By This Logic, I Should Be Teaching Sex Education

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I am having fun teaching Arts Reviewing/Reporting. I teach it in the spirit of the journalist: give me two hours and I will write about anything.

I understand the impudence of such an approach, and how it is an invitation to snark, to know-nothing-ism. Thus, I also insist that the students "write smart" and, in the end, take whatever they are reviewing seriously, though it may be that the only serious part may be what the "art act" says about our culture. Still, give what you are reviewing a chance. Confront it, okay?

But take that insight seriously, I insist.

Today on the Arts Reviewing beat: larks larks larks.

I found this in the Guardian. I steal it, but I steal it for you, as a father steals for his child or Rush Limbaugh steals for his dealer.

'This artist is deeply dangerous'

What would happen if the Guardian's sports and arts writers swapped jobs? In yesterday's G2, arts critics tackled sport. Today, the sports team take on sculpture, opera, dance and music

• The Guardian, Wednesday 18 June 2008
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• Article history

Thomas Castaignède takes in Puccini's Tosca at the Royal Opera House. Produced by Rebecca Lovell Link to this video

Thomas Castaignède, Guardian rugby union columnist who won 54 caps for France between 1995 and 2007, on opera
Tosca at Royal Opera House, London, June 2

Madame Butterfly was my first and last experience of opera, but I was in my early teens and not in the best frame of mind to appreciate it. Adolescence had kicked in, and I was more worried about the girl sitting next to me than what was happening on stage.

So this performance of Tosca was a revelation. I've passed Covent Garden so many times, but I had no idea it was so beautiful inside. As a social phenomenon it surprised me as well - the champagne, the way the audience had dressed up, the feeling that people were there to be seen, as well as to see.

All those years ago I was too young to appreciate opera, so Tosca itself was a new world: the range of human emotions - jealousy, avarice, love, death, despair, hope - all reinforced by the power of the music. I wondered about the creative process behind it: which comes first, the libretto or the music, or are they born together?

Talking afterwards to the tenor Jonas Kaufmann, who played Cavaradossi, I came to the conclusion that there is a parallel between what you feel during a top-class rugby match and what an artist feels on stage - and it's not just the roar of the crowd. The people who are watching influence how you behave: they were viewing Kaufmann and driving him forward, just as they used to inspire me. I could empathise with Kaufmann's total concentration on the performance, and the way he had to become one with the orchestra, who gave him the power to go beyond the norm. There is a physical aspect to opera, certainly; but more than that, on stage you see what in rugby we call "automatisms" - where you become conditioned to move and act by pure instinct. I had a sense of two completely different worlds coming together.

There is an element of theatre in sport - certainly in France, and in French rugby. You are there to bring a smile to the crowds. You want them to have a good afternoon. There is no acceptance of mediocrity. You are putting yourself up to be judged every time you enter the arena.

Opera singers learn new roles with a new company. As a rugby player, I used to have to get to grips with new trainers, tactics and team-mates when moving from one club to another, or whenever I switched mid-season to playing for the French national team or an ad-hoc squad like the Barbarians.

But most of all, what I saw in Tosca was exactly what drew me to sport: the feeling of total passion in the performers. I just love to watch people giving it everything - in any walk of life - which is why, since coming to England, I have even come to appreciate cricket.

Steve Bierley, tennis correspondent, on visual art
Louise Bourgeois at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, May 31

From the top of the Pompidou Centre, Roland Garros - the home of the French Open tennis championship, and my home for a fortnight every spring - was lost in the morning mist. Sport is essentially about youth, and about absolutes. Sport makes you feel elated or depressed. The works of Louise Bourgeois, 97 years old this December, make you feel unsettled, repelled. Roland Garros seemed a million miles away.

Faced with a new sport, which is unusual these days, my first instinct is to ignore the detail. Observe and record; don't get bogged down in too many facts or statistics. So I came to Bourgeois with no prior knowledge of her work, no inkling of the deeply disturbing web she was about to wind around me. Her huge spider, installed on the ground floor, should have been a hint.

Art galleries are not alien territory for me. The US Open brings an annual visit to New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, or the Metropolitan Museum, while the Musée d'Orsay in Paris has long been a favourite. But this was specific. One artist. No escape.

Numerous photographs ran along the wall outside the gallery. Bourgeois the small child, innocent of the first world war; Bourgeois the young woman, with long flowing hair and a sharp beauty; Bourgeois the bird-like octogenarian. As a preparation for what was to come, it had no more relevance than pictures of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal posing at the net before hitting a ball. Oh yes, there she was with Andy Warhol. But she might have been his maiden aunt.

In sport you are always waiting: the great shot, the goal, the end. You are also distanced from the others who watch, the supporters. "Fans with typewriters," an English journalist once scathingly described Scottish football reporters when they were covering their national team. Sports writing demands, though often does not get, degrees of objectivity and balance. But how can you be objective about art? Sport has rarely spooked me. But Bourgeois did, all the time.

Sports journalists only occasionally get to know the people they write about intimately. There is generally no need to explore the correlation or intertwining of the biographical line and its relation to sporting achievement. In the arts, you realise it is a constant focus.

Watch sport and you think about sport. Observe art and you discover yourself. Spirals, nests, lairs, refuges. Bourgeois leads you to dark places you are not sure you want to revisit. Sport is the toyshop; Bourgeois proffers no hint of a welcome. Even the "je t'aime" embroidered on the pillow in one of her claustrophobic rooms seemed like a threat. Rooms inside cages; bones inside glass spheres.

Outside the gallery, on a looped video, Bourgeois speaks about her art as if she were giving a talk to the Llansilin Women's Institute. It should have carried a warning: This woman is deeply dangerous. I go back to the comfort of Roland Garros, though Bourgeois remained a haunting and disturbing presence. I'm still spooked.

William Fotheringham, sports writer (cycling and rugby), on pop
Metronomy at Esquires in Bedford, June 5

It's official: I am a million years old. But I am not the oldest person watching Metronomy in Bedford tonight because, cunningly, I have brought my mate Tim along, and he's older than me. That is only a little bit reassuring, as this is a whole new world. Only the posters advertising the UK Subs and Wilko Johnson - playing last night and tomorrow - are in any way familiar, and that's because they date back 30 years. Everyone appears to be wearing leggings, and the support group are young enough to be my grandchildren. NME has described what I am about to see as "calculator-rock-punk-funk-electro-blimpoid-whatever music". I'm lost and disorientated, but intrigued.

About three numbers into Metronomy's set, once I've realised the distortion in my ears isn't a return of the old tinnitis, I am reminded, as always, that anything live and happening in front of me is good as far as I'm concerned. In sport or music, what's eternally fascinating is how people interact to create an end result. Be it an Olympic cycling team or three guys from Totnes playing music, there are always personalities on show, always a particular way of working. Here, the creative force, Joseph, is somewhat eclipsed on stage (if the gazes of the girls in leggings are to be judged) by the bassist, Gabriel, with his tortured cheekbones. Oscar, the one playing the sax, simply looks round and cuddly.

The trio are wearing semi-circular things on their chests that look just like the battery-powered nightlights I bought my children for camping. When they push the half-globes and they come alight I realise they actually are said nightlights. There's a lot of glowing going on: the lads wear what seem to be LED bike lights on their hands, while the fourth Metronome displays a luminescent Apple logo. It turns out to belong to a Powerbook. It contains samples - a concept with which I have come to terms only recently and reluctantly; and, Joseph explains, "it's the drummer: it doesn't answer back". Obviously a Mac doesn't take drugs or choke on anyone else's vomit. But here it's more than that, it's where it all began, with Joseph messing about on his computer.

I am hooked very quickly. The choreography - a set of clenched fists here, nightlights on all at once there - is slick, but knowing enough to avoid being a Kraftwerk parody. There are influences popping up every second: the Pet Shop Boys, Nirvana, Blur, Joy Division, the Cure, New Romantic stuff I detested 25 years ago, 1970s disco, bits of Balkan Gypsy accordion stuff. Who knows what route it's taken to get here via Joseph and his mates, and who cares? The mix of a driving bassline, high harmonies and electronic tinkling is well-drilled, tight and, at times, utterly infectious.

On the face of it, this isn't like my usual gig - there are no winners and losers. Metronomy are just doing their thing and if I like it, that's up to me. But as a sports writer, you think about more than the simple question of who went home with the prizes. The quality of the performance, emotional and technical, matters as much: on a rugby pitch or a French road, whole-hearted, technically expert artists who create a decent spectacle are what we want to see. And that's what's on show in this Bedford backroom, from three men and their Mac.

Lawrence Donegan, golf correspondent, on classical music
Yefim Bronfman with the San Francisco Symphony performing Brahms at the Louise M Davies Symphony Hall, San Francisco, May 17

The pianist Yefim Bronfman was born in Uzbekistan in 1958, moved to Israel in 1973, and made his debut with the New York Philharmonic five years later. This made him something of a musical boy wonder. The good news is that, 30 years later, he has become a fully grown, middle-aged wonder. I know this because (a) his biography in the concert programme tells me so, and (b) when this concert ended the audience went (and I use the following word advisedly) bonkers. This reaction shocked me, because I had no idea that people who were into classical music were also into going bonkers at the end of a performance. It was a bit like turning up at St Andrews and seeing the crusty old gentlemen of the R&A stage-diving after Tiger Woods holed a putt to win the Open.

I am loath to take issue with this visceral enthusiasm. These people paid good money for their seats, and presumably they knew what they were getting so excited about. Then again, this is my review, and it is my opinion that counts - even though my only previous experience of classical music was an open-air performance of Mozart's Requiem in Chicago's Grant Park on a sultry August night, the most memorable moment of which came when one of my friends turned up with a case of exceptionally cold beer.

Such philistinism notwithstanding, I am bound to say that the second classical concert of my life wasn't as good as I thought it would be. Yefim is a magnificent pianist, as far as I could tell. He played with tremendous energy and enthusiasm, which is more than you can say for most of the golfers I spend my working life watching. Even if he did play any bum notes, which I am sure he didn't, they were lost in an ocean of other notes.

The problem, at least to my cloth ears, is the music. Brahms' Piano Concerto No1 in D minor, the centrepiece of an evening devoted to the composer, has come to be seen as a masterpiece. But as it is longer than three minutes and not as immediately catchy as, say, Be My Baby by the Ronettes, it failed to hold my attention.

This is a terrible admission, no doubt. But in my defence, my attention remained fixed, tangentially at least, on what was going on inside the concert hall - which is to say I spent most of the night pondering why it is I would much rather have spent it watching sport - any sport. The answer, I think, is this: uncertainty. The essence of sport, and therefore of sports writing, is the unscripted nature of its narrative and the uncertainty of its outcome. Yefim Bronfman is a genius, no doubt, but he didn't write his own script - Brahms did - and the ending hasn't changed in the last 150 years, and won't for another 150. Tiger Woods, on the other hand, writes a new concerto every day, each one better than the last.

Kevin McCarra, chief football writer, on contemporary dance
Tero Saarinen's Next of Kin at Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, May 24

It was a surprise to see Avram Grant back in work just hours after Chelsea sacked him. Those doleful features actually belonged to the papier mache head briefly sported by one of the six dancers, but they reminded me of the Israeli football manager. I concede that my mind never roams far, because it's tethered to thoughts of football.

Next of Kin, the latest work by the Finnish choreographer Tero Saarinen, could not drag me into its own world. There were enjoyable aspects, but they all lay in the staging and the eclectic score by Jarmo Saari. At one point, my wife Susan whispered that we had just heard the arpeggio from the Star Trek theme. I doubt if anyone would have dared smirk, even if Saari was aiming for a smile.

To the comfort of this football journalist, there was a post-match press conference. All right, they called it a question-and-answer session, with the public making the inquiries. Saarinen talked about the unmistakable hysteria in the work, but when he spoke of its humour, the audience sniggered - they had found nothing to laugh about. But I had been puzzled when two people got up and left early in the performance. What were they expecting? Modernism is highly traditional. Of course, there were helpings of alienation, angst and sorrow. Thanks to the programme notes, I know there was a theme about personal traumas shaping the decisions we take in our private lives.

I was impressed more by the music and the presentation of the piece. It was performed almost entirely behind a curtain of scrim; the fabric was well-nigh transparent, and its distancing effect gave the action a kind of mythic tone. Saarinen mentioned Bela Lugosi and the influence on the design of expressionist cinema from the 1920s and 1930s.

I had been looking forward to watching the dancing. John Collins, a former Premier League footballer, used to take his daughters to the ballet and was in awe of the dancers' athleticism and sheer fitness. Saarinen, once a star of the Finnish National Ballet, is not so interested in that. The dancers - two men and four women - were kept extremely busy. There was a pas de deux in there (thanks again to Susan for keeping me informed), but melodramatic gesturing was the staple. It felt more like mugging than acting.

Next of Kin is meant to be a tale about the struggle of an individual, but it had no drive or direction. You want existential crisis, Mr Saarinen? I'll give you existential crisis. Three days before, I watched John Terry miss the penalty that would have won the Champions League for Chelsea. Maybe it's a terrible fuss for a supposed grown-up to make about a mere sport, but it was striking to witness a millionaire whose wealth is no consolation when his life has been invested in this game. Saarinen's work did not grip me like that.

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I Think They Call This a Teaching Moment

Those who think I hung the moon and subdivided the stars (with some arbitrage in there somewhere) recall that my students chose Vicky Cristina Barcelona, written and directed by Mr. Woody Allen, as the movie to review in my Arts Reporting and Reviewing class. I have not begun to grade the reviews yet, so in all innocence I asked Ricky what he thought of the movie.

Well, he said, I watched it in Italian.

Ah, I said.

And then he explained in some detail why this was the only version available at the last minute from Netflix. I did not fully understand the explanation, but students have long since learned the reward for intricate, perhaps impenetrable, explanations presented to teacher (like a cat presenting a dead mouse to its patron) is the teacher's inevitable exhausted retreat from further inquiry into circumstance and contingency.

With subtitles? I said, dead game to the last.

No, he said.

But you speak Italian? I said.

No, he said.

Well, there you go, I said. That's a clever angle from which to compose a review, I said, always supportive, particularly when the conversation turns surreal, perhaps Allen-esque, though perhaps more Perlman-esque, and thus in any case blogworthy.

Help! for the Reviewing Class

Pos
I've settled on the basic assignments for my reviewing class.

* first a restaurant review (because it's a combination of straight news story and personal essay and is unapologetically a matter of consumer advice)

* a couple film reviews (first something popular, vulgar even, and then a documentary -- verging on propaganda even -- from USF's own human rights film festival)

* a poetry slam (because I've never been to one and such are synonymous with youthful energy, are they not? and perhaps there will be some 'sticking it to The Man,' an encouragement from which The Man can always benefit)

* a play (because several will be performed on campus by students and directed by faculty, thus giving the students, with the cooperation of our distinguished faculty, the opportunity to drill down into preparation, motivation, etc. and thus learn the extent to which educating themselves about the genre makes them better critics)

* Something from the 'Fine Arts' (because there's the deYoung so close in the park, plus many distinguished faculty ready to lead us down the rabbit hole)

* music (late in the semester because I am a musical illiterate)

* a 'wild card,' meaning one review of the kids' own choosing (because at least one kid wants to review video games)

* a TV series, selected at the first of the semester and followed throughout (because one should never eschew the obvious, and never with your mouth open)

Also, in there will be an interview with a reviewer on the nature of the job.

Ask not what this blog can do for you, dear reader, but what you can do for this blog. I am looking for suggestions for marvelous witty insightful essays related, even tangentially, to the art of the review or to any of the genres reviewed. I've found a couple things by Pauline Kael to use. Teresa Moore, who created this class, pointed me toward something by Anthony Bourdain about what really goes on in a restaurant kitchen that should both educate and entertain the kids.

Indeed, I am probably more interested in the entertainment aspect than is good for my intellectual health. I seem to have run out of patience for that which is only knotty, opaque, difficult. Or, to put it another way, if I have to choose between the obscure brilliance of the original thinker and the glib popularizer of the thing thought, give me glib. If it can't be paraphrased, to hell with it.

Any suggestions?

Postscript: How's this for a first question for the students? How often do you read reviews which make no sense but which you continue to read either because you lack confidence to judge the thing being reviewed or because you lack the confidence to judge the quality of the argument? What do you fear most as you engage reviews, or anything else for that matter: the distorting effect of arrogance or of insecurity?

I Am a Clever Fellow

I'm exchanging emails with my Arts Reporting/Reviewing class (Spring 2009) about which genres they'd like to tackle. I make the final call, of course, but I want to give them what they want.

In moderation.

Anyway, one student asked for both recorded and live music, and I said we'll go with live performance because there's "more stuff for those of us with two left ears."

Two left ears. Never heard that before. Googled it. Only 243 hits.

Not bad.