Now let me try to answer the question you might be asking yourself at this point: was I boring? Yes, I might have been. In hindsight, I probably should have read a few pages from my book to give the audience a feel for it, and I did struggle with a few explanations. But I was not lazy and neither was Deborah. We were both working very hard at our task.
I have no doubt that, in time, and with some cooperation from the audience, we would have achieved ignition. I have been performing a long time, and I can tell when the audience’s attention is straying. I do not need a note. My mind was already churning like a weather front; at that moment, if I could have sung my novel to a Broadway beat I would have.
But I can’t help wondering what we might have said if we hadn’t been stopped. Maybe we were just around the corner from something thrilling. Isn’t that the nature of a live conversation? It halts, it stutters, it doubles back, it soars. We might have found a small nugget, something off topic or unexpected, that wouldn’t have warranted the refund that was offered.
Saturday, December 4, 2010
DID YOU DO THE MONKEY? In Sunday's NYT, Steve Martin defends himself:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Or, to put it another way, "Excuuuuuuuuuse Me!"
ReplyDeleteHate Deborah Solomon and want to put thi s all on her, but every time I want to give Steve Martin the benefit of the doubt on something involving good judgment (not that I feel her requires it very often, ignoring this fracas) I remember: he dated Anne Heche for two years.
ReplyDeleteTo repost (with my name this time) something I noted in the previous thread:
ReplyDelete<span>My parents attended one of the remote simulcasts up in Great Barrington, Mass. They said that they spent almost the whole interview cringing uncomfortably because Deborah Solomon was SO awful -- talking too much, offering inane follow-up comments, failing to read obvious cues from Steve Martin, and generally making the whole event about her. When my parents left the theater, they ran into the woman who'd organized the simulcast, and she agreed that all the blame lay on Solomon (not on Martin or the Y).</span>
To follow up on Martin's op-ed: He and Solomon may be friends and they may have done this sort of chat before, but my parents (and the simulcast organizer) firmly believe that he was quietly seething during the interview -- even before The Note was passed to Solomon -- because of how poorly she was doing her job. In the op-ed, Martin gallantly tries to take most of the blame himself, but that's not how the humble viewers of Great Barrington saw it in real time.
Good judgment, no, humorous and sometimes soulful reflection on bad judgment, yes. But by the time this is in a book or movie form it'll be unrecognizable.
ReplyDelete(Full disclosure, I love Steve Martin for the high points and forgive the lows readily.)
But maybe Art-cap-A is his undoing. Maybe he did the Pink Panther to fund his Picasso habit. ...Maybe there's a movie in that?
Pink Panther 2, Cheaper by the Dozen 1 and 2, Sgt Bilko, Bringing Down The House ...
ReplyDeleteLALALALALALALAAALALALAAAAAAAAICAN'THEARYOU...!!!
ReplyDeleteWith staff like Solomon, it's hard not to assume that a significant chunk of the payroll at the NYT owe their positions to their social network, the dinner parties they throw, and the like, rather than their skills at journalism or cultural analysis.
ReplyDeleteOutside of this incident, generally speaking, social friends rarely make good interviewer-interviewee combos. Not that good interviews must be antagonistic, but seems like friends forget that their knowledge of each other isn't shared by the audience, and they fail to fill-in the blanks.
Since the 90s, Martin seems to have operated on a "one for the paycheck, one for me" sort of model, though the "one for me" hasn't always been a movie--the three novels, the memoir, the banjo album, the couple of plays he's written, etc. A couple of times, he's managed to fuse what I assume was a good paycheck with some degree of art--It's Complicated, Bowfinger.
ReplyDelete