wanted: an angry break before his self-imposed exile. It would be anti-climatic to silently walk away; anti-comedic, too. What stand up simply walks off stage without an exit line?

Upstairs at the bar, I finished my Absolut as Ray entered, two comics alongside him. Unlike many stand ups, Ray is very social and willing to talk about anything. His energetic talent attracts those incapable or unwilling to match it. They just want to share Ray's vibe.

"We need to talk," I said.

Ray nodded, polished off his pint and followed me outside. It was a beautiful Fall night, people spilling across Bleecker Street, laughing, shouting, kissing. Ray and I walked to the curb and leaned on a mailbox.

"So," I asked, "what the fuck's going on?"

To find out what the fuck is going on, you'll have to read the rest of part two, with part three yet to come.

I have some related comedy news but will hold until I can get it confirmed, otherwise I'd have to go back and scrub the link, which can be such a bore.

Well, that didn't take long.

It seems like it was only a few stubborn shaves ago that Don Draper watched his new secretary Megan (Jessica Pare)—who replaced Miss Blankenship, who died at her desk in the performance of her owlful duty as bathroom monitor—luxuriantly applying lipstick like a French model, and last night that lipstick was applied to his lips from her lips, which, had Don opened his eyes before the kiss arrived, probably loomed as large as Joan's breasts, with equal pillowy impact. But as Rodney Dangerfield so usefully taught us through the medium of comedy, it's always wiser to keep your eyes closed while kissing, lest you open them and find another pair of eyes staring back...

The Mad Men recap, continued here...

Mad Men recap up later.

Can't decide who's my least fav new character, Stan the grinning jackass art director or Peggy's frisky, lefty boyfriend, who seems ready (nay, keen) to take her running barefoot in the park like Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, if it only weren't for Mad Men's budgetary constraints, which next season will necessitate having the entire episode-run shot on a single set with stage props, using blackouts to indicate shifts of time and scene, as was done in the hypnotically minimalist nun movie, Therese, a meditation on the life of St. Therese of Lisieux, upon whom I seem to have developed a fascination.

"Will somebody make this soulless asshole shut up and go away?" asks Lance Mannion, in a rare expression of exasperation.

To which soulless asshole do you refer, Lance?

There are so many littering the landscape, wearing shiny loafers.

Larry Summers.

Oh, that soulless a---.....

Larry Summers, who recently ruminated:

"It is true the economy is not fulfilling the promise many of us saw in the spring," Summers said. "I think that is a reflection of three factors. It's a reflection of the shocked confidence that came out of what was happening in Europe that raised risk premia, depressed markets, created uncertainty, and that proved to be much more virulent than most people expected. It's a reflection of the end of the inventory cycle, which had been a substantial source of tailwind leading to increased employment, increased hiring as inventories were replenished... And it's a reflection of the difficulty that firms have had in getting over the threshold and making a decision to expand their hiring, which led to lower levels of income which in turn led to lower levels of hiring."

"No, you cyborg," Lance exclaims.

The economy stinks because people keep losing jobs, people aren’t getting jobs, people with jobs haven’t had raises in years, they’ve had their pay cut, they’ve had their benefits cut, and meanwhile the bills keep piling up and you and your fellow technocrats in the White House and Congress have refused to do anything significant about it!

Run that technobabble through Babelfish and you’ll find that what Summers is saying is that the System failed to self-correct.

The System!

That’s all they’ve been looking at. That’s all they see. The System.

They don’t see the stinking economy as a disaster making the lives of millions of human beings miserable.

They see it as a systemic problem affecting and affected by technocratic elites making “reasonable” decisions designed to keep the System running. The trouble is that some of those reasonable decisions have had undesirable results that have harmed the efficient functioning of the System.

The way Summers and the other technocrats see it hiring---that is people getting jobs---is a cause leading to a desired effect, the recovery of the System’s functionality.

Here, where human beings live and work people getting jobs is supposed to be the object. If the System isn’t creating jobs, the System needs to be junked.

The System won't be junked, of course. It will be maintained, lubed, polished, and worshiped, while millions of Americans find themselves junked.

Lance:

The first impulse of the technocrats has been not to help people directly but address the glitches in the System...

They saved the System and they’re proud of it and they think that’s all they were required to do and they want us to thank them for it.

All they’re asking is that we give them a little more time in office to tinker with the System to address the glitches in order to make the System run a little more smoothly and efficiently.

And what about us? What are we supposed to do?

Wait.

[snip]

Tighten our belts.

Be grateful we can still pay the cable bill.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans is supposed to be that the Democrats help people out in the meantime.

The difference is supposed to be that Democrats believe that doing the things that help people out in the meantime will make the economy get better faster and stay better longer.

What we have, though, is Democrats who believe that it’s our job to sit and be patient while they tinker with the System that we all loathe and despise.

'Loathe' and 'despise' are the stepping stones to a stronger verb, which also doubles as a noun, a word dear to Alexander Cockburn's pirate heart:

Which brings me...to Ed Miliband, now chosen to be the leader of the British Labor Party. The last time I saw Eddie he was an intern at the Nation in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Round the corner from the Nation when it was on Fifth and 13th st in Manhattan was Zinno’s restaurant and amid a pleasant lunch with JoAnWypijewski, my own intern Richie McKerrow and Eddie, I asked the future leader what I asked all interns as a matter of form, “Eddie, is your hate pure?”

The man who first asked me that question was the late Jim Goode, editor of Penthouse. Like Playboy, Penthouse would pay good money for long articles about the corruption of America, thus giving the pointyheads an excuse to thumb through the pinups. Goode, tall and cadaverous, was gay, clad in black leather as he crouched on the floor of his office, gazing morosely at hundreds of photos of bare-breasted women. As I entered with some screed about corporate and political evil, he snarl, “Alex, is your hate pure?” “Yes, Jim, my hate is pure.”

It was a good way of assaying interns. The feisty ones would respond excitedly, “Yes, my hate is pure.” I put the question to Eddie Miliband. He gaped at me in shock like Gussie Fink-Nottle watching one of his newts vanish down the plug hole in his bath. “I…I… don’t hate anyone, Alex,” he stammered. It’s all you need to know. English capitalism will be safe in his hands, assuming he ever grasps the levers of what passes for power in 10 Downing Street. It is very hard to imagine him as prime minister. He’s forever Fink-Nottle to me.

Perhaps Democrats should divest themselves of their Harvard endowment and relearn the language they used to speak.

In an ideal world, IOZ would review every high-profile movie, rendering all of the other so-called critics redundant, which they are already, except for the ones I like. IOZ, for example, saw things in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps that nobody else perceived, including me, and I was looking at the screen the entire time. Yet somehow I managed to miss, well, all this:

So here is the plot of WS2: MoneyNeverSleepz. Shia LeBoeuf works for Lehman Brothers and is dating Michael Douglas' 10-year-old son, a Mozartian trouser role played by Carey Mulligan, whose last name translates as "an American accent, re-attempted but not counted against the player's score, in a friendly round of golf." Michael Douglas is played with flattering sincerity by well-known 1980s personality, Gordon Gekko. Josh Brolin is played by Pierce Brosnan, who sounds convincingly as if he had grown up in Dubuque, Long Island. Susan Sarandon plays your aunt, who sells real estate. Frank Langella is played by the uptown 5 train. The role of Wall Street is split between the set of the Dead Poets Society and the Apple Genius Bar. The soundtrack is by David Byrner, who does an uncanny David Byrne impersonation. After Lehman-manque collapses, a pedestrian throws himself in front of an onrushing Frank Langella, killing everyone involved. Shia LeBoeuf vows revenge on 007. A series of things occur. There are two main sideplots. In one, Carey Mulligan's boyscout troop is mimeographing a newsletter. In the other, Shia LeBoeuf is trying to scam some money for a nuclear fusion project. Every once in a while, LeBoeuf's eyes dart from side to side and he pronounces his sincerity. Michael Douglas pretends to help him, then screws him over, then pretends to help him, then screws him over, then pretends to help him, then screws him over, then buys the love of LeBoeuf and his daughter with $100,000,000. They kiss. The camera pans. Fin.

The uptown 5 train did give a superb performance as Frank Langella, but I do think Vincent D'Onofrio's uncanny impersonation of the downtown R train to Brooklyn has been unjustly neglected, perhaps because we take his chameleon genius for granted.

I can only hope that IOZ will risk a bucket of popcorn and review The Social Network, a revelatory achievement that drove David Denby to use the word "coruscating" in his opening paragraph, giving himself a foot cramp and having to hop around on one leg until the it stopped acting up, much to the annoyance of his neighbor in the adjoining cubicle, the Ghost of Penelope Gilliatt, represented by a cloud of hair drawn with a pencil.

The sound of raindrops pricking the fallen leaves here in south Jersey is very John Cage.

The significance of last night’s episode title, “Hands and Knees” (superbly directed by Lynn Shelton, who did the film Humpday), seems elliptical until a scene of knockdown violence cracks the air that’s more disturbing than the garish beatings and slashings on Boardwalk Empire or the blood-feasting in TV vampire porn, because it was so primal, so profoundly degrading. It seems to come out of nowhere with a single blow, but in its quiet aftershock...

My Mad Men recap, mailed straight from the heart to you, darling bunny, and continued here at Little Gold Men.

No, not Sally overcome by the spirit of Easter Sunday, but a man of certain years besotted by a different vision with a white fluffy tail, a vision knocked cock-eyed before tonight's Mad Men is through.

Recap tomorrow, as we examine the time-bombs locked inside Sterling Cooper's hurt lockers, one temporarily defused, the others ominously ticking away and set to blow.

The catholicity of Kim Morgan's passions--we must cherish them. Her transfixation by Isabelle Huppert in The Piano Teacher--that seems quintessentially Kim, a smoldering affinity. But her devotion to Bing Crosby?--who'da thunk it? He's considered so uncool and ultra mellow, a fuddy-dud in a cardigan sweater, a crooner whose voice could be served as hot toddy. But to Kim Morgan, Crosby's smooth pour is precisely where his poignance and arresting allure reside:

There’s no denying that Crosby was and is big time. And yet … why does he feel just a little slighted through the years? Like the only moment we enjoy his music is once a year, when we roll out “White Christmas” from our holiday collection of old standards?

Perhaps it’s just how antiquated his music sounds today -- beautifully, mysteriously antiquated, like something emerging from a dream….or a nightmare. In either moody reverie, when listening to the brilliant baritone sing “Pennies From Heaven,” “Ol’ Man River” or “Swinging on a Star,” you feel the music form around you, as if you’re riding on an ethereal echo chamber of air coming from a million miles away. It’s spacey, creepy and charming all at once. Which perfectly explains how effective the song “Mairzy Dotes” becomes in David Lynch's Twin Peaks, when daughter-murdering, Bob-haunted Leland Palmer crazily sings it in the midst of his meltdowns. And then there was that pairing of the two Thin White Dukes -- Bowie and Bing dueting “Peace On Earth/Little Drummer Boy” -- ideal. These were two sexy space aliens keeping Christmas a little bit Christian and a little bit…pagan. As much as I love Frank Sinatra, this kind of cross generational extraterrestrial-ness could have only been created with Crosby.

All of these elements of Crosby are so marvelously powerful, that his music remains (particularly his earlier recordings) ever haunting, ever romantic and, in some instances, ever celestial. As musicologist J.T.H. Mize put it, Crosby could “melt a tone away, scoop it flat and sliding up to the eventual pitch as a glissando, sometimes sting a note right on the button, and take diphthongs for long musical rides.” In short, Crosby sends me. He always does. And not only at Christmas time. Right now, actually.

And M. A. Peel reminds us that Crosby's legacy is more than music and movies and TV appearances, as a recent discovery reveals:

It’s a surprise to see Bing Crosby, pop culture's most important forgotten man, on the homepage of the New York Times online, but there he was on Thursday night, a beautiful black & white picture from 1947.

The subject: baseball. A complete video of Game 7 from the 1960 World Series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and New York Yankees——"the best game ever"——was found in his wine cellar last year by an archivist going through his video collection for potential DVD releases. MLB Network has now struck a deal with Crosby Enterprises for the game to be broadcast with interviews and wrap-arounds with Bob Costas.

Crosby had a passion for the technical side of his trade—microphones and magnetic tape sound recording equipment. The story is oft told that a guy named Jack Mulligan, a U.S. Army Signal Corps engineer during World War II, discovered the advancements the Germans had made in high-fidelity recorded sound and brought them to Hollywood. He got a meeting with Crosby, who immediately saw the practical and commercial value of the technology, and he invested in both the tape technology and the machines to replay it. Crosby preferred the relaxed atmosphere of a recording studio to the that of a live radio session. With recording he could control the final product. He could also produce shows ahead of airdates, and so could go fishing and hunting more often.

One of Crosby’s other passions was baseball, which he exercised by his coownership of the Pittsburgh Pirates. The two passions came together when his superstition about the World Series lead him to leave the country, lest he bring them bad karma, and simply listen to the game on the radio in Paris. But he knew he would want to see it once it was over, and so he had it recorded.

Like the MLB’s archivist said in the article, it’s an amazing time capsule. The snippet on the MLB website shows the game in its purest, black and white best. No high production values, no virtual advertising on back field walls, just great athletes, like Roberto Clemente, Mickey Mantle, and Bill Mazeroski playing the game at the highest level.

And best thing about it, the Yankees lost.

I was so upset when Mazeroski's home run cleared the fence--such a sensitive eight-year-old I was, and still am--not because I was rooting for the Yankees but because I worshiped Mickey Mantle, everyone did, and he should have been the one hitting a game-winning home run over the fence, not this other guy! I got no sympathy whatsoever at home from my mother, who always enjoyed it when a favored team lost, doesn't matter which team, which game, which sport we're talking about. I suppose there's some yin-yang principle underlying her attitude, though she's never articulated it; perhaps she just likes seeing big shots lose, since they so seldom do.