Sly Wit 2012

Happy New Year!

As always, I welcome the New Year with open arms and lots of plans and projects.

Barring any 2012 doomsday scenarios coming to fruition, here’s what you can expect to see at Sly Wit this year.

Books:

Clearly you all have opinions on these and I will be posting what I think of your favorites throughout the year as part of the 2012 Readers’ Choice Challenge. Encouragement as I tackle some of the longer ones is always appreciated!

I will also be trying to keep the book salon alive as many members move on to bigger and better things following the near dissolution of my former office by The Man. Appropriately enough, this month’s theme is “Go West, Young Man!” for which I chose to read The Grapes of Wrath.

Performing Arts:

Ballet 101 posts will probably dominate the spring as I enjoy a subscription to the San Francisco Ballet for the first time. Sadly, I don’t foresee the ballet of the Opéra de Paris in my future this year, but you never know what the fates may bring.

Opera won’t be completely absent, as I have tickets to The Lamplighters’ upcoming productions of The Gondoliers and The Pirates of Penzance singalong as well as Nixon in China at the San Francisco Opera in June. I’m also hoping to see Ensemble Parallèle’s The Great Gatsby in February.

Of course, assuming La Maratonista is willing, I’m planning to renew my subscription for the San Francisco Opera’s 2012-2013 season. To combat my opera withdrawal symptoms, I’ve been listening to a number of classic recordings and, before our next subscription starts, I’m hoping to write up some more systematic Opera 101 posts that go through the history of this art form, starting with the Baroque era and continuing to the present day.

Television and Film:

I’m still debating giving up cable, but I have to wait until at least the end of January since there is no way I am missing Season Two of Downtown Abbey on PBS. And, of course, The Voice will be starting up again soon. But there’s not much else I’m excited about going forward besides Season Two of Sherlock, which can’t come soon enough.

Aside from the Oscars, I don’t often talk about film here. (That in and of itself might not seem odd, unless you know that my training is as a historian of French culture with a specialization in the film industry and my doctoral dissertation was on the reception of American films in postwar France.) I’m hoping to rectify that with a new Film 101 series looking at various genres I want to explore again without having to view them through an academic lens. Right now, I’m thinking of three of my favorites: film noir, screwball comedies, and westerns; however, inspired by David Smay’s series at HiLobrow, I may also take on horror, a genre I don’t know at all.

But before I begin that project, I will spend the month of January rewatching my favorite director of all time, a man who incorporated all those genres into his work (okay, maybe not westerns), Alfred Hitchcock. A colleague recently asked for recommendations of his films and, having lately read John Buchan’s The 39 Steps and Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles (which became Young and Innocent), I decided he was due for a serious review.

I hope you join me for these and other random musings!

So You Think You Can Dance Season 8 Mixtape

"Koop Island Blues" by Koop featuring Ane Brun

In reflecting on my recent posts about So You Think You Can Dance, it struck me how much my reactions to the dances on this show are influenced by the music. Mandy Moore and her love of 80s music aside, this show has actually introduced me to a number of songs and artists I wouldn’t know otherwise, whether through Wade Robson’s love of Róisín Murphy or Mia Michaels’ incredible choices, including introducing me to Adele back in Season 4 with “Hometown Glory” and her choreography set to “Koop Island Blues” in Season 5.

"Hometown Glory" by Adele

This season, it seemed that choices were a little more mainstream, or at least by artists more familiar to me. There were many older tunes, some refreshing (“Another One Bites the Dust,” “Precious Things”) and others quite tired (“Total Eclipse of the Heart”), but overall there wasn’t much to get me excited. While it confirmed my love of Florence + the Machine (“Heavy in Your Arms”) and The Civil Wars (“Poison & Wine”), I didn’t find myself downloading much new stuff, just “Pop Drop & Roll” by Chonique Sneed, “Skin & Bones” by David J. Roch, and “In This Shirt” by The Irrepressibles, which blew me away so much when I first heard it that I was sad it wasn’t immediately available for purchase. I would love to get Damien Rice’s “Prague,” but it is only part of a much longer bonus track on iTunes. If anyone knows where I could get a legal copy of something close to single length, let me know.

"Prague" by Damien Rice

How about you, are there any songs from this season that made you sit up and take notice?

So You Think You Can Dance Season 8 Awards

Thank you for standing by during last night’s technical difficulties.

And now the awards!

Best in Ballroom: Iveta & Pasha in “Ven A Bailar On The Floor” (Jason Gilkison)

Best in Contemporary: Sasha & Alexander in “Stupid” (Travis Wall)

Best in Hip Hop: Sasha & Twitch in “Misty Blue” (Christopher Scott)

Best in Jazz: Sasha & Melanie in “Game On” (Sonya Tayeh)

Sasha & Melanie in “Game On” by Sonya Tayeh

Best in Housewives: Melanie & Sasha, “Heart Asks Pleasure First” (Stacey Tookey)

Best in Statues: Melanie & Marko in “Turn to Stone” (Travis Wall)

Best Contemporary Concept: The Nightmare in “Precious Things” (Tyce Diorio)

Allison & Ricky in “Precious Things” by Tyce Diorio

Best Use of 80s Music: “Another One Bites the Dust” (Mandy Moore)

Best Use of 80s Music (runner-up): “Fashion” (Charles Klapow)

Best Performance (Comedy): Marko in “Whatever Lola Wants”

Best Performance (Drama): Melanie in “Skin & Bones”

Melanie & Marko in “Skin & Bones” by Dee Caspery

Best Performance (Mohawks): Sasha & Mark in “Raise Your Weapon”

Best Bird: Jordan as a vulture in “Brotsjor”

Best Bird (runner-up): Miranda as a woodpecker in “Break Ya Neck”

Best Flying Leap: Melanie in “Total Eclipse of the Heart”

Jordan & Tadd in “Brotsjor” by Travis Wall

Best Solo: Melanie, “Cracks”

Best All-Star: Allison

Most Welcome All-Star: Ivan

Most Improved All-Star: Lauren

Least Charismatic All-Star: Robert

Male Contestant Who Got the Shaft: Nick

Female Contestant Who Got the Shaft: Miranda

Most Annoying Judge Favorite: Ryan

Most Tiresome Judge Refrain: Sasha’s “hard life” and its effect on her dancing

Best in Choreography: Travis Wall for “Stupid,” “Turn to Stone,” and “Brotsjor”

Melanie & Marko in “Turn to Stone” by Travis Wall

Best Judge Comment: Jesse Tyler Ferguson: “Travis took the classic ‘vulture stalks boy, boy almost succumbs to vulture, boy kills vulture’ story that we all know so well… we’ve seen it over and over… and he took it and he made it this brilliant, beautiful thing…”

So You Think You Can Dance… Contemporary

Last fall I wrote about how I was supremely bored with competitive reality television and wondered why, as the talent pool has improved over the seasons, these shows have become so boring. This is particularly true of the last couple of seasons of So You Think You Can Dance, which recently closed its eighth season with Melanie and Sasha, two incredible dancers, as the final two.

Melanie & Sasha in “Heart Asks Pleasure First”

While the seventh season was plagued with injuries (mostly due to the fact that there has been a marked uptick in the number of dances these contestants are expected to perform on a weekly basis), which impeded any real enjoyment the season’s progression, the eighth season was relatively injury free. And, yet? Sort of boring.

I think I’ve identified the problem. Despite the fact that this show has become extremely demanding in one sense, in another sense these dancers were extremely coddled. While this was somewhat discussed regarding Melanie, it actually applies to almost all the dancers, who were far less challenged outside their style than dancers in earlier seasons. Gone are the days when one drew a different style and partner out of a hat every week. (And, producers, no one actually believes these dancers are drawing their style out of a hat, so why don’t you give up that farce right now.)

If you compare the dance styles assigned in the first five episodes (those with the most dancers) of Seasons 2-4 with those of this season, the reduction in ballroom is stark. Seasons 2-4 are pretty consistent, with an average of 43% ballroom dances, 33% contemporary (including jazz and broadway), 23% hip hop, and 1% disco. But, by Season 8, the majority of dances (51%) are contemporary, with only 26% ballroom, 19% hip hop, and a couple of stray styles like African jazz and Bollywood.

Allison & Ivan in Season 2's “La Cumparsita”

As an example, by just the fifth episode in Season 3, we had seen all ten formal ballroom styles* as well as other ballroom dances such as Argentine tango, mambo, salsa, and West Coast swing, sometimes more than once. On the other hand, Season 8 saw far fewer ballroom styles, with many of those quite watered down technique-wise. When the only great ballroom number is in the “Meet the Top 20” show (with “Ten Dance” world champion Iveta, before they kicked her off for younger, contemporary blood), you know there’s a problem.

This is a shame, given some of the superb numbers we’ve seen in the past, for example, Heidi & Benji’s mambo, Allison & Ivan’s Argentine tango(s), Lacey & Danny’s samba, Melissa & Ade’s rumba, Karla & Vitolio’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz” quickstep, Caitlin & Jason’s “Minnie the Moocher” foxtrot, Janette & Brandon’s Argentine tango, Jeanine & Brandon’s “Matrix” paso doble, Ashleigh & Jakob’s cha-cha, and Mollee & Jakob’s “Ordinary Day” waltz.

Jeanine & Brandon in Season 5’s “Tetsujin”

One can only hope that this imbalance will be corrected next time around because I think having so many contemporary pieces became fairly repetitive, or at least seemed that way. Even if some of the dances were quite beautiful, I’m not sure they will stick in my mind as well as Travis & Heidi’s “The Bench,” Jaime & Hok’s “Hummingbird and Flower,” Courtney & Mark’s “The Garden,” Randi & Evan’s “Koop Island Blues,” Kayla & Kūpono’s “Eyes on Fire” and “Gravity,” Jeanine & Jason’s “If It Kills Me,” Melissa & Ade’s “This Woman’s Work,” Ellenore & Jakob’s “Tore My Heart,” or Ellenore & Legacy’s “Machine Gun,” to name just a few.

Still, tune in tomorrow for the awards!

*The ten dances include the five Standard dances of foxtrot, quickstep, tango, Viennese waltz, and waltz, as well as the five Latin dances of cha-cha, jive, paso doble, rumba, and samba.

The Battles Are Over But the War Goes On

Now that the battle rounds are over, I figured that it was time to revisit the teams on The Voice.

In reviewing the four rounds together, I think that for the most part the correct decisions were made, but I’m not sold on the battle format. Even though I loved comparing competitors singing the same song at the same time (especially when one singer did surprisingly better than I thought they would), inevitably it meant that promising people who we had barely heard were eliminated, including Niki Dawson (Team Cee Lo), Justin Grennan (Team Christina), and Tim Mahoney (Team Adam).

Also, and this was no fault of the format, some of the song choices were just flat-out crazy, including all of Blake’s choices (“Hunk of Burning Love,” “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “I’ll Stand By You”).

Some other opinions…

Favorite Song Choice: “F*ckin’ Perfect” (Cee Lo)

Least Favorite Song Choice: “Hunk of Burning Love” (Blake)

Oddest Song Choice That Actually Worked: “Baba O’Riley” (Christina)

Favorite Duet/Battle: Rebecca Loebe & Devon Barley on “Creep” (Team Adam)

Most Egregious Elimination, Part I (because he was so much better): Tyler Robinson (Blake)

Most Egregious Elimination, Part II (because her competition was so bad): Kelsey Rey (Cee Lo)

Toughest Battle to Call: Emily Valentine & Curtis Grimes on “Need You Now” (Team Cee Lo)

Favorite Expression: Cee Lo’s face when Emily Valentine & Curtis Grimes kissed at the end of their duet

Most Pleasantly Surprising Team Pick: Jared Blake (Blake)

Top Five Six I’m Rooting For: Devon Barley (Team Adam), Javier Colon (Team Adam), Jeff Jenkins (Team Adam), Vicci Martinez (Team Adam), Beverly McClellan (Team Christina), Nakia (Team Cee Lo)

Contestant I'm Most Rooting For to Get Her Act Together After a Dismal Battle Round: Xenia (Team Blake)

Eliminated Contestant I’d Love to See on American Idol: Rebecca Loebe

Strongest Team: Team Adam (Devon Barley, Javier Colon, Jeff Jenkins, Casey Weston)

Weakest Team: Team Christina (Raquel Castro, Frenchie Davis, Lily Elise, Beverly McClellan). Seriously, I’m pretty sure a team made up of Adam’s rejects (Casey Desmond, Rebecca Loebe, Tim Mahoney, Angela Wolff) would beat this team.

If Each Team Could Pick an Additional Wild Card: Casey Desmond (Team Adam), Cherie Oakley (Team Christina), Tyler Robinson (Team Blake), Emily Valentine (Team Cee Lo). I’d love to see any of these singers again.

I’m not sure exactly how the live rounds are going to work, but I like a lot of these singers and I’m very interested to see what happens in the coming weeks.

Back to Reality: The Voice

Last fall I wrote about how I was supremely bored with reality television and had stopped watching many of my favorites, including my beloved The Amazing Race. That may be changing, as I am absolutely giddy about The Voice. It remains to be seen whether this love will blossom or fizzle, but I’m eager to see what happens tonight.

The singing competition is an import from Holland and has a few innovative features. Instead of judges, there are four coaches: Christina Aguilera, Cee Lo Green, Adam Levine, and Blake Shelton. In the first round, the coaches pick teams that will then compete in later rounds. The auditions in this phase are blind. The coaches, sitting on rotating chairs, hear the contestants perform and decide if they like them enough to press a button and turn around during the performance. If only one judge turns, the singer joins their team. If more than one judge turns, the singer gets to pick which coach they prefer to work with. If no one turns, the contestant does not move on.

Throughout the competition, the coaches will work with the singers to develop their talent, eventually sending only the best to compete against the other teams. In the (final) live performance phase, the television audience will vote to save one contestant on each team, leaving the coach to decide who they want to save and who will not move on. Finally, one contestant from each coach’s team will compete in the finale.

Really, they had me at blind auditions. I loved the concept from the first I heard of it. One of the biggest flaws in the judging of American Idol was both Simon’s and Paula’s tendency to be swayed by a contestant’s looks. I also love that the coaches can’t just give bland positive feedback; they have to actually commit to the singers. And, unlike American Idol, these contestants have actually been screened for talent, so there are no “bad” auditions.

What has been really interesting is watching the judges during the auditions and seeing the decision play across their face. Does this person really have a unique talent? Does it make sense for me to work with them? If I don’t turn, will I be sorry? If I do, will I be sorry?

And, of course, one gets to play along: What would make me turn? Why are they taking so long? Who is Blake Shelton and why have I never known about this man? Why is Christina Aguilera ending up with such a bad team? What the hell is Carson Daly doing on this show?

These and other questions may be answered tonight (Tuesday) at 9pm on NBC.

John Marcher, I hope you are watching this.

A Spelling Bee for Cheaters

On Thursday, 826 Valencia presented A Spelling Bee for Cheaters at the Herbst Theatre, raising over $100,000 for their writing center. I went primarily to cheer on a friend (who ended up finishing second—congratulations Sunil!), not realizing it would be one of the most entertaining nights out I’ve had in a long time.

Individually (usually celebrities) or in teams, contestants raised funds for the ability to cheat during the competition. Only one person from each team competed as a speller. The cheating menu included:

• Free letter ($500): You get a one-letter hint (limit 3 in a row).

• Try again ($750): Spelled your word wrong? You get to try it one more time.

• Ask your team ($1,000): Ask your team (or the audience) for their opinion.

• Look it up ($1,500): You may consult the dictionary for 15 seconds.

• Free pass ($5,000): You may skip to the next round without spelling your word (Adam Savage from Mythbusters used this on putsch).

No cheating was allowed in the final round.

The competition was hosted by some of the creators of the Tony-award winning 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, who provided hilarious color commentary on the words and spellers, including extremely creative model sentences, as for palaestra (a public place in ancient Greece or Rome devoted to the training of wrestlers and other athletes; “What happens in the palaestra, stays in the palaestra.”), Spaniard (a person form Spain; “Billy giggled when he learned the Spaniards were once a world power.”), and kumkum (a powder used for social and religious markings in Hinduism; “Mary, put down that kumkum, we're Episcopalian.”).

Celebrities included the aforementioned Adam Savage, who made it to the final three, singer Tracy Chapman, who went out on gidgee (a small Australian acacia tree), and authors Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket) and Michael Chabon—the latter going out on kurdaitcha (an Australian aboriginal word for the emu-feather shoes worn on vengeance missions) after correctly spelling kraal (an Afrikaans and Dutch word for an enclosure for cattle or other livestock) in an earlier round. One celebrity I didn’t recognize was singer Thao Nguyen, who not only correctly spelled evaginate (to turn inside out; “Evaginate.com is not the website you think it is.”), but also sang a song using one of her words, locomotive. I loved her voice and unique style and will definitely seek out her music in the future.

There were certainly a few easy words (cow, jihad, spaniard), words I thought were easy because of French or Italian (oubliette, crepuscule, cenacle), other words I might have gotten through cheating (capybara, astrobleme, kulak), but then a whole lot of “are you kidding me?” words like kurdaitcha that I mostly can't remember. It was great fun and everybody was a good sport and in good humor. This group has done this gig in other cities, so if it comes to a theater near you, don’t miss it. I also think the cheating concept alone could be scaled down to use as a general fundraiser.

Comfort TV

I’ve spent much of this week home sick with a bad cold. Not feeling particularly awful, but rather completely exhausted. While you might think this was a perfect recipe for catching up on the remaining films in my Oscar blitz, I just wasn’t feeling up to watching them, or anything really. But then I remembered I had all those episodes of Downton Abbey saved up on the dvr.

Like comfort foods that you only eat when you’re sick, or feeling nostalgic, Downton Abbey proved to be the ultimate comfort television, managing to weave together my Titanic obsession, love of drawing-room shenanigans and questions of entail, and appreciation for the upstairs/downstairs mix found in Agatha Christie mysteries and books like Mary Reilly. And, as a bonus, gorgeous clothes.

I was thrilled to learn that a second season is already in production. If you missed this gem during its PBS outing, be sure to catch it on DVD.

In the meantime, do you have any comfort books, movies, or television you turn to when sick?

La Ciccia

I don’t normally write about food here, but I had such an amazing dinner earlier this week, I just had to. La Ciccia is a Sardinian restaurant located on the edge of Noe Valley near Glen Park. It was recently featured in a New York Times article on San Francisco Italian restaurants, but I’ve wanted to try it since it was featured on Check, Please! Bay Area. Seeing everyone on that show praising the restaurant so highly, and having recently watched the Sardinia episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, where everything he ate looked so incredibly delicious, La Ciccia quickly moved to the top of my list of restaurants to try. However, it took me some time to get there since most of my restaurant budget these past few months has been devoted to pre- or post-theater excursions.

In any case, I finally went, and it was delicious.  For antipasti, we started off with a plate of prosciutto, Sardinian flat bread, and an octopus stew in a spicy tomato sauce.  Despite being in public, I couldn’t resist “saucing” my plate, as they say in France. (Yes, the French have a verb for soaking up the sauce on your plate with your bread, and, while acceptable at home, one shouldn’t do it in a restaurant.)  For primi, we had two of Bourdain’s favorite dishes, Spaghittusu cun Allu Ollu e Bottariga (bottarga is a dried fish roe that is shaved over the fresh pasta) and Malloreddus a sa Campidanese (semolina gnochetti with a pork ragu). I think they’ve spoiled me for all other pastas; I would go back for either of those in a heartbeat. As a secondo, we shared the sea bream special. I’m not a huge fan of fish, but I really enjoyed this simple preparation. To finish, we shared the Truta de Arriscottu, a ricotta and saffron cake served with honey and almonds, a perfect dessert that wasn’t too sweet. To me, it had a taste very similar to madeleines, although no Proustian side effects. The wine suggested by our waiter (random side note: a gorgeous man from Milan), a lovely Cannonau, or Grenache, went perfectly with the food.

Heaven, absolute heaven.

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

As many of you know, I spent Thanksgiving in Pasadena with friends, one of whom introduced me to the joy that is Slings and Arrows (appropriately, her own blog is called Little But Fierce). I had heard about this Canadian comedy for years, but had conflated it in my mind with Due South (both star Paul Gross), a show I had sampled but wasn’t much interested in.

Slings and Arrows revolves around the fictitious New Burbage Festival, a stand-in for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival just outside of Toronto—and believe me, I’m now kicking myself for not checking this festival out when I was in nearby Kitchener-Waterloo. Each season (there are three, with six episodes each) the local company takes on a different play, first Hamlet, then Macbeth, and finally King Lear, with the arc of the season somewhat mimicking the play itself. If you have any interest in theatre, particularly Shakespeare, hie thee to Netflix to add this remarkable show to your queue.

Shakespeare has been much on my mind of late. For starters, Macbeth was one of my book challenge should-reads for the year (being the only one of the major tragedies that I hadn’t read). I hadn’t liked it when I read it back in March, as the misogyny really struck me forcibly at the time. However, that may have been due to the type of books I had been reading in February, which had a distinctly feminist slant.

However, I recently revisited the story with the BBC film that aired on PBS this fall and was forced to reconsider my opinion. The film stars Patrick Stewart and updates the setting to a 1930s(ish) Scotland. Unsurprisingly, Stewart gives an incredible performance (I will never forget being blown away by his one-man show of A Christmas Carol years ago), but the real revelation for me was Kate Fleetwood as Lady Macbeth—she really brought the character alive. Also, transforming the witches into hospital nurses was a truly inspired touch; they brought just the right amount of modern creepiness. If you didn’t get a chance to catch this on PBS, try to watch it when it comes out on DVD this January. You won’t be disappointed.

West Coast Story

This week (as a sort of belated birthday present), I attended the new touring revival of West Side Story at the Orpheum. The conceit of this version is that it’s grittier and more authentic than the original, primarily through the extended use of Spanish by the Puerto Rican characters.

I thought the concept worked well as a whole, but that may have been because I was so familiar with the story and songs. Given that there were no translations made available, nor any supertitles, and that a few key plot points were in Spanish, I have to wonder if someone new to the show would be able to fully appreciate the story. However, after a day when the bilingual nature (in fact, trilingual, when you throw Chinese into the mix) of our city was on full display, with the highlighting of the Spanish-speaking announcers and players in the parade and celebration of Los Gigantes, the updated musical seemed a fitting close to the day. Of course, as someone who daily works in multiple languages, I’m always eager to see new displays of mixed language use.

I got another pleasant surprise when it turned out that one of the Jets was none other than Neil Haskell, of So You Think You Can Dance fame. It was a good thing, as I hadn’t realized just how much dancing there actually was in this musical (having only known it through the movie version). And dancing was certainly the highlight here; although, as often seems to happen in San Francisco, the rustle-tussle of the gang fighting took on new meaning. Unavoidably, given the small orchestra, Bernstein’s lovely music got short shrift, which was a disappointment. But, all in all, it was an enjoyable, if a bit overly dramatic, show.

Bored with Reality

I’m a big fan of Reality TV. Or, at least I thought I was. But I’ve been wondering lately if its time has past. Is it me, or has reality television become really boring?

I should start off by saying that, by reality, I primarily mean competitive shows. And by competitive shows, I mean ones based on actual talent and skills, judged by actual experts. In other words, So You Think You Can Dance, but not Dancing with the Stars. I did used to watch The Amazing Race, but when it became all about the casting, instead of the racing, I gave it up.

I have little interest in documentary-style reality, although I will cop to watching most of the first season of Toddlers and Tiaras—I just couldn’t look away. Hoarders could be interesting, but I think it would give the neat-freak in me seizures, or at least nightmares. In the past, I’ve enjoyed some self-improvement shows, mostly What Not to Wear and Clean Sweep, but these quickly became repetitive to me.

Is competitive reality suffering the same fate? Why do I no longer care who wins American Idol, Project Runway, or Top Chef? (Well, that’s not exactly true, Mondo needs to win Project Runway, but does anyone come close to him?) We’ve gotten to the point on most of these shows that the talent pool is incredible, but did anyone find their latest seasons interesting?

Are they pushing too hard on So You Think You Can Dance? Have they run out of good challenge ideas for Top Chef? Are the contestants too savvy and self-aware? Has stunt casting backfired? In short, can these shows be saved?

Or should I just be happy that I’ve discovered Modern Family and Parenthood?