June 30, 2005
Et tu, Slate?
I love Slate.com - Today's Papers is the best source for a smart, cross-referenced news snapshot you'll find - but they frequently tend towards being overly clever or perverse for the sake of perversity. One method is attacking a widely loved phenomenon and trying to show why it's actually Not All That, as in their current headline decrying Shakespeare in the Park.
I mean, where's the beef? It's free, the actors are top-notch (and frequently A- or B-List Hollywood), and they always put an interesting spin on the classic Shakespearean story (in the past two years, Henry V was played largely as a WWII war movie, while Much Ado About Nothing was remade into a Southern plantation drama). Yet apparently this is all for nought, because the hoi polloi don't or won't appreciate the higher order effects of Shakespearean art and might undeservedly feel cultured for a night.
For someone so concerned with people getting nuance and underlying messages, the author seems frightfully oblivious to the goddamn point.
Posted by ben at June 30, 2005 07:37 AM