Category: The Arts

I am flying there tonight, to speak at www.freedomfest.com.  But yikes people, this is a tough one.  I never finished Walter van Tillburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident and what else can I think of?  Wikipedia tells me that Curtis Hanson, who directed L.A. Confidential, is from Reno.  Does Wayne Newton somehow enter this equation?  The Killers are OK.

How about this?

1. Movie, set in: Viva Las Vegas, with a number of strong runner-ups, including Ocean's Eleven, Leaving Las Vegas, the still under-rated Casino, Diamonds are Forever, Showgirls, Austin Powers (partly, I recall), and you might even squeeze Godfather II into the category.  Catch this erotically supercharged clip of Elvis singing to Ann Margaret.  Wasn't Them set in Nevada?

2. Song, set in: Viva Las Vegas, with Las Vegas, by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, as runner-up.

3. Architecture book, set in: Robert Venturi, Learning from Las Vegas.

The state has excellent food, but overall I come no further.

The bottom line: You tell me.  If you're wondering, I've never gambled, although I have visited the city four times.  I genuinely cannot understand why so many other people find gambling to be an appealing pastime.  It's negative expected value!  There are so many positive expected value things to do.

Find them here and they are excellent.  One thing we learn is that women playwrights are more likely to write stories about other women.  Women playwrights are also more likely to write plays with fewer major characters (slide 19).  Outside evaluators are most likely to perceive the story's characters are less likable, if they believe a given script was written by a woman (slide 31).  They also judge the economic prospects of a script to be poorer (slide 32).  It is female artistic directors who have the harshest judgments of scripts submitted under female names (slide 34).  Women writing plays about other women have the toughest time (slide 36).  On Broadway, female-written shows are 18 percent more profitable than male-written shows yet they do not have longer running times (slides 44 and 45).

The original paper is here.  She'll be on The Colbert Show on July 2.

Hat tip goes to the indispensable Literary Saloon blog.

Here is more.

Or was it dinner?  He let me order and we ate at the excellent Sichuan Gourmet, on 39th between 5th and 6th.  Felix asked me who were the three greatest living contemporary artists.  Although we had never discussed this question before (and we had barely met before), we agreed immediately on picks #1 and #2 and required only a short while before settling the more difficult question of who should be #3.

Can you guess our picks?  I'll leave it to Felix to decide if and when to offer up our answers, whether on his blog or in the comments section here.

I also had an excellent lunch with Gretchen Rubin, covering the strengths and weaknesses of Judith Harris's The Nurture Assumption, people who have a "relentless" writing style, and what sells books and what doesn't. 

I have never once met a person whose blog I like and then been disappointed.  Never.

1. Cellist: Pao Casals; see my comments under Puerto Rico.

2. Artist: Joan Miró, who remains underrated.  Oddly many people do not see him as better than the guy who puts the squiggles on their design bags.  Almost everything he did — across media — was phenomenal in terms of composition and textures.  I am fond of Antoni Tapies, although his work does not reproduce well on-line.  Aristide Maillol, who was French Catalan, did paintings and sketches.  Dali is now so vilified by some intelligent people that he can rightly be considered underrated.

3. Novelist: Albert Sanchez Piñol's Cold Skin is a favorite of mine.  Quim Monzó is a fun writer, as is Carlos Ruis Zafón.

4. Architect: I have mixed feelings about Gaudi; it feels to me like he is trying too hard.  How about Lluís Domènech i Montaner?  Try this one too.

5. Composer: Isaac Albeniz, especially as played by Alicia de Larrocha.  There is also Federico Mompou.  I grew up playing the guitar music of Fernando Sor, though it is less fun to listen to.

6. Economist: Xavier Sala-i-Martin; his home page is full of interesting links.

7. Bandleader: Xavier Cugat.  Wong Kar-Wai likes him but mostly he is forgotten.  Here is a good video and you can hear his unusual Spanish accent as well.

8. Medieval theologian and memory expert: Ramon Llull.  I am a big fan of Llull, a cosmopolitan polymath and early advocate of animal welfare.  I wrote a part of my next book about him, although I ended up cutting it out of the final draft because it didn't quite fit.

9. Movie, set in: I've never seen Barcelona (is it good?), so I have to go with Vicky Cristina Barcelona.  There's probably a better movie set in Barcelona, but offhand I don't know it.

10. Chess opening.  Duh.

They have a bunch of opera singers too.

The bottom line: This is an impressive showing, yet what ties it all together remains elusive in my mind.  Perhaps that is what makes the region so interesting.

They're picking a guy named Rocco, Rocco Landesman, to head the National Endowment for the Arts.  The report noted: “Rocco is bored,” Mr. Brustein said, “if things just go routinely.”  He is described as having an "affinity for country music, horse racing and baseball."

I never read Maureen Dowd's column but the picture today is great.

The topic is eBay and the antiquities trade.  It turns out that looting has gone down, the opposite of what was expected from the expansion of eBay.  Supply is so elastic, and so many fakes are made, that looting is less worthwhile than it used to be:

Our greatest fear was that the Internet would democratize antiquities
trafficking and lead to widespread looting. This seemed a logical
outcome of a system in which anyone could open up an eBay site and sell
artifacts dug up by locals anywhere in the world. We feared that an
unorganized but massive looting campaign was about to begin…But a very curious thing has happened. It
appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the
antiquities trade.

…many of the primary
"producers" of the objects have shifted from looting sites to faking
antiquities. I've been tracking eBay antiquities for years now, and
from what I can tell, this shift began around 2000, about five years
after eBay was established.  …Today, every grade and
kind of antiquity is being mass-produced and sold in quantities too
large to imagine.

…Because the eBay phenomenon has substantially reduced total costs by
eliminating middlemen, brick-and-mortar stores, high-priced dealers,
and other marginal expenses, the local eBayers and craftsmen can make
more money cranking out cheap fakes than they can by spending days or
weeks digging around looking for the real thing. It is true that many
former and potential looters lack the skills to make their own
artifacts. But the value of their illicit digging decreases every time
someone buys a "genuine" Moche pot for $35, plus shipping and handling.
In other words, because the low-end antiquities market has been flooded
with fakes that people buy for a fraction of what a genuine object
would cost, the value of the real artifacts has gone down as well,
making old-fashioned looting less lucrative.

I thank Lawrence Rothfield for the pointer.

More information here.

1. Singer: Amalia Rodrigues, fado specialist.  I am also a fan of Sara Tavares, especially this CD.  Carmen Miranda is often thought of as Brazilian, but she was born in Portugal and I believe she grew up there as well.  She was good.

2. Popular music: Nelly Furtado has Portuguese ancestry, although I believe most of the demons who inhabit the MR comments section would count her as Canadian.

3. Novelist: Jose Saramago.  But I don't like them all.  Blindness, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, and The Double are the primary ones to read.  Baltasar and Blimunda I should try again.  The Stone Raft is good.  Currently I am reading, and enjoying Antunes's Fado Alexandrino.

4. Philosopher: Can I count Spinoza?

5. Painter: I guess I pick Paula Rego.  I can't think of a classic painter here. 

6. Poet and essayist: Pessoa.  I've been influenced by his work.  The Book of Disquiet is his masterpiece.

7. Composer: Manuel Cardoso is the only one I can think of.  He's OK.

8. Former colony: Brazil.  But there's stiff competition.

9. Economist, one eighth of him: Can you guess?  The eighth is from the Madeira Islands with the family name Alfonso.

The bottom line: I am worried by the gaps here, including classical music, cinema, painting, and sculpture.  Yet #8 makes up for it all.  I suspect that too much royal patronage is the reason why there are so many notable Portuguese explorers and so few recognized composers.

I enjoyed this one and I wonder what the sequel will look like:

Drawing inspiration from a best-selling Japanese manga adaptation of Das Kapital, Chinese theater producers are planning to bring Marx's masterpiece to the stage.

Yang Shaolin, general manager of the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Center, told the Wen Hui Bao that, together with Fudan University economics professor Zhang Jun and other experts, he is preparing a dramatization of Das Kapital. They've already decided on a director: He Nian, who directed the stage adaptation of the hit martial-arts spoof My Own Swordsman (武林外传).

He Nian says he will combine elements from animation, Broadway musicals, and Las Vegas stage shows to bring Marx's economic theories to life as a trendy, interesting, and educational play.

I thank Robert C. for the pointer.