Word: memoriam
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...Sept. 11, goes the saying, did not kill 3,000 people; they killed one person 3,000 times. But TV has focused mostly on Sept. 11's enormity: CBS's 9/11 celebrated the hundreds of fire fighters who died at the World Trade Center; HBO's forthcoming In Memoriam gives a God's-eye view of the Giuliani administration's response. The event was so massive, its effects so sweeping and its images so staggering, that like the fallen towers themselves, it defies human scale...
...course the Oscars are a waste of time - God bless them! - they were always a waste of time. They're a meaningless celebration of spoiled rich people, their self-entitlement, their vulgarity, sanctimony and vanity. (Later, Kevin Spacey introduced the annual In Memoriam roll of clips of dead movie personalities by asking for a few seconds of silence for the victims of Sept. 11; apparently that was considered a roughly equal trade.) They're pretty much the sort of thing that caused the Taliban to outlaw all those TV sets. But that's what makes them American; that...
...problem. We want the things we hate about the show. The dirty secret is that we want the Academy Awards to be boring - we want, and we watch every year, the slow, predictable rituals that mark another year of our leisure time past. We want the In Memoriam roll. We want Dino De Laurentiis receiving the Irving Thalberg Home Audience Mass Sedation Award. We want the speech from the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. We want that four hours of tedium, the better to set off that one perverse moment of total surprise...
...Alison Lurie '47, a close friend of Gorey's for many years, sums up in a memoriam published in the New York Review of Books, her tribute to Gorey's lifetime accomplishments: "Often, characters in Gorey's books who die or disappear leave only a void behind: empty cross-hatched streets and withered formal gardens and rooms with strange wallpaper. We are luckier...
...running over to shake the hands of the Marises, whose father had been resented for breaking Babe Ruth's record without a Babe Ruth career. McGwire spoke of Maris to the press, making sure his predecessor, on whom he probably only recently got briefed, finally got his due in memoriam. McGwire was making sure, even in his moment of pure exultation and relief, that he did the right thing. Hug son, hug teammates, hug ex-wife, hug Marises and, oh, yeah, touch first base...