"Ma Nuit En Enfer. Or, A Night at the Movies" by Steve Provizer

Hollywood movies suck. Not only that, going to a multiplex theatre is one of the most dispiriting, depressing and irritating experiences imaginable. Yet, it's one to which Americans are sado-masochistically drawn by the millions. It's especially piquant to plunge in just after you've seen the Oscars; like turning over a beautiful moss-covered log in the forest and having your hand covered with slimy larvae.

I had submitted to watching the Oscars only because I actually know a couple who made a movie that was nominated for best picture. I was curious to see someone of my ilk trying to pass in that glorious parade of narcissism, so I gritted my teeth and abided the endless car ads, the gruesome display of self-love and the singular lack of humor that marked the broadcast. A person's gotta ask: Does each winner really love his or her family that much? (actually, one noticed that it was only the men who gushed about that, not the women) And you know what else? Bob Hope was always stiff as a board. Finding 5 bits from him that were funny must have taken the editors half a day.

Right after that cavalcade of bonhomie, circumstances compelled me to transport my daughter to a multi-theatre gigaplex located in downtown Boston. The trip was necessary because video she'd submitted of herself singing one of Justin Bieber's  songs was chosen to get screen time in the "director's cut" (watch out Fellini) of his movie. It was about 2 seconds worth, as it turned out, but kudos to her. It was certainly Papabear's responsibility to get her there so she could strap herself in with the 3D glasses and bask.

I decided that the easiest thing would be to confer with my wife and find another movie that played at about the same time. It seemed a better alternative than drinking over-priced beer in the Theatre District for two and a half hours. Not the first time I've been wrong.

Walking in from the sidewalk, I knew immediately that we were in for an aesthetic treat. The interior of the place was right out of Albert Speers by way of Frederick's of Hollywood. The designers had managed to evoke mall anomie and blend it with the cheezy theatricality of Grauman's Chinese Theatre; all of it burnished with the accumulated grime of thousands of buckets of spilled popcorn smothered in "butter product."

Entering the theatre to see "True Grit" was like stumbling into a Mythbusters episode investigating how many decibels of sound it takes to induce diarrhea. We were forced to submit to half an hour of commercials and coming attractions-each of these pitched to 15 year old meth freaks. Bad in themselves, played at the volume level they were, they became instruments of torture. I'd paid Eleven and a half bucks to get the fillings shaken out of my teeth and have such of my hearing apparatus still remaining reduced to a distant tinnitus-tinged memory. 

I'll spare you a digest of the plot of True Grit. Initially, the experience was fairly pleasant, although the film's score was annoyingly Ken Burns-ish. However, as it went on, the characters more and more devolved into mere examples-albeit pristine examples-of "types." And, after the third bludgeoning, I asked myself how was it that crude, dismemberment/viscera-saturated violence had become so much the norm that it didn't even bear mentioning in film reviews?

While we're at it, someone tell me how many teachers can be paid union dues for the cost of one movie  ($300 million for "Avatar") and at what point filling out questionnaires at the end of a movie became electrodes strapped to your head.

No, my friend, the next time the latest "big" filmic release arises as a topic of conversation, you will find me curled up behind the couch with headphones on my head, a Rumpole in one hand and a Chateau Thames Embankment in the other.

Professor Provizer's Bad Jazz Art Gallery

Welcome-and abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

We'll stop the bleeding and let this stand as a representative sample. Clearly, some of this stuff was knocked off quickly. Some of it seems painfully pre-civil rights, some of it falls squarely in the tchotchke category (thanks, E. Doberman, whose comment inspired this post), some of it is carefully done yet still inept and some of it is just weird.

On a larger scale, the culture as a whole occasionally turns its resources to commissioning public jazz statuary. Here are Oscar Peterson, Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie.




The results do not inspire confidence for the aesthetic future.

Why is there so little good jazz art-aside from album covers, the loss of which was a definite blow to the visual side of jazz. Is this just a jazz issue or is art not a good subject for art?

Maybe the problem begins when people start believing that someone is "larger than life." This is the road to romantic tripe and cultural ruin.

Is it really impossible for us to have music as a beautiful pursuit, relief, even escape, in our lives and not bleed the humanity out of our artists? As the mortician replaces blood with formaldehyde, we want to replace actual character, in all its contradictory, petty, wretchedly excessive glory, with a misty, fusty mythology.

I think there is a alternative choice: let's face the music and dance.