The Car Man

was on OVATION tonight. It was this boringly slutty ballet. Men and women and men and men dance-fucked in a garage setting. Sans language. Some dimestore novel torrid plot involving murder and an innocent man blamed...the bad egg in a wife beater protected by his red-headed lover. Apparently it's an interpretation of Bizet's Carmen by choreographer Matthew Bourne: Ovation Blather. It was really stupid and the sort of thing OVATION keeps patting itself on the back for. The most predictable sexual moves were simply endowed with a fluency and sped up and this mock-coitus was supposed to be Instant Ballet the way you add water to make instant cococa. During a commercial break, they did a self-promotion where the network called itself SEXY the way a drunken middle age man might do in his own basement bar in a Cheever story. It made me pity OVATION even as I cursed it.

They also announced their intention to run that godawful John Adams opera again, The Death of Klinghoffer.

I like Nixon in China but the above is a piece of shit, and would get my vote for one of the worst things OVATION has ever run...and run...and run...talk about bathos...

I'm a Mamet fan and tried watching American Buffalo but couldn't get into that at all. I had never seen it nor read it, though I know the majority of his plays, and like a few of them quite a bit.

But it was something in his trademark Chicago stichomythia that was irritating the hell out of me. The actors (Dennis Frantz and Dustin Hoffman) were delivering it the only way you could deliver those lines (the right asshole way) but it all seemed so contrived and playlike, so annoyingly Pinterish (I'm not a fan) that the pawn shop looked like a stage set of a pawn shop rather than a pawn shop we're watching in a movie...it was as though it were a play cursed to remain a play.

Mamet has written plays which delight in being plays and will never be adapted into any other medium in any convincing manner (I'm thinking of works like Prairie du Chien) and one can respect those works.

But if it's not meant to be a movie, don't force it to be one. I suspect I would be just as dissatisfied with American Buffalo as a play.

It seems mired in an Ashcan stage aestheticism that emerged (and then died a natural death in the thirties) anyway.

Maybe I'm just in a shitty, non-receptive mood.

Not a great night for art that aspires.

I'll switch over to Forensic Files or one of the other murder shows.

I'd better stick with the homme moyen sensuel tonight.

Or is that homo moyen sensuel?