Category: The Arts

My favorite things Honduran

1. The best known Honduran painter is Jose Antonio Velásquez, here is a typical image.

2. America Ferrara, who plays Betty in Ugly Betty, is of Honduran parents.  I like that show, I don’t love it.

3. This guy did lots of scientific work, including the laying of some foundations for Viagra, and he married a Belgian princess.  I’ve yet to benefit from his existence.

Plus I would cite a few personal acquaintances, past and present, of whom I am very fond.  That’s what I can think of folks, and I wouldn’t have found #3 without Google.  This website assures us "There are famous people from Honduras," although the link to the list of them is broken.

I have also read one short story from Honduras, from an anthology of Latin American short stories; it is entitled "Malaria."

I might add I am very fond of airfares to Honduras; right now the roundtrip is cheaper than the one way shuttle to New York City.  And maybe the flight is quicker too, no holding patterns over LaGuardia!

Most of all I like places where no one else goes, and I expect this short weekend trip to be very worth its while.

Kottke interview of Cory Doctorow

Joel Turnipseed blogging at Kottke asks, why give away books for free?  Cory responds:

…we live in a century in which copying is only going to get easier. It’s the 21st
century, there’s not going to be a year in which it’s harder to copy than this
year; there’s not going to be a day in which it’s harder to copy than this day….And so, if
your business model and your aesthetic effect in your literature and your work
is intended not to be copied, you’re fundamentally not making art for the 21st
century. It might be quaint, it might be interesting, but it’s not particularly
contemporary to produce art that demands these constraints from a bygone era….

So that’s the artistic reason. Finally, there’s the ethical reason. And the
ethical reason is that the alternative is that we chide, criminalize, sue, damn
our readers for doing what readers have always done, which is sharing books they
love–only now they’re doing it electronically. You know, there’s no solution
that arises from telling people to stop using computers in the way that
computers were intended to be used. They’re copying machines. So telling the
audience for art, telling 70 million American file-sharers that they’re all
crooks, and none of them have the right to due process, none of them have the
right to privacy, we need to wire-tap all of them, we need to shut down their
network connections without notice in order to preserve the anti-copying
business model: that’s a deeply unethical position. It puts us in a world in
which we are criminalizing average people for participating in their
culture.

The economics have yet to be worked out but I think Cory has got the aesthetics and the ethics right.  Lots more of interest.

My favorite things Georgia

1. Favorite Ray Charles song: "What’d I Say"; it’s heresy to admit this, but overall his stuff leaves me cold.

2. Favorite Jasper Johns series: Lately I often call up the "Decoy" prints in my mind.  But the "Targets" series is my pick, followed by the American flag and "Numbers."

3. Big band arranger: Fletcher Henderson — does he deserve as much credit as Benny Goodman?

4. James Brown song: "Bewildered," and have you ever seen the videos of JB dancing on the T.A.M.I. show?

5. Favorite Otis Redding song: "Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa-Fa (Sad Song)."

6. Best Little Richard cover: "Long Tall Sally," Beatles. 

7. Favorite Gladys Knight song: Tough choice.

8. Fiction: Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Erskine Caldwell, and James Dickey are all candidates but none of them do it for me. 

9. Movie, set in: Duh.  Remember "Dueling Banjos"?

10. Favorite REM song: "Shaking Through," from Murmur, is a good pick.

11. Favorite Leo Kottke album: Six and Twelve String Guitar; this one changed my life.

12. Musician I’m not supposed to like: Tommy Roe; "Sweet Pea" and "Dizzy" still sound pretty good to me.

The bottom line: Awe.  It’s Jasper Johns plus music, music, and more music, and I didn’t even have to think hard about the music.  I’m sure I left plenty out.

My Favorite Things Maine

I don’t know this state very well, so I fear that this list is not, in fact, my favorite things from Maine.  It is what I think are my favorite things from Maine:

1. Writer: The first five volumes of The Dark Tower are amazing plus I love The Stand and Misery and The Dead Zone.  He’s not as good as Melville or Faulkner but few other American writers beat him.

2. Painter of seascapes: He’s not from Maine, but surely he counts because he painted there.  Try this one, or this one.

3. Painter: Marsden Hartley, this one is atypical.  There is also Andrew Wyeth, do you know the old saying "As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between"?

4. Poets: There is Longfellow, E.A. Robinson, and Edna St. Vincent-Millay, none of whom I much relate to but nonetheless I am impressed in the aggregate.

5. Best writer about spiders and swans: Duh.

6. Movie director: John Ford, with Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as the classics.

7. Composer: Walter Piston is the only one I can think of, try this disc.

8. Beautiful woman: Liv Tyler.  Wasn’t she beautiful?  But when?  I can’t find any picture on Google to prove it…

The bottom line: For an isolated, underpopulated state, this is a pretty awesome line-up.  But hey, it’s cold up here!

My favorite things London

No, I am not there, but this was a request from a loyal MR reader.  Here goes:

1. Mystery writer: Eric Ambler, most of all A Coffin for Dimitrios; the villain is pathetic, not fearful, and this is most of all a study in collective mythmaking.

2. Philosopher: Francis Bacon.  I’m not a Straussian but he really does have hidden and deep meanings.  Read Perez Zagorin on Bacon for a guide to the complexity of it all.

Honorary mention goes to Jeremy Bentham, whose proposal for interest-bearing currency, ideas on animal welfare, and Auto-Icon (most of all the text, not just the body) still stand ahead of their time.  He was a subtle thinker, not a one-dimensional simpleton.

3. Favorite song off London Calling: "Jimmy Jazz" remains dearest to my heart.

4. Favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie: Vertigo may be the most complete masterwork, but the best segments of The Birds, Psycho, and Marnie (all inconsistent movies) stick most deeply in my mind.

5. Favorite Henry Purcell recording: The Complete Odes and Welcome Songs, and no, eight discs of this music is not overkill.

6. 17th century economics pamphlet: Nicholas Barbon’s Apology for the Builder.  Barbon to Dudley North is a wonderful period in the history of political economy, spend a few weeks reading that stuff sometime.  This short pamphlet has increasing returns, aggregate demand management, urban economics, and the invisible hand, all well before Adam Smith.

7. Favorite neighborhood to stay in: Kensington, it is leafy green and away from both the monarchy and the hideous theatre district.

8. Favorite painting in: The National Gallery offers stiff competition, but how about this Gauguin, in the Courtauld?  As for carpets, here is the Ardebil, in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

9. Pianist: The elegant Clifford Curzon remains underrated.  He produced a lyrical account of Liszt’s B Minor Sonata plus try his Schubert B flat sonata and his Mozart.

Other stuff: Do I really have anything to add about Chaucer, Blake, Defoe, Forster, Keats, Milton, Samuel Johnson, Dickens, Orwell, Turner, Turing, Mick Jagger, Tim Harford, Stephen Jen, and The Economist?  Maybe, but not today.

My favorite things Pennsylvania

Growing up, I regarded Pennsylvania as the most typical and most American part of the country; I loved it.  I loved the mid-sized towns with old industrial and domestic architecture, I loved the museums of Philadelphia, and I loved the bridges of Pittsburgh.  Of course this was before America moved South and I gave the honor of most American place to Knoxville, Tennessee. 

This list didn’t require much thought, and the candidates poured out right away:

1. Eugene Ormandy recording: He introduced me to so much in classic music and somehow I felt he would never let me down; I’ll pick either his Beethoven 5th and 6th or his Shostakovich 10th.

2. Painting: The Gross Clinic, by Thomas Eakins. and my second choice would be the Andy Warhol car crash or electric chair paintings.  Mary Cassatt, George Catlin, Andrew Wyeth, John Sloan, Stuart Davis, and Keith Haring all deserve honorary mention.  And I’m sure there are others.  Wow.

3. Sculptor: Alexander Calder, but only the little ones, the more delicate the better.  The big ones in plazas are garish and misplaced.

4. Book on free trade: Henry George’s Protection or Free Trade remains a wonderful introduction to economics.

5. Writer: John Updike, or Benjamin Franklin.  John O’Hara never clicked with me, though he was my grandmother’s favorite after Shakespeare.  I’ll pick The Coup as my favorite Updike; I don’t think he’s written a good novel in a while.

6. Popular music: Todd Rundgren was remarkably talented, never quite fulfilled his promise, but Something/Anything remains a wonderful double album.

7. Jazz: Art Blakey, Keith Jarrett (The Koln Concert, or his Shostakovich), Erroll Garner, Earl Hines, and George Benston was good at the very beginning.  Stanley Clarke is amazing to hear live.  Wow.  And that’s not even counting jazzmen who played long stints in Philly, such as John Coltrane and Sun Ra.

8. Rap music: Schooly D, The Adventures of Schooly D, remains one of my favorite rap albums.

9. Stepdaughter: Yana (it feels funny to list her as a thing, but in the metaphysical sense yes indeed she is), who as of today is moved in at Franklin and Marshall.  Boo hoo!

Note we haven’t even touched the Amish quilts, Fraktur drawings, mighty rivers, the Barnes collection, fall foliage, sports, Reading, or philanthropy.  Harrisburg, however, is a blight.

The bottom line: Almost certainly, Pennsylvania is better than your state.  If you are a foreigner, and want to understand what made America great, study and visit Pennsylvania.

Five Best

This is one of my favorite features of The Wall Street Journal.  Yesterday they asked Kanye West to name his five favorite restaurants.  Usually (and more usefully) some other celebrity is asked to name five favorite books, CDs, or movies.

Five is enough to frame the namer’s tastes.  And your chance of learning about a new peak experience is relatively high.  Even if you get no useful information, you’ve had a chance to judge a celebrity.

I believe this method of "criticism" will become increasingly popular.  The biggest potential downside is encouraging excess winner-take-all behavior on the part of producers.

Addendum: Here are favorites from HobNobBlog.

Economists who collect art

Here is the story, here is one bit at the end:

Now that the Bhagwatis have acquired a strong collection, they have decided to shift their focus away from expanding their art holdings.  The couple will be working more with charities and philanthropy.  Ms. Desai is also writing her 10th book, which is about America and the opportunities it offers to reinvent yourself. 

Thanks to David Quinn for the pointer.

The critic as the handmaiden of Google

What are critics good for anyway?

I look for one main piece of information from a review: is the name of the product or artist worth Googling?  Yes or no.  That is a binary decision.

Once I have the answer to that question I usually stop reading the review.

I look for one main piece of information from Google: is the product worth buying, on Amazon or elsewhere?

Once I have the answer to that question I usually stop pawing through Google.  That’s another binary decision.

Imagine that.  The critic as the handmaiden of Google, and Google as the handmaiden of Amazon.

To me, the most valuable critics are those who can be disposed of most quickly.  Is it any wonder that so many critics do not like the Internet and bloggers?

Sometimes I think it is enough to simply list how many of the book’s pages I bothered to read.