5.11.2008 New York Times Digest

1. “50 Years of Dizzy, Courtesy of Hitchcock”

“You can’t help wondering what those first Bay Area viewers 50 years ago must have thought as they watched this strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance unfold on the big screen, with the strains of Bernard Herrmann’s lush score — brazenly echoing the ‘Liebestod’ from Wagner’s ‘Tristan and Isolde’ — swelling on the soundtrack. It wasn’t what they had come to expect from Hitchcock, the beloved portly ‘master of suspense,’ who had been making impishly macabre thrillers for 30-some years and had since 1955 also been the host and impresario of a very popular mystery-story anthology series on television.”

2. “At a Haven for Creative Souls, a Prolific Talent Is Affirmed”

“After two months, Mr. Bassett finally entered No. 503 to find that Ms. Grossman was, in fact, fiercely guarding an apartment nearly stuffed to the ceiling with hundreds of boxes, forcing her to live in her hallway and sleep on a deck chair. The boxes turned out to be jam-packed with a voluminous body of artwork, which Ms. Grossman had produced in her prime in New York and Europe.”

3. “Niko Bellic vs. Britney Spears and Indiana Jones”

“Wall Street analysts expected it to sell about five million copies in its first two weeks. Instead, it sold 3.6 million copies in just one day, April 29.”

4. “Gasol Ceding the Spotlight, but Still Shining”

“Bryant communicates with Gasol in Spanish on the court, but that is not why they have clicked. Their collaboration works because they are so fluent in basketball that neither one has to say much to the other.”

5. “For Griffey, the Roads Not Taken”

“His opportunity to challenge Ruth and Aaron has come and gone.”

6. “Take My Wife. Please. I’ll Take Yours.”

“In setting the tone for ‘Swingtown,’ its producers … said they aimed to combine the raucous abandon of Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson’s tongue-in-cheek take on the 1970s porn industry, and the sweetness of ‘The Wonder Years,’ the ABC series (starring Fred Savage) in which a grown man looks back on his upbringing in the late ’60s and early ’70s.”

7. “Mike Tyson Film Takes a Swing at His Old Image”

“But does the public have any appetite left for Mr. Tyson? Muhammad Ali, an Olympic hero with political cachet, has been feted in his postboxing life. Mr. Tyson, on the other hand, has been (unfairly perhaps) dismissed as a mere fighting machine.”

8. “Special Effects From the Real World”

“He acquired the rights to the film, and, he said, ‘I started to collect visuals.’

“‘It took me about 16 years,’ he added. In the meantime, he continued to work in commercials, for clients like Levi’s, Nike and MTV, as well as directing music videos for groups like Green Day and R.E.M.”

9. “1958: The War of the Intellectuals”

“In ‘The Un-Angry Young Men,’ an essay in the British monthly Encounter in 1958, Leslie Fiedler wrote that American popular culture ‘has never been in a duller or less promising condition.’ Meanwhile, ‘everyone, and not least the highbrows, wants to read about popular culture’ — to the point that ‘the study of popular culture threatens itself to become a branch of popular culture.’”

10. “Lexicographical Longing”

“As of now, Oxford University Press has no official plans to publish a new print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.”