Department of Amplification

The Day Job reports having received this message from one Ross Partridge, regarding my Tribeca review of Baghead:
wow- speaking of "generational" reporting- Phil Nugent( perhaps child to Ted which may possibly explain it) should actually read the writing on the wall(or credits)for that matter before being allowed to review a movie. Jay and Mark did not star in Baghead. Although, I can guarantee if they did, they would have been amazing, at the very least, pitch perfect accurate with their delivery... unlike your
writer.
I'm afraid that Mr. Patridge has me dead to rights on this one. In actual fact, the homely, appallingly needy, whimpering brother in the film is played by Steve Zissis, whose name would be worth many points in Scrabble, and the repellently smarmy, pretty-boy dumbass brother is played by Ross Partridge. I feel awful about the error and have no good excuse for it, except to note that Ross Patridge, the actor--he played "Milo Shaughnessy" on As the World Turns and "Curious Man" in The Lost World: Jurassic Park--really does look a lot like Mark Duplass, if you squint and turn your head funny, although it's probably true that, as Ross Patridge, the e-mail correspondent readily admits in his message, Mark Duplass probably would have done a much better job with his delivery. (Ironically, once you somehow get the mistaken impression that the film's directors are playing the lead roles, it becomes easier to believe it's so when you're watching the movie, since it would provide an explanation for why the directors didn't fire the lead actors.) Really, though, it was an unforgivable blunder on my part, and nothing, not even the fact that it was very hard to concentrate with all the snoring in the theater and the people charging over my knees and lurching in front of the screen as they made a break for the exit, can excuse it. (One poor bastard in the front row was so desperate to escape after the first fifteen minutes that, in the dark theater, he went tearing out of his seat like a rocket and literally ran--KAPOW! straight into the wall, which for a while there was on my list of the five most entertaining things I saw at Tribeca.) Mind you, as I said in my review, I thought the movie itself had a fair share of chuckles and was kind of cute up until the last twenty minutes or so--about a third of its running time--when it matched up all too well with the male leads. At first, I thought that the baffling reference to "'generational' reporting" by Mr. Patridge meant that he thinks that Baghead's meandering, half-assed quality, which pulls it into the mire in the concluding sequences, are specially pitched at a hip twenty-something sensibility and that I'd love it a lot more if I didn't have one foot in the grave, but then I looked him up at IMDB and it turns out that he's actually a few months older than me, so now I'm guessing that he meant that he'd like to take me over his knee. My loss if that never actually happens.
I've sometimes been accused to of taking criticism too much in stride by some of my more wild-eyed Internet colleagues, but my feeling is that, while we all make honest mistakes, a mistake is a mistake, and one hardly gains in stature by trying to dodge responsibility for them. I fucked up; the post in question has been corrected, and I apologize and resolve to do better in the future. The only thing that tempted me to reveal just the teeniest trace of exasperation this time is the tone adopted by Ross Partridge, the correspondent, which, while strikingly in keeping with the "I am an asshole, but enough about you" vibe that Ross Partidge the actor conveys so perfectly in the movie, did seem to me to be scaled a little out of proportion to the actual offense. But then I realized that when a scathing, lacerating wit such as that possessed by Ross Partridge, the correspondent, reveals itself, you just have to get out of the way and let it express itself. The world would be poorer by far if it had been denied the full throttle attack of an Oscar Wilde, a Jonathan Swift, a Lenny Bruce, a Ross Partidge. Think of it: this is someone who, looking to lean in for the kill, had the devastating inspiration and the ballsiness to go right for the jugular and point out that I have the same last name as a rock star and gun enthusiast who I have never met and to who I am not in fact related, though I do loves me some "Wango Tango." In playing the Nuge card, Ross Partridge the correspondent has shown himself to be every bit as much a master of creative invective as everyone I knew in fifth grade, everyone I knew in sixth grade, everyone I knew in seventh grade, everyone I knew in eight grade, everyone I knew in high school, everyone I knew in college who lived in a dorm, and three thousand of the people I identified myself to over the phone while working as a phone pollster for The New York Times, including the guy who, in response to my asking him, two months into the Iraq war, if he thought things were going better, worse, or as well as he'd expected, replied, "To be honest, a little worse. Hell, they're just sand monkeys!" It boggles the mind to imagine what kind of new-style equivalent to the Algonquin Round Table we might have if only that guy and Ross Partridge, the correspondent, could be persuaded to grab a sandwich together. Though if that had happened before Baghead was made, the sand-monkeys guy might well have been offered Ross Partridge the actor's part.
I was a little surprised to see Jack Shafer's article in Slate in which he accused obituary writers of "slobbering" over Robert Rauschenberg, and a brief notice by one of my favorite working art critics, Jed Perl, who slagged the artist's achievement. (Shafer did link to a piece by Roger Kimball belittling Rauschenberg in The New Criterion, but that doesn't surprise me at all.) I have no objection to people saying that Rauschenberg-worship is out of control or even that he wasn't all that, but Shafer, who showed more of a sense of moderation when he pissed people off a couple of years back when he complained that the obituaries for David Halberstam didn't do enough to stress that the ego that made Halberstam a maverick reporter in his youth did him fewer favors when he became a comfortable, best-selling member of the journalistic establishment, professes to be bewildered that no critic has used the occasion of Rauschenberg's death to question the value of any of his major works--"not his White Painting, not his "black painting," not his Automobile Tire Print, not his screenprints, not his Mud Muse, and not his "cardboards." Perl bores in from the opposite direction, declaring that "I cannot see that there is any poetry or power in Rauschenberg's work," period. He adds, "The merest suggestion that the juxtapositions of objects and images in Rauschenberg's paintings, sculptures, and prints are nothing more than arbitrary has left one open to the accusation of being a conservative or a reactionary. And once you have been called those names, you are out of the discussion." It's disappointing to see a published critic who's given free rein to say whatever he wants in a major magazine claiming that, because nobody recognizes how wrong they've been all these years and falls down in remorse upon learning that they disagree with him, his influential and widely disseminated opinion isn't really part of "the discussion." It underlines the real problem, which is that Perl and Shafer and company don't want a "discussion" of Rauschenberg; they want everyone to agree with them and then never mention him again.
But at least Perl--like Jim Lewis, whose measured and reasonable take on Rauschenberg, a very model of the sort of thing that Shafer complains doesn't exist, can be found in, um, Slate--is speaking straight about his thoughts and feelings. Shafer's piece has a rancid stink of willful disingenuousness to it. "You'd expect that an artist who deliberately courted controversy might rouse a little debate on the event of his death." Shafer bills himself as Slate's "media critic." His piece appeared yesterday, when Rauschenberg had been dead a day. Shafer was, I believe, alive and sentient when Nixon died; I know that he was working for Slate when they decided to put their Dubya-mocking "Bushims" feature in mothballs in the wake of 9/11, a choice that presumbaly had less to do with the editors' belief that the president's imbecility was a less important issue after the attacks had bestowed upon him the powers of a god than a feeling that if they kept making fun of him at that time, they might be beaten on the streets, or on the set of Fox talk shows, by angry mobs. If there is any part of Shafer genuinely capable of "expecting" that the very first death notices published in the wake of the passing of a legendary and celebrated figure in any field would be full of negative re-evaluations of his work, then the site ought to hire a media critic who's not from Mars.




