May 28

Bartenders are far more powerful than waiters, which is one reason why I liked bartending. Waiters have to go to customers to receive instructions, which defines them as subservient and makes them prone to abuse. But bartenders command the room from their fortress, the bar; customers have to come to them to get something they (often badly) want, and the bartender has the right to not serve them or to cut them off if they are unworthy. No wonder bartenders have a mystique (and consequently get laid a lot); they have real power in their domain. In the New York Times, Frank Bruni profiles master bartender Doug Quinn of P.J. Clarke's. Love the bow tie look!

Mr. Quinn wears pastels, sometimes with French cuffs and cufflinks, and always, always with a vividly colored bow tie — it’s his thing, plus a bow tie never flies up, flaps around or otherwise slows him down. A forelock of his hair, glistening with product, usually dangles low across his brow. He should be in a carrel at Oxford. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/dining/28bruni.html

Until the recent downturn in commercial real estate (which, as a former broker, I can tell you is going to last a while in most places), the term "mixed-use development" was a hot catch-phrase. Two such projects caught my eye at ArchDaily, the first, the Akerselva Atrium, in Oslo:

The unsettling tilts of the Atrium are of a piece with recent in-your-face expressionist architecture, but I like this better than many such buildings; its humor and style move it out of the pure stunt category. The interior shots at the link are cool, too:

http://www.archdaily.com/61528/akerselva-atrium-nbbj/

The other development is the Broadcasting Place in Leeds, Yorkshire, also a building with genuine panache:

http://www.archdaily.com/61616/broadcasting-place-feilden-clegg-bradley-studios/

When Alain Resnais was filming the bewitching landmark Last Year at Marienbad, actress Francoise Spira (who sadly committed suicide a few years later), documented the production on 8mm. That film has re-surfaced and been assembled into a documentary by the German director Volker Schlondorff:

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-last-year-at-marienbad-documentary.html

The blog Wuthering Expectations, new to my RSS feed, considers Mad Toy by the Argentine novelist Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), whom Martin Seymour-Smith called "a landmark in the history of Latin American literature -- a great writer":

http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2010/05/roaming-city-by-guess-and-by-god-robert.html

http://wutheringexpectations.blogspot.com/2010/05/even-so-it-cannot-have-been-good-for.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Arlt

Arlt's only other novel to be translated into English so far is The Seven Madmen; hopefully more will follow.

Among notables born on this date are novelists Walker Percy, Fred Chappell, and Patrick White (Australia), spy novelist Ian Fleming, poets Thomas Moore and May Swenson, playwright Fritz Hochwalder (Austria), zoologist Louis Agassiz, politician Rudy Giuliani, civil rights activist Betty Shabazz, etiquette expert John Morgan, architect Clough Williams-Ellis (Wales), painter Carl Larsson (Sweden), composer Gyorgy Ligeti, pianist Youri Egorov, baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, bluesman T-Bone Walker, ska musician Prince Buster, singer/songwriter John Fogerty, pop singer Gladys Knight, punk singer Wendy O. Williams, cinematographer Gordon Willis, and actors John Payne, Sondra Locke, Zelda Rubinstein, Carroll Baker, Thora Hird, and Rachel Kempson. It was nervy of Alan Gilbert to cap his first season as music director of the New York Philharmonic with a semi-staged version of Gyorgy Ligeti's great and difficult opera Le Grand Macabre; but all three performances have sold out, and Anthony Tommasini is enraptured by the production:

Here, courtesy of the Philharmonic, was the New York premiere of a piece that by rights the Metropolitan Opera should have produced long ago...Thursday night’s presentation was an exhilarating success, offering an eager and excellent cast, a brilliant and assured performance of Ligeti’s daunting score and a disarming production....The hero of this production, of the whole endeavor, is Mr. Gilbert, who conducted the score with insight, character and command. The Philharmonic players seemed inspired as they executed this complex music with skill and conviction. Mr. Gilbert brought out Ligeti’s wildness. Yet moment after moment was ravishing.... This was an instant Philharmonic milestone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/29/arts/music/29macabre.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/arts/music/24gilbert.html