Bicycles have drifted through these leaves


Luhring Augustine, the art of chess

[The Luhring Augustine show is being presented in tandem with the exhibition The Imagery of Chess Revisited, on view at The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City from October 21, 2005, to March 5, 2006. This is the first major museum exhibition to explore and reprise one of the legendary events in the history of twentieth-century art: the 1944-45 exhibition The Imagery of Chess, organized by Surrealist masters Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst for the Julien Levy Gallery, in New York. The exhibition brings together more than 80 chess sets and chess-themed works by some of the most influential artists of the 20th century. (www.noguchi.org).]

* Raw Story says National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley was the senior administration official who told Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA officer. Now there are three senior administration officials who we know leaked Plames name. Will Fitzgerald now be able to bring conspiricy charges?

-- related: Scooter's attorney talks shit.

* Prospect Magazine on the lack of good critics. excerpt:

"In the early 1970s, the Financial Times used three theatre critics, four or five music critics, a dance critic (the evergreen, still inimitable Clement Crisp), and gradually established regular weekly columns on television, radio, cinema, architecture and (acknowledging Mammon's place in the order of artistic things) the saleroom. What is more, this page was not tucked away out of sight. Throughout the 1970s arts occupied the whole of the FT's page three.

"Every single debutant at the Wigmore Hall was reviewed, every new play at the Bush or the Theatre Upstairs or the ICA. London is still the music capital of the world; in those days, the arts pages, led by the FT, treated it as such. Lord Drogheda was chairman not only of the FT, but also of the Royal Opera House. When looking for the paper's first music critic in the early 1950s, he found Andrew Porter, a critic of an authority and brilliance to rival George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman. There is no one else quite like Porter, who today writes mainly in the Times Literary Supplement. Great critics are rare birds; rare birds, though, need a welcoming aviary, and the zookeepers are not on the lookout for such special—and specialist—breeds of plumage any more."
...
"The irony is that, over the past 20 years, the critical pendulum has swung entirely the other way, with a sort of tame green light for new plays all over town. It is like crying wolf in reverse, so that when something really outstanding comes along—as in the case of Martin McDonagh—there is no praise left to distinguish it from the rest of the pack.

"I am not suggesting that today's broadsheet—let alone tabloid—press should come over all high-toned and learned when confronted with a new Alan Ayckbourn comedy or the latest drug-fuelled shocker at the Bush Theatre. But let's hear it once more for experience, knowledge and seriousness. What is sorely needed is a new group of younger critics who will combine the enthusiasm of the aficionado with the rigour of the informed taskmaster. Such a group is, alas, nowhere to be seen."
...
"If the critics aren't going to do something special about the best new work around, who can blame their editors for allowing the great critical tradition of Shaw, Tynan and Porter to wither? For as another Australian critic, Peter Conrad (as clever and outspoken as James) said in a devastating attack on the breed in the Observer: 'Critics are the means whereby society becomes conscious of itself, aware of the direction it is taking. There can be no culture without them.' We still need critics, he said. But better ones."

* In DC? Don't forget about tonight's Big Yawn showcase at DC9, featuring Sweeden's Love is All and the caribbean from Washington, D.C. Doors at 9, $8.

* "Money and Corruption are ruining the land, crooked politicians betray the working man, pocketing the profits and treating us like sheep, and we're tired of hearing promises that we know they'll never keep." -- ray davies