Ah, the Olympics

First, the positives about the Olympics.  Just getting to see top-class competition in many, many sports that rarely get air time, at least in the U.S., is fantastic, even if you have to find some out-of-the-way cable channel at 3:00 A.M.  Second, the Brits managed to rescue that mastodon of TV programming--a show that every four years makes you wish the Oscars show was put on a quadrennial schedule--the opening ceremonies. Now, maybe you didn't find Rowan Atkinson taking out the lead runners in Chariots of Fire or hamming it up while Sir Simon Rattle--only the world's best living conductor--had the London Philharmonic playing the Chariots theme. I, however, was in stitches.

The negatives--which are always many but not very varied--begin with the International Olympic Committee. Remember those wonderful folks who brought you the Nazi Olympics of 1936?  To them, that was the crowning moment never yet repeated--and they sure tried, since the next two Olympics--the ill-fated schedules for '40 and '44 were planned for Tokyo and Rome, in case you wondered where their hearts were.  And the spirit of Avery Brundage--who learned his trade from seeing his ancestors in 1912 strip Jim Thorpe of his medals for playing a semipro ball game--returned for an encore when the IOC grandly told the Israelis and their ilk to get lost when it came to having a memorial minute for the Munich horrot.

I've often thought that it's amazing that serious competition does indeed occur at the Olympics, amid all the posturing and bad attitudes, but what can you expect from a council made up of quasi-defrocked royalty, old friends of Franco--yes that was Juan Antonio Whateverhisface--and other mostly Euro but also Afro and Asian rich trash?

Oh yes, they banished baseball because ostensibly too few countries played it, despite some of those being ones that don't always get along on other issues, such as Japan, Cuba, and the U.S.  Softball went down for the ride, too.  And if you're an old champion, don't expect too much respect. Hope Solo gave Brandi Chastain, now a commentator, the back of her hand, just as some German lout did to Jesse Owens in the 60s, and Jesse had only turned up to say something nice.

I watched women's air rifle competition and men's archery and was amazed at how technology now dominates those ancient sports, so that I wonder how, except for politics, they can stay on the schedule. Gymnastics is always amazing--but now the performers, and that's what they are, have actually replaced both vaudeville and Barnum & Bailey in getting and deserving prime time for acrobatic stunts that it would seem no human could pull off.  The TV clowns fill that role, too, with the ballyhoo. Costas or Lauer put the Paris Olympics in 1928 (that was Amsterdam) instead of 1924. So much for making use of their potted research.

Take a good look at sports like fencing, though, because in the U.S., many colleges don't have it any more, especially for men, because of Title IX. Yes, it's great that women get equal or even higher billing but yes, too, a lot of it at the college level has come at the expense of men's sports. And I agree with them that the one that costs the most and costs men their other sports--football, American variety--probably should bite the dust on many campuses.  The Southeastern Conference should just turn pro.

But the Brits saved the opening ceremonies with a show that made the Chinese and Nazi spectaculars look like the inflated crapola that they were.  The Brits were funny--Atkinson, and grandly dramatic--Kenneth Branagh reading from The Tempest, and willing to boast about stuff Americans criticize but would wish they had if they knew what it was about--such as the National Health Service, for all its foibles.

Comedy Strikes Back

A few days in New York (again) allowed me the chance to see a really fine comedy, One Man, Two Guv'nors, which was adapted (and updated) from the Carlo Goldoni 17th century Venetian original and presented on Broadway by a British company put together by the National Theatre. James Corden, who won a Tony this year for his performance, is the lead and he is a true natural clown, and excels (joined by an equally skilled cast) at perfectly-timed slapstick complete with pratfalls aplenty and true and seemingly ersatz audience involvement.

This was one of the absolutely joyous evenings in the theater--which happened to be the delightful Music Box on 45th Street, built by Irving Berlin for his musicals, then jointly owned by the Shuberts and him until the Shuberts' successors bought it from his estate. But I can't overemphasize the sheer delight of this show, which was playing to a packed house the night I took it in.  There seemed to be no dead time, either; everything clicks.

Next night found me at the 2nd Stage Theatre on 43rd just west of Eighth Avenue, seeing a new musical called Dogfight, apparently based on a 1991 movie about three new Marines in San Francisco the night before shipping out to Vietnam. The title refers to a bit of Marine ugliness that has each man try to find the ugliest date to win a contest.  This time, the lead picks up a nice waitress who finds out what the "party" is all about and calls them out about it. Then the Marine goes back to find her and make amends (no, this isn't a 12-step program). 

Doesn't sound like the most likely theme for a musical but the music, lyrics, and especially the choreography are excellent.  Joe Mantello, who starred in Angels in America and has become a well-regarded Broadway director, did a fine job putting the best style into action here. The youngish audience hooted and applauded--I'm getting used to this new Broadway behavior, and try to resist recalling (out loud, anyway) that getting audiences to react so formidably was much more daunting a prospect when I first went to see shows--and bravos were few and far between.

Yesterday's Times, however, must have taken some of the wind out of their sails. While praising Mantello's input and the deserving female lead, in particular, the writer pointed out some of the shortcomings in both the plot and the characterization. I felt sorry for the company because they seemed a spirited unit and I think the show could have made it.

A Cornell Friend--Steve Conn

Some readers of this page may have known Steve Conn, an old friend who died this past Tuesday after being in poor health for several years.  Steve was a talented journalist and publicist who was both delightful and crazy.  Below are some remarks I prepared about his connections with Cornell, from which he graduated seven years prior to my graduation.

Were you to attend a reunion of the Cornell Class of 1960, who graduated 52 years ago, you would likely meet a lot of men wearing buttoned-down white shirts and rep ties and of course sport jackets or even suits. There might even be a few with pocket protectors. The women—and Cornell has always been co-ed—would likely be attired in tasteful suburban outfits. According to their latest class letter, 17 classmates have each contributed more than $1 million to the university.

We commemorate one member of the Cornell Class of 1960 who did not conform to this rather dull profile. When I would run into Steve at annual alumni meetings in New York City—invariably held at one or another of the major hotels managed by Hotel School grads—I’d see him chatting excitedly (did Steve speak in any other way?) with these corporate cut-outs and thought he must be the class member imagined for the class by Damon Runyon. It was as if he’d just wandered in from Broadway or climbed out of the BMT.

Steve graduated from Cornell before I even got there three years later. It was a different place then. Even by the time he graduated, you could still travel there by going to the old Penn Station and jumping aboard the Lehigh Valley’s Black Diamond Express to Ithaca. And for men, until two years after he graduated, two years of ROTC were mandatory. You also had to (and still did when I was there) pass a swimming test to graduate. But some things stayed the same. One was The Cornell Daily Sun, where both Steve and I spent huge amounts of our collegiate lives and where Steve learned a lot of his trade even before he got to Columbia’s J School.

His class recognized that Steve was cut from a different cloth—not just because he was from Brooklyn, heck there were lots of people there from Brooklyn; right, they were the ones with the pocket protectors—but that he was street-smart, had a great gift of gab, and knew how to put some snappy sentences together. They recognized that Steve had skills and knowledge that they couldn’t imagine—to take us back a few decades, they had slide rules and he had the clipboard, the one with a clip, not the one you cut-and-paste with on MS Word.

Steve had the ability to build up enthusiasm by using words but also through his expansive personality. And just as these incredibly dissimilar types appreciated Steve, Steve was fond of his Cornell days and enjoyed hanging with these guys, which always amazed me. I figured he might actually be getting some business from some of them, since they usually appeared to be well-heeled, but then at one of these gatherings, he came over to me and asked me if I knew of a possible job for one of them. Maybe this was Steve’s early ability to network but so much for my thinking that he was the one profiting from it.

Steve was indeed fond of Cornell and when Sam Roberts first worked one summer at the Times, he came back to Cornell full of stories about his high times running around day and night with this wild-man reporter, Steve Conn. Sam, of course, went on to become City Editor of the News and a veteran Times reporter and TV presence. He’s out of the country and wished he could have been at the funeral. Another old friend with whom I attended a Cornell-Princeton football game a few years ago was so mesmerized when we sat with Steve that I thought I’d engineered a fix-up. Without knowing anything about his condition, she asked me a week or two ago out of the blue how he was doing. I doubt that anyone who ever met Steve forgot him.

I thought about Steve and Cornell a week or so ago when I went to a Cornell crab feast on the Eastern Shore. I’ve lived in DC for years and that’s the kind of thing we do. There were lots of people there and the couple on whose huge farm it was held graduated from Cornell the year after Steve did, and looked a lot older than he did even in the bad shape he was in when I saw him last week. But I thought back to the last time I’d been to a Cornell crab feast, which was the one Steve had taken me to back in the mid-70s when I was first living in Washington. As always, he was the life of the party and made sure I met everyone who was anyone, and then a few more, too.

More Museums--in Philadelphia

Even at the beautiful new building off Ben Franklin Parkway in Center City Philadelphia, a visit to the Barnes collection takes some planning. Eileen and I were in town for a conference of hers on international labor relations so I set up our visit ahead of time; never could it have been arranged upon arrival.

You probably know about the eccentric Dr. Barnes who was in the right place at the right time with the right advice--William Glackens, the American impressionist, purchased some of the best items in the collection. Dr B, of course, had his own ideas about how to hang all the Renoirs, Cezannes, and Matisses on his walls, and said they couldn't be lent or even moved. So finally they were going broke out in his Bala-Cynwd mansion in the Philly suburbs near the Main Line, so they were allowed to build this magnificent set-up and even with his "arrangements" packing paintings on the walls, it's an incredible experience.

Never will you see so much magnificent modern art, plus a few El Grecos and a Durer here and there. But in addition to the masses of Renoirs and Cezannes and Matisses, there are probably 5 or 6 Van Goghs, as many Modiglianis, and some Picassos, Pissaros, Utrillos, Prendergasts, Sisleys, Gauguins, Horace Pippins, and many many more mixed in with American metalwork and Greek sculpture and African masks and sculpture. Yes, it's quite a trip.

Then I picked up where we left off at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco in May at the new National Museum of American Jewish History.  It's a well-conceived museum and today I read why they didn't have the actual original G. Washington letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport out--it can only be shown for three months every year. But there were lots of good items and a wonderful film of comedians and Yiddish theater and even the Hollywood moguls. Those last miserable characters got off lightly in the show, which makes me think their descendants must have ponied up for the production. And another one of contemporary edgy stuff had Mel Brooks's most classic Inquisition number from History of the World--Part One and Gilda Radner as Emily Litella discussing saving Soviet jewelry.

I found time to make it out to the Penn Museum of Archaeology which had a pleasant exhibit on Maya 2012, about their calendar which doesn't really say the world will end late this year. Some of the basic parts of the Penn galleries on human evolution and the Etruscans (not those two together) are absolutely fantastic--it seems that Penn had people out in ancient Assyria and Yucatan digging before anyone else got there and they present the stuff brought back very offhandedly in that classically understated Philly style.

Before we leave I will hit the Art Museum--recall how in Philly, it's the University and the Orchestra and the Art Museum--which has just opened a Cezanne, Gauguin, and Matisse show on Visions of Arcadia. The Times sent a foreign correspondent down last week to point out that there were only a few of the works of those three named leads, but I'm sure it will be worth the non-detour.

Lots of Museums

Every so often I get the chance to make a stab at being up-to-date on what's at some of the many museums worth visiting. Of course, the ones I seem to get to the least are in Washington, which is a shame especially since almost all of those are free, not a standard practice any more in most places. But last week I was in New York and had a rare opportunity to attend a members' preview at the Museum of Modern Art.

The subject was one Alighiero Boetti, whose first name is a variant on Dante's last name. His work is definitely different -- collages of maps made up of flags, lots of early variations on op art. Viewing a whole range of his creations was fun and his life (I believe he died in the 1990s) included a patch running a hotel in Kabul.

Of course, just getting a chance to take in the permanent collection at Moma is delightful. What's even better is that they seem to alter the makeup of that permanent collection by bringing some additions out to take up wall space and these invariably are of the incredible quality of the rest. Another permanent collection always worth a visit is at the Neue Gallerie, the home in New York, on 86th St. and Fifth, of German and Austrian art.  This time they were having a Klimt show, and that includes Josef Hoffman designs as well as the occasional Kokoschka or Schiele canvas. Klimt always fascinates me, and Neue has the Adele Bloch-Bauer portrait that the family which owned it fought the Austrian government here and there in court to recover, only to then sell it to Ronald Lauder for the Neue.

The Neue also had a great photo show upstairs featuring Heinrich Kuehne, a colleague of two not-so-shabby camera bugs named Stieglitz and Steichen.  Having a coffee downstairs in the lower-level cafe is also a treat. I know, it's not the equal of the first-floor Cafe Sabarsky, which is the perfect rendition of a Vienna coffeehouse, but I don't mind the lesser version. The next day, I took in the Weegee show at the International Center of Photography; Weegee is the ultimate master of the Speed Graphic crime shot, mostly in the 30s and 40s for all New York papers, but a few dead bodies go a long way, although his more experimental work which appeared in PM still is compelling.

Then it was around the corner to the Lunch Hour exhibit at the New York Public Library, not yet ruined by yet another profit-seeking venture envisioned for the grand 42nd Street building. This history of lunch hour in Manhattan featured the coin-slot windows from the old Automat, as well as menus going back to the original Delmonico's in the early 1820s. A fine lady contributed her menu collection in the early 1900s to the Astor Library, one of the three great components of the New York Public. Then there are menus and other items from war-time cafs at the Brooklyn Naval Yard and the great Joe Baum joints of the 50s and 60s--The Four Seasons, The Forum of the Twelve Caesars, Windows on the World. Lots of enjoyable stuff.

My last stop was my first ever visit to the Museum of the City of New York, which had a very sophisticated film on three screens on the growth of the great metropolis to accompany a carefully organized exhibit on "the Great Grid"--the 1811 street plan for Manhattan. There was also a show devoted to activists of all stripes.