Judges, Potato Chips And Best Of Lists

Tag : Making Potato Chips
June 26, 2008
I'm so disgusted with the judges on So You Think You Can Dance.

I don't take back any of the good things I said about them before they're still the most thoughtful and helpful judges on any of thecurrent talent shows.

But everybody has a bad day. And last week was a terrible one.

Eliminating Susie Garcia made sense. While she is likeable, shesimply does not have the versatility that is essential to thisshow.

Garcia's partner, Marquis Cunningham, however (born in Cumberland,North Carolina, by the way), is another story. He is anextraordinarily talented lyrical dancer, who has trained his bodyto do amazing things. He is expressive, fluid, masculine, graceful.

So last Thursday he was "dancing for his life." In his 30 secondshe threw himself into an exuberant dance that showed his mostpowerful moves, including his ability to rise to his feet from akneeling position over the tops of his toes.

His performance left us gasping. We replayed it immediately. Hisdance was a thing of beauty.

The judges unanimously rejected him on the grounds that his dancewas a "series of tricks."

We were stunned. The whole point of "dancing for your life" is todo your best stuff. Breakers and poppers do all their tricks atsuch times, and the judges say, "You showed us why you made it ontothis show." Well, Cunningham's virtuosity is what got him onto theshow  what was he supposed to do, not use his most unusual andpowerful movements?

In 30 seconds it's not as if anyone can do a full, coherent dance.Furthermore, these dancers did not come here as choreographers.That's why the show hires choreographers to come in and directthem. So why would they reject Cunningham for a flawlessperformance of his coolest stuff, on the grounds that hischoreography was lacking?

Here is my guess: All three men were superb. (In fact, most of themen are far and away better than most of the women this year. Itjust happened that way.) They didn't want to get rid of any ofthem. But Cunningham was Garcia's partner. Since she was leaving,the least disruptive decision would be to bounce her partner aswell.

Besides, Marquis Cunningham was one of the two most skilled dancersin the show this year  and the other one, Debbie Allen'sprotégé, is the judges' pet. Since Cunningham is far morelikeable than Will Wingfield, it seems as if the judges might have,consciously or un-, taken the opportunity to get rid of him so thathe couldn't, through some fluke, spoil their plan of having WillWingfield as the sole contemporary dancer in the finals.

Yet Marquis is everything they claimed to be looking for. How doyou get rid of someone like that?

You demean and insult him by calling his glorious hard-earnedskills "tricks" and dismissing his dance as nothing but a "series"of them. When they said what they did, it's as if they slapped hisface  he looked stunned and hurt. It was the cruelest thing I'veever seen a judge do  not even Simon Cowell has hurt someone likethat  and they did it to a performer who had just executed aflawless dance that no other dancer on that show could have done.

It was so out of character for these judges. I am still angry aboutit. To treat him so dismissively ...

And on top of that, the camera work last week was obtrusive andham-handed. Somebody apparently told the director of the show thatit was no longer a dance show, it was a camera show.

The idea of dance is that the choreographer and the dancers movebodies rhythmically through space.

But when the camera keeps doing closeups, we don't get to see thatbody motion through space. When it keeps showing only one of thedancers, we don't get to choose whom to look at, or to see whereour eye would naturally go. When the camera swirls around them,then it's the camera that's dancing, and it distracts from the veryart that we wanted to see.

Changing from one angle to another  from one motionless camera toanother  is occasionally helpful, especially if the director hasseen the dance before and knows when one angle will be better thananother.

But constant movement of the camera, or any movement at all thatforces us to look at only one tiny part of the dance instead ofallowing us to see the whole of it, makes as much sense as if, onAmerican Idol, the audio engineer occasionally focused on oneaccompanying instrument, shutting out all the others, so thatinstead of hearing the entire musical experience, we got only onetrack at a time.

I hope they get that camera under control, or I'm afraid I won'tbother watching for the whole season. As it is, their stupid reasonfor ousting Marquis Cunningham and their cruel way of saying ithave made me want to avoid the show anyway.

On the final show of this past season, Simon Cowell apologized toDavid Cook for his overly negative comments after the finals  andproperly so. These judges owe Marquis Cunningham a far more ferventapology. They can't put him back on the show, but they can admitthat their stated reason for booting him was flatulent.

....

Speaking of things that ruin the art of dance, I have to say thatone thing So You Think You Can Dance got right was when they showedus, in the auditions, how the dancers who were watching treatedtheir fellow contestants.

They gave them the respect of complete, silent attention duringtheir dance, so that their concentration was never broken; onlyafter the dance was over did they show their admiration by applausecommensurate with the performance.

By contrast, in the dance-school recitals I've attended inGreensboro, I have been irked  and sometimes infuriated  by theway the dancers who were watching constantly cheered and shoutedand whistled and catcalled. Supposedly they were doing this "insupport of" the performers  but the effect was indistinguishablefrom the rudest kind of heckling.

It makes the dancing schools in Greensboro look amazingly ignorant,that they permit their students to behave in such a low-class way.Art is not athletics. You cheer to encourage an athletic team; yourespect artists  even student artists  by doing nothing todistract from what they're creating.

I wish the dancing schools in our town would teach their studentsto respect the art they're supposedly being taught.

Athletics, you see, is not about the relationship between playersand the audience  it's about the conflict between teams. But theperforming arts are not competitive, they're creative  and theaudience is there to receive the art as it is meant to be received.In the case of dance, that means you hear the music and see themovement and nothing else.

Maybe this is how "competitive" dance works everywhere. If so, thenit bears about the same relationship to the art of dance asconstruction worker catcalls bear to the art of oratory.

....

Best new potato chip: From Good Health Natural Foods, the Chileanlime flavor Avocado Oil Potato Chips. They didn't go overboard withthe lime flavoring, and the avocado oil affects the flavor only forthe better. We've tested it with quite a few people now, and it's afavorite.

....

Entertainment Weekly's double issue for June 27 and July 4 touts"the New Classics"  supposedly the 1,000 best movies, TV shows,albums, books and other stuff from the past 25 years.

As a retrospective, it's a great collection, and it's fun to browsethrough it and remember things you might have forgotten. It's alsofun to argue with friends about whether they got their choicesright or not.

But their section on books was an embarrassment. This is nosurprise  the book reviewing in EW has never been anything otherthan spotty. But this time the writers embarrassed themselves byshowing how completely enslaved they are to the elitist tastes ofEnglish majors who believed in all the nonsense their professorssaid.

In short, they tried as hard as they could to pretend that theirlist was for The New York Review of Books rather than EntertainmentWeekly.

Here's the problem: The New York Times Book Review and The New YorkReview of Books have, between them, a corner on the elitistsneering snob review rag. Entertainment Weekly is supposed to besomething else  it's supposed to be about what ordinaryintelligent people enjoy. Not what they're impressed by, but whatthey love.

So what do they choose as the best novel of the past 25 years?

The first bad sign is that it's a book that was only published in2006. The second bad sign is that it's by a nearly unreadablecritics' darling.

Every time I hear about how brilliant Cormac McCarthy is, I pick upone of his books and try to slog through the pretentious,self-displaying prose. The problem is that he's so in love with hisown writing that he hardly needs a spectator. I give him credit fornot being as egregiously dumb as Jonathan Franzen, who writes likea precocious 14-year-old  and who also made their list  but thisis truly, deeply bad writing, folks. It only impresses people whoread fiction in order to be impressed.

The actual content of The Road is like Margaret Atwood's TheHandmaid's Tale  the author moves into territory that sciencefiction writers have been working with  brilliantly, I might add for two generations, and without any sign that they have botheredto read any of the excellent works that pioneered this kind ofsubject matter, the author shows off his or her ineptitude with thepride of a Shirley Temple imitator. Look what I thought of!

Oh, how cute. But it's already been done, by smarter people andbetter writers than you.

Then again, Handmaid's Tale also made their list. So at leastthey're consistent.

When J.K. Rowling moved into middle-grades fantasy, she read a lotof what had gone before. She also borrowed from a lot of it, butimitation is the sincerest form of flattery  and she certainlygave it her own turn.

The EW writers could not ignore Harry Potter in their list  themost popular publishing phenomenon of the past 25 years cannot beoverlooked, despite their longing to be taken seriously by thesnobs.

They solved this dilemma by choosing the fourth book in the series,Goblet of Fire, and dismissing the books that came before as "purekid stuff." With Goblet she supposedly went "epic and dark killing children, resurrecting evil and sending Harry to war."

Excuse me ... but weren't Harry's parents murdered right at thestart? There was plenty of darkness from the beginning. Thesereviewers are reporting on their own attitudes, to call it "kidstuff." If it took them until book four to realize what was goingon, it just means they're second-rate readers.

Their book list is also padded with late-in-the-game works bywriters whose important work was all prior to the 25-year framethey had chosen. Thus we get minor Philip Roth and John Updike perhaps because they would have felt bad about leaving teacher'spets like these out of the list.

And they showed how easily they're fooled by pretentious tricks(yes, I know that this is right after I criticized the So You ThinkYou Can Dance judges for using that term  but I'm right, and theyweren't). Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is an incoherent mess ofa story  but it touches all the right politically correct buttons,and it's told so awkwardly that it has to be art.

It's a list dominated by ideology and undergraduate tastes. Thebooks they admire are full of trite and easily imitated tricks andtropes  but those tricks and tropes are precisely the"experiments" that the academic-literary elite puts forth as "goodwriting." It isn't; it never was; it never will be. But it willcontinue to be praised by reviewers whose judgments are shaped bywhat they think their friends will think of their opinions.

As William Goldman put it in The Season, many critics suffer fromthe fear that if they ever praise something that their elitistfriends haven't already praised, they leave themselves open to thesneer: "So that's what you like!"