Joe's View

With Joe Meyers, entertainment writer

Archive for September, 2009

New York City seen through ‘foreign’ eyes

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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In “Home Boy” (Shaye Areheart Books), first-time novelist H.M. Naqvi allows us to see New York City in a fresh light.

The book starts as a witty, sharply observed story of a Pakistani immigrant who has fallen in love with the energy of the metropolis and what appears to be its boundless acceptance of newcomers from abroad.

Our hero — nicknamed “Chuck” back home in Karachi — comes to Manhattan as a scholarship student at NYU and then stays on, due to the lure of a Wall Street job and the sheer fun of the fast-lane lifestyle he enjoys with two fellow Pakistanis, known as “AC” and “Jimbo.”

The young men dive into the same wild, sexy downtown life as many another hero (or heroine) in a modern New York novel.

“We fancied ourselves boulevardiers, raconteurs, renaissance men, AC, Jimbo and me. We were mostly self-invented and self-made and certain we had our fingers on the pulse of the great global dialectic,” Naqvi writes.

Then comes 9/11.

Suddenly stranded in a city that has changed radically in the course of one morning, Chuck and his friends feel a new chill in the air and realize they are no longer part of the fabled melting pot: “…I finally got it. I understood that just like three black men were gangbangers, and three Jews a conspiracy, three Muslims had become a sleeper cell.”

Many 9/11 novels have been published over the past eight years, but “Home Boy” takes us into new territory by placing us among people who are just as horrified as any other New Yorkers by the events of that day, but who are victimized as potential terrorists simply because of their religion, their skin color and their country of origin.

A spur of the moment trip to Connecticut by the three friends turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare when the men wind up in jail as suspected enemies of the U.S.

Chuck is released, but sees that his fellow New Yorkers in the streets and on the subway clearly harbor doubts about him. naqvi The young man becomes hyper-aware of the way he is being viewed: “An ancient Chinese couple in matching embroidered Mao suits watched me unflinchingly and, it would seem, unforgivably…And in the far corner, a waifish man sporting a streaked crew cut eyed me while tugging the stud in his ear. It was a free country: he was free to stare; I was free to cringe…When they announced, ‘Please report any suspicious activity or behavior’ over the speakers, I closed my eyes like a child attempting to render himself invisible.”

H.M. Naqvi has made a very auspicious debut.

A road company Gordon Ramsay

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Is there room for one more reality TV series featuring a raging, foul-mouthed narcissist?

Last week, the Oxygen cable network launched a new Tuesday night series, “The Naughty Kitchen with Chef Blythe Beck,” about the drama surrounding the opening of a new Dallas restaurant, Central 214.

Beck is apparently a “star” chef in Texas, but based on the debut episode that Oxygen sent me, the woman doesn’t have the charisma to carry a series and her staff is a collection of mopes and dopes with little of the energy and humor associated with restaurant work (the two teeny bopper self-described “door whores” – below – who greet guests and answer the phone wouldn’t last five minutes in a Manhattan or Fairfield County establishment).

Oxygen clearly hoped it had found a new female Gordon Ramsay in Beck. The chef certainly qualifies as a obscenity-spouting, egomaniac, but Beck doesn’t have the credentials to justify her Ramsay-like behavior. Ramsay came to reality television because of his long and hugely successful career as a chef and restauranteur in London and New York — he had a hit show on British TV, “Kitchen Nightmares,” before U.S. producers came calling for the current Fox series, “Hell’s Kitchen.”

“The Naughty Kitchen” serves up food that looks like glorified roadhouse grub — Beck tells us that it is “naughty” to present so much fried, high fat content food in a boutique hotel eatery, but it looks more like a rip-off. The first episode climaxes with Beck in tears upon learning that the Dallas Morning News has panned Central 214. That verdict combined with the perverse charmlessness of the show’s star should have been enough for Oxygen to pull the plug before putting “The Naughty Kitchen” on the air.

What’s the point of a restaurant-based reality show with food you don’t want to eat and a chef you wouldn’t want to meet?

(Episode two of “The Naughty Kitchen with Chef Blythe Beck” is on Oxygen tonight at 10 p.m.)

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‘Mad Men’ yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Monday, September 28, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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James P. Othmer spent two decades in the advertising business before his terrific first novel “The Futurist” was published in 2006.

While we wait for novel number two — “Holy Water,” due next summer — Othmer offers us an insider’s guided tour to his former occupation in “Adland: Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet,” which Doubleday published on Sept. 15 (in a sick joke worthy of “The Futurist,” Othmer’s tome entered the marketplace on the same day as Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol”).

Neither an expose nor a love letter, “Adland” reminded me of the wonderful 1969 William Goldman book, “The Season,” in which the budding novelist and rapidly rising screenwriter explored a world he was in the process of leaving — the Broadway theater.

Goldman combined insider observation with hard reporting as he covered every show that opened on Broadway in the 1967-68 season. The format gave Goldman plenty of opportunities for using material drawn from his own years spent in the trenches of Shubert Alley — the book remains the best single volume on Broadway art and commerce.

Othmer clearly loves the adverising business — and has no regrets about the time he spent there — but he’s wary too, especially in this new age in which ads seem to be all around us, on the Internet, hidden in scripted TV and film, and on wall-screen TVs in places that the “Mad Men” of the 1950s and ’60s would never have dreamed were available to their work. othmer

The author didn’t have much time for reflection when he was in the midst of working on Madison Avenue (indeed, he admits to embarrassment at never having heard of Vance Packard’s 1957 best-seller attack on advertising, “The Hidden Persuaders,” until he read about it in The New York Times two years ago).

“Adland” begins with Othmer’s own adventures in advertising, from observing the fall of the once-mighty N.W. Ayer agency (the loss of the AT&T account was a giant nail in the coffin) to his work with clients such as Kentucky Fried Chicken.

In the KFC chapter, Othmer recalls almost losing it after debating new ad strategies with executives of the fast food franchise and being forced into endless discussion of how the long-deceased Colonel should be depicted in new ads.

“Maybe their problem is beyond advertising,” Othmer says to a veteran KFC account guy. “Maybe it’s their scuzzy restaurants and incompetent employees. Maybe it’s their unhealthy menu, or people are just sick of the Colonel, live, dead, or animated.”

This autobiographical material is very funny and enlightening (and fans of “The Futurist” will recognize the author’s sharply satiric voice). In one especially absurd sequence, Othmer has to justify the hiring of Oscar-winning cameraman Janusz Kaminski for a crazy U.S. remake of a Russian ad for deodorant. (The managing partner asks “What’s he ever done?”)

What gives the book considerable journalistic distinction, however, is Othmer’s post-ad life reporting on the business, including material on the decline of traditional TV advertising and visits to some of the small-but-hot companies in Manhattan that specialize in Web-based ads and viral marketing.

“…25 percent of all current media consumption is online, and by 2011 annual online media spending in the United States alone will double to more than $50.3 billion,” Othmer writes.

“This has advertisers and agencies seriously rethinking the mega-agency model and questioning the very future of the thirty-second television spot that has been the foundation of branding since the days of Milton Berle,” he adds.

Like it or not, we all live in “Adland” now, and we should be grateful that Othmer has leveled with us about the past, the present and the future of a business so many people love to hate.

A ‘potentially true story’ about Tennessee Williams

Sunday, September 27, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

Daniel MacIvor’s play “His Greatness” was one of the hits of the recent NYC Fringe Festival.

The playwright’s imagining of a few days in the life of Tennessee Williams — near the end — is a well-written and well-acted piece about the sources of artistic inspiration and what happens when the ideas stop coming. In a subtitle, MacIvor describes the play as “Inspired by a Potentially True Story About Playwright Tennessee Williams.”

MacIvor takes us to Vancouver in the early 1980s where the Williams stand-in — known simply as The Playwright — has arrived to attend the opening of a regional theater production of a re-working of one of his poorly received “late” plays. It’s an experimental, tough-to-fathom drama such as Williams’s 1975 play “The Red Devil Battery Sign” about American paranoia in the wake of the Kennedy assassination — a piece the writer never quite “finished” but which received a memorable posthumous off-Broadway staging by Hartford Stage artistic director Michael Wilson with Elizabeth Ashley.

The good reviews and strong audience response to “His Greatness” have caused two well-deserved extensions of a play that should have a long life in regional theater — it feels true to the spirit of Williams both as an artist and as a troubled man in the many disappointing years that followed the playwright’s tremendous success in the 1940s and 1950s.

“His Greatness” has a plot somewhat similar to that of “Sweet Bird of Youth,” the 1959 Williams drama that followed an aging actress on the run from Hollywood to avoid the premiere of a film she is sure will finish off her career. The actress hooks up with a much-younger gigolo named Chance Wayne who hopes the star might be his ticket out of hustling.

In “His Greatness,” the playwright (given lots of authentic Tennessee Williams poetry and passion by Peter Goldfarb, above left) is travelling with The Assistant (Dan Domingues) who has grown tried of cleaning up the great man’s messes — both literal and figurative — and who is sick of the glorified pimping behind finding another Young Man (Michael Busillo, above right) who will be the writer’s escort to the opening of the play.

The situation is gripping and the parallels with “Sweet Bird” are clever. Unlike the actress in the Williams play — who gets a call from The Coast telling her the movie is a hit — the writer in MacIvor’s play is crushed when the regional theater production gets panned by the two local reviewers. The play reminds us of that terrible what-have-you-done-for-us-lately reception that plagued Williams after a series of Broadway flops in the 1960s and 1970s tarnished his reputation. What a shame that he could not escape the trap of “his greatness.”

(“His Greatness” is being performed Tuesday through Thursday at 8 p.m. at The Soho Playhouse, 15 Van Dam St. For ticket information go to www.sohoplayhouse.com.)

Back to the grassy knoll

Thursday, September 24, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Did you catch Moammar Qaddafi’s 90-minute speech at the U.N. yesterday?

Noting that he was suffering from jet lag, the Libyan leader went off on a stream of consciousness rant that included a reference to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

In the latest conspiracy theory, Qaddafi laid the blame for Kennedy’s death on the Israelis, a new one for those of us who have been reading about Mafia and Cuban and CIA plots for more than 40 years.

The night before the Qaddafi speech I watched an advance DVD of a documentary that examines folks who have been swept up in the major conspiracy theories of the past 50 years — “New World Order” (IFC).

The film set for release on Oct. 13 takes us back to Nov. 22, 1963, and the infamous “grassy knoll” (above) where the president was shot. It then moves to the supposed contemporary global conspiracies hatched at the annual Bilderberg Conference where politicos and businessmen meet in private.

A good portion of the documentary is devoted to people who are convinced the 9/11 attack was part of another vast conspiracy.

Along the way we get mini-biographies of interesting characters such as the talk radio host Alex Jones — who makes Glenn Beck look sedate — and follow them to Bilderberg conferences and ground zero.

The movie earns points for presenting these possessed characters without too much sarcasm, but it seems facile to throw all of these conspiracy theorists into one big pot. To me, there is a big difference between possible non-Warren Commission explanations for how and why JFK was killed and the bizarre 9/11 theories involving the positioning of bombs throughout the Word Trade Center and someone linking their detonation to a perfectly coordinated attack by two hijacked commercial jets.

“New World Order” would have us believe that all conspiracy theories are created equal.

What’s so funny about that?

Wednesday, September 23, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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It’s hard to describe the shaggy dog appeal of the HBO program “Flight of the Conchords” to someone who has never seen this comic serial about the adventures of two New Zealand musicians in downtown Manhattan.

(The second season — 10 half-hour episodes which were shown on HBO last winter — just came out on DVD.)

Recently, I screened a few of the season two episodes for visiting friends — two laughed almost continuously and the other two clearly didn’t care much for it (they were politely unenthusiastic).

The show was created by and stars Jemaine Clement (above left) and Bret McKenzie (above right) who play fictionalized versions of themselves. Clement and McKenzie have been performing a comic musical act they call “Flight of the Conchords” for more than a decade, starting in their native country. It was the buzz from U.S. comedy festivals and TV appearances by Jemaine and Bret that led HBO to produce a first batch of 12 episodes two years ago. flight2

Although much of the musical material was written in New Zealand a decade ago, it’s a tribute to Clement and McKenzie’s skills as comedy writers that the tunes fit so seamlessly into stories that take place in New York City and seem so true to the lives of struggling young artists there. Each episode contains a musical number in which the “Conchords” escape into a fantasy world of endless romantic opportunities and commercial success.

The HBO series benefits almost as much as “Sex and the City” did from on-location filming that captures the spirit of the city. In the case of “Conchords, however, no one is buying Manolo Blahniks or spending weekends in the Hamptons — the show takes us into a much lower-rung New York City of shared dumpy apartments, crappy jobs taken to support artistic work, and a life lived so close to the financial edge that using a debit card to make a purchase for $2.79 can trigger an economic disaster.

“Conchords” gently satirizes the Manhattan music scene, with the two singer-songwriters landing gigs in the tiniest and most far-flung clubs and finding themselves the object of a female stalker who is their only real fan (comedienne Kristen Schaal who is brilliant the role of Mel). Their manager is a fellow New Zealander, Murray Hewitt (Rhys Darby), who works in the tiny N.Z. consulate and who appears to know nothing about the music business. One of the show’s running jokes — in seasons one and two — is the way that these folks from New Zealand come in at the very bottom of the vast New York City immigrant community (most people think they’re from Australia or England).

“Flight of the Conchords” is the sort of quirky comedy that sneaks up on a viewer — with some gags as broad as the side of a barn and others virtually subliminal (only to be be picked up in a second viewing). The mix of slapstick and sophistication — and the oddball musical numbers — sometimes recalls the Monty Python troupe. You definitely have to watch more than one episode to get on the show’s wavelength.

There has been no official word on a third season — HBO says it would like one, Bret and Jemaine say they’re not sure if they can come up with enough new musical material — but it would be a shame if such a terrific show died after only 22 episodes.

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‘A Bubble in Time’: how quickly we forget

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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Although it takes lots of time for history to sort itself out — who knows what the verdict on the Clinton Era will be 100 years from now? — William L. O’Neill’s new book “A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989-2001” (Ivan R. Dee) gives a reader the chance to time travel back to a wild era that can seem somewhat carefree in the aftermath of 9/11 and last year’s financial collapse.

O’Neill mixes the high and low aspects of recent history — a chapter on the creation of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is sandwiched between an account of the Navy’s Tailhook sex scandal and a long account of the “trial of the century” (the O.J. Simpson case).

The author writes in his preface, “The 1990s ended only a short time ago, yet the decade seems far away, a happier and more prosperous age unmarred by terrorist attacks, long inconclusive struggles abroad, contempt for human and individual rights at home, botched disaster-recovery attempts, and a government whose arrogance was exceeded only by its ineptitude.”

O’Neill is far from a Clinton apologist — the Monica-gate scandal is recounted in such a way as to heighten the personal sleaziness of the ex-president — but the author sees Clinton’s successor in a very cold light. Noting that he tried to avoid facile comparisons between Clinton and Bush II, the historian notes, “…(If) Bush II becomes the yardstick by which earlier presidents are measured, they will all look great, going back to and including Herbert Clark Hoover.” monica

The highly readable style of “A Bubble in Time” reminded me of Frederick Lewis Allen’s “Only Yesterday,” a classic pop history of the 1920s written in 1931. I didn’t read the Allen book until I was in college and it made the 1920s come alive for me in a way that no other book or film did.

Writing a book about a decade while it is still fresh in one’s memory has some advantages over long-after-the-fact tomes that might exclude ephemeral pop cultural events that help to define a time as well as “important” news stories that are almost instantly forgotten.

(Do you remember why the photo above ran on page one in every newspaper in the country on April 23, 2000? O’Neill includes a full account of the politically-motivated hysteria in Florida over a Cuban boy named Elian Gonzalez, a news story that was almost immediately consigned to the dustbins of history.)

A distressing theme running through the book involves the rise of what O’Neill calls “Tabloid Nation,” the evolution of news into entertainment as a result of the 24/7 cable news cycle and the rise of the internet. O’Neill points out that public knowledge of politics and social issues declined during the 1990s in spite of more hours devoted to so-called “news” on TV.

The book takes us back to 1994 when Republican approval ratings soared during Clinton’s second year in the White House: “A big problem for the Democrats had to do with the public’s invincible ignorance. Almost three-quarters of those polled got their news exclusively from TV broadcasts, to which they evidently paid little attention. As an instance, more people thought Clinton had increased the budget deficit than believed he had lowered it, though he had reduced the shortfall by almost a third, from $290.4 billion in fiscal 1992 to $203.4 billion in fiscal 1994.”

In praise of Nathan Fillion (and ‘Castle’)

Monday, September 21, 2009 by:Joe Meyers

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I’ve been having fun watching an advance copy of the season one DVD of “Castle” that will be released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment tomorrow.

A mid-season replacement show on ABC last season, the series is returning for its second year tonight at 10 p.m.

The New York-set mystery is very light in spirit, often having the feel of one of those cozy comic mystery series the Brits do so well, such as “Jonathan Creek” or “Rosemary & Thyme.”

American television is full of gruesome police procedurals in the vein of the “CSI” and “Law & Order” franchises, so it’s refreshing to see a character-driven mystery show with sophisticated characters and witty, lively banter (when a character compares a female cop’s interrogation technique to a Meryl Streep performance, she replies “The ‘Out of Africa’ Meryl or the ‘Mamma Mia!’ Meryl?”)

The show also puts me in mind of one of the saddest TV flops of the past 25 years, the 1987 CBS series “Leg Work” starring Margaret Colin as a Manhattan private investigator whose best friend played by Frances McDormand worked in the district attorney’s office. That filmed-on-location show was smart and funny and was able to draw on a young New York acting pool that then included Marisa Tomei and Angela Bassett.

“Castle” has a clever premise. Nick Castle (Nathan Fillion) is a best-selling crime writer in the James Patterson-Lee Child vein. When a copycat killer appears to be following the methods of murder in one Castle’s novels, the writer is called in by Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic).

After that pilot episode case is solved, Castle uses his political connections to be assigned to Beckett’s precinct to research a new series of books about a female detective.

The show really rests on Fillion’s shoulders and he is terrific in a very tricky role that requires him to be a glib wiseguy at one moment and a serious crime solver the next. Fillion has the natural charm of a true TV star (I missed him on the cult series “Firefly” but friends tell me he was the engine behind that show, too).

The chemistry between Fillion and Katic in the season one episodes is just about perfect. The challenge (if the series runs for a few years) will be sustaining the sexual tension between the duo while delaying a romantic relationship that could destroy the comic balance.

Susan Sullivan is very funny as Castle’s ex-actress mother, Martha Rodgers, a classic New York type that the veteran performer plays to the hilt.

The first episode of “Castle” benefitted from a lot of New York location shooting; the follow-up shows fake the background fairly well, but it’s a shame that such a Manhattan-savvy project couldn’t be filmed there all the time, ala “Law & Order.”

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