Results for “my favorite things” 259 found
My favorite things Nigeria
Yup, I’m here. I made this list before setting off:
1. Popular music: Few from any country come close to Fela Kuti, the main question is how many you should buy, not which ones. Most of them! On the CD medium, that old series of “two albums on one CD” was the best way to consume Fela. On streaming, you can probably just let it rip. And rip. And rip. Other favorites are King Sunny Ade and I.K. Dairo, I don’t love Fema Kuti. You also might try Nigerian psychedelic funk rock from the late 60s and early 70s, for instance found here. Most of all, there are thousands of wonderful local performers in Nigeria, you can watch a few of them on the Netflix documentary on the Nigerian music scene, titled Konkombe, recommended and only an hour long.
There is now a good deal of hit Nigerian and Nigerian-American music, such as Wizkid. It is enjoyable but does not compare to Fela in terms of staying power.
2. Basketball player: The Dream is one of my three or four favorite players of all time. My favorite Hakeem was watching him pick apart David Robinson play after play after play…see the final clip on the immediately preceding link.
3. Novel: Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart. Honorable mentions go to Wole Soyinka, Ben Okri, and my colleague Helon Habila. There are also the Nigerian-American writers, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Teju Cole is worth reading, including his non-fiction.
4. Movie: Well, I’ve seen parts of some of them, and you should at least sample some Nollywood if you haven’t already. It’s kinetic. The documentary “Nollywood Babylon” (Netflix) gives you some background. As for “Movie, set in,” I draw a blank. “Album, set in and recorded in” would be Band on the Run, Paul McCartney and Wings.
5. Actor: Chiwetal Ejiofor, he starred in “Twelve Years a Slave,” and is from a Nigerian family in Britain.
6. Presidential name: Goodluck Jonathan.
7. Artist: Prince Twins Seven Seven, or more formally Prince Taiwo Olaniyi Wyewale-Toyeje Oyekale Osuntoki. He received his nickname because he was the only surviving child from seven distinct sets of twins.
8. Food dish: At least for now I have to say jollof rice, a precursor dish to jambalaya, further reports to come however!
The bottom line: Lots of talent here, plenty more on the way.
My favorite things North Dakota
It has been suggested to me that perhaps North Dakota is the most obscure state in the Union. Maybe so! Let’s take a look:
1. Author: William Gass would be a possible pick, but I do not enjoy his work. Same with Louis L’Amour.
2. Humorist: Chuck Klosterman.
3. Sociologist of religion: Rodney Stark.
4. Painter: Clifford Styll is the obvious pick, except I don’t much like his work. If you were wondering, he dominates so many rooms in American museums because of restrictions placed on grants of his paintings from the artist’s own collection. I suspect some curators have come to resent this, but often the grants were made propitiously near the peak of Styll’s reputation. I suppose I’ll opt for James Rosenquist, although I am not a huge fan of his work either.
5. Evening television bandleader and toastmaster: Lawrence Welk. I can’t even think of a clear runner-up, with or without bubbles; this video will show you why he was a favorite of so many.
6. Movie and TV show, set in: Fargo duh. Otherwise it is Man in the Wilderness, which was the original and in some ways superior source material for The Revenant.
7. Actress: Angie Dickinson comes to mind, Dressed to Kill is a good movie.
8. gdp per capita — That can set many things right, although 2016 may not be as good as was 2014.
The bottom line: Hm..but yet we must consider Delaware and Rhode Island!
My favorite things Idaho
OK, OK, I have decided Nebraska is not the most obscure state. How about Idaho? What can we can think of which is noteworthy from Idaho? More than you might expect, here goes:
Author: A variety of writers have lived in or passed through the state for a few years’ time, including Ernest Hemingway and Edgar Rice Burroughs. A few of Hemingway’s short stories I admire very much.
Poet: Ezra Pound, yes I know he left at age three. Still, he was from Idaho.
Native American sage and explorer: Sacagewea. Did you know that her portrait design on the dollar coin is not in the public domain?
Economist: Lant Pritchett was raised in Boise.
Popular music: Built to Spill.
Composer: La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano is one of the better pieces of contemporary classical music, still highly underrated. Here is a two minute sample from what is more or less a five hour work.
Artist: Matthew Barney, twelve years in Idaho. Here is an interview.
Director: David Lynch, who spent formative years in Boise. Here is a good recent piece on how powerful Blue Velvet still is. Is it fair to say this state has produced some pretty weird stuff?
Actress: Lana Turner, and Patty Duke just passed away. Mariel and Margeaux Hemingway also have claims.
Movie, set in: The only one I can think of is…My Private Idaho.
Other notables: Philo T. Farnsworth invented television, more or less, and he also worked on nuclear fusion.
The bottom line: Per capita, this isn’t bad, even if not much of it is associated with Idaho. I’ll have to look harder for the most obscure state. It might be Idaho, but it doesn’t deserve to be Idaho. So perhaps Delaware, Wyoming, and Rhode Island will come under the microscope soon.
I thank Roy LC, Marcus, and kb for essential pointers here.
My favorite things Nebraska
If it is the most obscure state, I thought it worth a ponder and profile of what they have produced. And the answers are surprisingly strong:
1. Author: I’ll take Willa Cather over Raymond Chandler, but neither puts the state to shame. I don’t care for Nicholas Sparks’s writings, but he makes the list. Malcolm X wrote one of the great memoirs of American history.
2. Actors and actresses: There is Brando, Harold Lloyd, Hilary Swank, Henry Fonda, Montgomery Clift, and James Coburn. What a strong category.
3. Dancer and singer: Fred Astaire, try this from Swing Time. For his underrated singing, try “Cheek to Cheek.”
4. Music: I can think only of Elliott Smith, am I missing anything?
5. TV personalities: Johnny Carson and Dick Cavett. Did you know that Carson learned Swahili on-line after his retirement and became fluent in the language?
6. Painter: Edward Ruscha.
7. Album, set in: Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, favorite song “Open All Night.”
8. Movie, set in: Election. I feel there are others too, Nebraska for one but presumably a fair number of Westerns too.
9. Investor: Duh.
10. Economist: Lawrence Klein was born in Omaha, although I cannot say his is my favored approach. How about Edith Abbott?
11. Other: I cannot count L. Ron Hubbard as a positive. I believe I have neglected some native Americans born in Nebraska, maybe some cowboys too. I don’t have favorite cowboys.
The bottom line: People, this state should not be so obscure!
My favorite things Belgian
No, I am not there but think of this as an act of homage from a distance. Here goes:
1. Novelist: There is Simenon, Yourcenar, and Amelie Nothomb. I like them all but do not love them. Can I pick Julio Cortázar, who was born in Belgium even if he did not come of age there and essentially was Argentinian? As for a fictional character, how about Hercule Poirot?
2. Playwright: Maurice Maeterlinck, read especially Blue Bird.
3. Composer: César Franck is the obvious modern pick. There is also Henri Pousseur, and a variety of Renaissance composers, including Heinrich Isaac, Guillaume Dufay, Johannes Ockeghem, and Josquin des Prez. I’ll pick the violin works of Eugène Ysaÿe, as the Renaissance music is arguably more Burgundian or “Franco-Flemish” than culturally Belgian as it relates to the modern nation.
4. Jazz musician: Django Reinhardt, that one is easy, try this cut. Toots Thielmans, the jazz harmonica player, is perhaps runner up.
5. Economist: Jacques H. Drèze and Robert Triffin would be the obvious picks. A dark horse choice would be Jean Drèze, son of Jacques, for his obsessive data work in India. He still awaits a much-deserved major profile. Gustav de Molinari, who first wrote about private protection agencies and arguably was the first modern libertarian anarchist.
6. Painter: This has to be the strong suit. Magritte is an obvious choice, but there is also Gerard David, Hans Memling, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Adriaen Brouwer, Luc Tuymans, Jacob Jordaens, Paul Delvaux, Petrus Christus, Robert Campin, and Pierre Alechinsky, among others. Jan van Eyck is one of the greater painters ever, but for sheer Belgianness I will opt for James Ensor, see the image below.
7. Sculpture: Marcel Broodthaers. Right now there is a nice retrospective of his work on at MOMA.
7. Historian: Henri Pirenne, way ahead of his time.
9. NBA point guard: Tony Parker was born there, to American and Dutch parents, that counts for something.
10. Anthropologist: Claude Levi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques remains a beautiful book to be read by all.
11. Movie: I cannot think of one I really like, can you help? And I can’t easily digest the works of Chantal Akerman.
11b. Movie, set in: In Bruges, a fun dark comedy.
12. Violinist: Arthur Grumiaux, but with competition from Sigiswald Kuijken.
The bottom line: Once you get into the period where Belgium is a modern nation, it’s all so wonderfully offbeat.
My favorite things Iowa
No, I’m not in Iowa, but I’ve never covered it before, and today seems like as good a day as any. Here goes:
1. Painter: Grant Wood. Here is an interpretative take on American Gothic. It’s not by the way man and wife in the picture, but rather Wood’s sister standing next to the local dentist.
2. Novelist: I draw a blank, sorry people…Does it count that Joe Haldeman (The Forever War) was a product of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop? There must be other examples as well.
3. Hero: Norman Borlaug.
4. Actor: John Wayne is from Iowa, but I can’t call him a favorite. I guess he is my favorite version of…John Wayne. If that. Can one call Johnny Carson an actor? I never took to him either.
5. Jazz musician: Yes there is one, Bix Beiderbecke. Art Farmer too, and also Charlie Haden. Yet how rarely one hears of the “Iowa jazz tradition.”
6. Guitarist: Dick Dale, don’t by the way forget his Lebanese background, which you can hear in his riffs.
7. Movie, set in: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? Honorable mention to the more obvious Field of Dreams, an OK but not great film in my view.
The bottom line: Who would have thought “jazz musician” would be the strongest category here? Those Iowans are so busy with their jazz, it is amazing they have time to lobby for their ethanol subsidies.
My favorite things Serbian
1. Painter: Marko Čelebonović. Plus lots of the art in the monasteries.
2. Performance art: Marina Abramović. I still love this video of the staring game.
3. Author: Danilo Kiš, the Serbian Borges. Or how about Milorad Pavic, Dictionary of the Khazars, which somehow seems to have fallen through the cracks since the time of its publication. Ivan “Ivo” Andrić is the Serbian Nobel Laureate, sort of, he espoused a Serbian identity but actually was Bosnian.
4. Actor and director: Emir Kusturica. Recently he has disappointed, and taken flak, for having supported Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. He is still an impressive creator, however, and is also an accomplished musician and author. Did I mention that he espouses a Serbian national identity, and has converted to Orthodox Christianity, but originally was a Bosnian Muslim?
5. Actress: Milla Jovovich, most of all in Fifth Element and also Resident Evil, she is part Serbian.
6. Economist and blogger: Branko Milanović.
7. Sports: Lots of tennis players, plus Pete Maravich was of Serbian descent.
Other: Tesla was ethnic Serbian though born in Croatia. American poet Charles Simic was born in Serbia, though he moved to the United States at a young age.
My favorite things Croatian
1. Novelist: Help! I do own a copy of Sarah Nović’s Girl at War, but haven’t yet read it.
2. Basketball player: Toni Kukoc, the “Croatian sensation.”
3. Painting: There was an active school of Naive painting in Croatia, from Hlebine near the Hungarian border. Perhaps my favorite from the group was Ivan Generalic, but Mirko Virius was very good too.
4. Inventor: Nikola Tesla. Before you go crazy in the comments section, however, here is a long Wikipedia page on to what extent we can justly claim that Tesla was Croatian. Here are further debates, Croat or Serb? Or both?
5. Pianist: How about Ivo Pogorelić? Here is his Petrushka.
6. Economist: Branko Horvat, the market-oriented market socialist, is the only one I can think of, here is an overview of his contributions (pdf). Am I forgetting someone?
7. City: Split, not Dubrovnik. I am here for two days right now, then on to Belgrade for a conference/salon.
I cannot name a Croatian movie or composer or pop star. I have the feeling they have many more famous athletes. Don’t they have a lot of beautiful models? Aren’t they the world’s most beautiful people? Has anyone set a movie here?
The bottom line: It would be worse without Tesla.
My favorite things Baltimore
I’m passing through Baltimore on the train today (a talk at U. Penn and chatting with Ashok Rao), so I have license to do this. Here goes:
1. Author: There is plenty to choose from here, including Poe, James Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Frank O’Hara, and H.L. Mencken. I do not love F. Scott Fitzgerald as many do, same with Upton Sinclair, but they deserve mention. I’ll opt for Poe, with Gold-Bug as my favorite story. Hammett’s Red Harvest I also enjoy and have taught a few times, delicious incoherence. Anne Tyler has a few good books, but stop reading after one or two of them.
2. Philosopher: John Rawls, though since we’re talking about Baltimore I feel I should call him Jack.
3. Painter: Morris Louis or Grace Hartigan? I feel I can do better, help out people.
4. Popular music: Tori Amos grew up in Baltimore, I like her Little Earthquakes and various singles, live cuts, and cover versions, available only in scattered form as far as I know. Is Dan Deacon popular? Frank Zappa is a remarkable musical talent, but I don’t actually enjoy listening to him.
5. Jazz: Eubie Blake, there is also Bill Frisell and Billie Holiday.
6. Classical music: Philip Glass was born there, though I associate him with NYC.
7. Baseball: I still remember that old Orioles rotation with Cuellar, McNally, Palmer, and Dobson, all twenty-game winners in the same year.
8. Soviet spy: Alger Hiss.
9. Movie, set in: I don’t love Diner or Avalon, how about The Accidental Tourist, or Twelve Monkeys? The first half of Silence of the Lambs is excellent.
For good measure toss in Thurgood Marshall, Tim Page, Babe Ruth, The Wire, Walters Art Museum, the underrated BSO, and Brooks Robinson. Who or what else am I forgetting?
The bottom line: Lots for one city! Let’s hope it gets better soon.
My favorite things Kentucky
1. Popular music: The Everly Brothers, I recommend this song. There is also Loretta Lynn and Dwight Yoakum and Merle Travis, I like this video. In jazz there is Lionel Hampton.
2. Visual artist: Edgar Tolson, that image is not fully safe for work. John James Audobon worked in the state quite a bit.
3. Movie, set in: Goldfinger, though of course immobilizing that stock would not affect the world price of gold very much. And keep in mind the nominal price of gold was pegged back then under Bretton Woods — should we really have expected a lot of goods and services deflation, just because some nutcase set off a bomb? I don’t think so.
4. Monk: Thomas Merton. He was an excellent writer, as a monk I cannot judge.
5. Author: Hmm…I don’t really like either Robert Penn Warren or Hunter S. Thompson. So Thomas Merton wins a second category, try The Seven Storey Mountain.
6. NBA player: The incandescent Rex Chapman, recently arrested for shoplifting. I liked Pervis Ellison too, believe it or not.
7. Movie director: I believe John Carpenter grew up there, he has several excellent films, including The Thing, Starman, Dark Star, and Escape from New York. I don’t actually enjoy the D.W. Griffith movies.
8. Poet and impresario: Muhammad Ali.
For some inexplicable reason Victor Mature was one of my father’s favorite actors. There is also Johnny Depp and George Clooney. Economist Milton Kafoglis passed away not long ago. How about the Kentucky Colonels?
The bottom line: If I had better taste in fiction, this list would be strong across the board. I’m in Louisville for the day.
My favorite things Bolivia
Yes, violinist Jaime Laredo is from Cochabamba, but that does not sum up what is special about Bolivia. I’ve been to maybe ninety countries, and often I think Bolivia is the most exotic and wild of them all. For a simple contrast, so many aspects of Yemen have fed into streams we are familiar with, and Yemeni food is instantly recognizable, even if you have never been to the Arabian peninsula.
The main strands of Bolivian indigenous life — which I estimate to represent sixty percent of the country or more — have barely touched America or Europe. It is all strange. It is (mostly) deeply beautiful, like visiting another planet. The sky is intense, and the potatoes and corn taste much stronger than what we we Americans are used to. “I went there to eat a purple potato” is a coherent and indeed a wise sentence. Llama jerky is a major dish.
There is a three-toed sloth in the Santa Cruz park. Pink flamingos and lithium on the other side of the country. La Paz is set in a bowl of sorts where you can look either up or down and see homes carved into mountains. The altitude (in some parts of the country) never ceases to feel like a strain, and the Andes are the world’s largest mountain range. Some of the indigenous politicians have run against the Western Enlightenment. On the Altiplano I encountered some of the most miserable-looking people. The beautiful women have an intensity and a heartiness. The bowler hat remains in style.
Most of the hotels aren’t very good. The country has been landlocked for some time, and has lost territory in three different wars. There are over thirty official languages and it is the number four country in the world for number of butterfly species. You will not find a higher percentage of expressionless, stone-faced petty merchants.
Due to hydrocarbons, the country is growing at over six percent a year. My favorite movie set in Bolivia is Even the Rain, a Spanish production I believe.
I strongly recommend a visit to Bolivia.
But as for Santa Cruz, well…that is something altogether different.
My favorite things Minnesota
I am here for but a short time, speaking at the university, but here is what comes to mind:
1. Folk singer: Is that what he is? Bringing it All Back Home remains my favorite Dylan album, of many candidates.
2. Rock music: The Replacements were pretty awesome for a short while. The Artist Formerly Known as Prince has an impressive body of work, with Sign of the Times as my favorite or maybe Dirty Mind, though when viewed as a whole I find the corpus of work rather numbing and even somewhat off-putting. Bob Mould I like but do not love, the peaks are too low.
3. Jazz: The Bad Plus come to mind.
4. Writer: Must I go with F. Scott Fitzgerald? I don’t like his work very much, so Ole Rolvaag is my choice.
5. Coen Brothers movie: Raising Arizona or Fargo. The more serious ones strike me as too grim.
6. Director: George Roy Hill, how about A Little Romance?
7. Columnist: The underrated Thomas Friedman, who ought to be considered one of the world’s leading conservative columnists but is not.
8. Scientist: Norman Borlaug. I hope you all know who he is by now.
9. Advice columnist: Ann Landers, most of the time she was right, much better and sharper than her sister Dear Abby, plus she coined better phrases.
What else? Garrison Keillor belongs somewhere, even though he isn’t funny. Thorstein Veblen is often unreadable but on status competition, and its Darwinian roots, he was way ahead of his time.
Overall this is a very strong state, and on top of that I feel I am missing some significant contributors with this list. Are there painters or sculptors of note from Minnesota? I can’t think of any.
My favorite things Java
1. Novel: Pramoedya Toer, The Buru Quartet. I like this better than say Mahfouz or Rushdie. It focuses on the key question of what a life may be said to consist of, and each of the four volumes makes the others richer. Another famous Indonesian novel is Andrea Hirata, The Rainbow Troops, it is good not great.
2. Gamelan music CD: Java: Court Gamelan. Dreamy and beautiful, this is one of my favorite world music CDs.
3. Popular music: The Smithsonian has a very good 17-CD set of Indonesian popular music.
4. Classical pianist: Eduardus Halim.
5. Movie: Raid: The Redemption. Martial arts reign, after the police storm an apartment fortress. If you like the genre at all, this one is special. Note that The Act of Killing is set mainly in Sumatra and thus does not count.
6. Movie, set in: The Year of Living Dangerously is the obvious choice. I believe the old “Krakatoa, East of Java” is set…east of Java.
7. Painter: I can’t say I love Affandi, so I must be missing someone.
Xaviera Hollander deserves mention, although in what category should she be my favorite? Old Javanese Gold is excellent, plus there is puppetry. The best textiles are from Sumatra, or from the smaller islands.
Overall I have long felt a kinship to this culture, and I am excited to be visiting Java for the first time.
My favorite things Sri Lanka
This is a tough one, and I admit failure in advance, and yes I will call upon the diaspora in this case. But even that doesn’t much help me. Here goes:
1. Popular music: M.I.A., with Arular and then Kala being my favorite works by her.
2. Science fiction writer, lived in: Arthur C. Clarke lived there for over fifty years.
3. Author: Michael Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka, I like but do not love his work. Two quite recent Sri Lankan novels are Michelle de Kretser, Questions of Travel, and Ru Freeman, On Sal Mal Lane, both noteworthy.
4. Movie, set in: I can’t think of one. Bridge on the River Kwai was filmed here.
5. Architect: Geoffrey Bawa, some images are here.
Is Lal Jayawardena the most famous Sri Lankan economist? And I have had excellent Sri Lankan food in Germany, most of all in Berlin. There is a takeaways Sri Lankan place in Derwood, Maryland, Spice Lanka, which I have yet to try. When I was much younger, the Sri Lankan chess player Sunil Weeramantry was always very cordial to me. And my grandmother had a Sri Lankan friend who, when I was a small boy, used to bring us cashews. I liked him. I think of the music — perhaps unfairly — as falling into the “raucous, influenced by cinema, good jolly fun but I’m not going to buy it” category, but I would gladly receive your better-informed recommendations in the comments.
Sorry people, I’ll try harder next time. I don’t follow cricket and I know virtually nothing about cinema here, I hope to learn more.
My favorite things Scotland
And so the journey continues.
Let’s put the Scottish Enlightenment aside and turn to some more recent creations. Here goes:
1. Novel: Alasdair Gray, Lanark. Iain Banks and Ken MacLeod deserve notice as well. I don’t relate to Trainspotting. I understand the case for Robert Louis Stevenson and would wish to jump on board, but usually I lose interest before the end of his books.
2. Painter: Henry Raeburn was part of the Scottish Enlightenment I think. So where to turn? Ken Currie? Scotland is not strong in this category.
3. Classical music: Umm…William Primrose was a strong violist.
4. Architect: Charles Rennie MacIntosh, especially the library.
5. Inventor: James Watt, but there is lots and lots of competition here.
6. Actor: How about Sean Connery? Don’t forget Zardoz.
7. Movie: Gregory’s Girl.
8. Movie, set in Scotland: The Queen.
9. Popular music: David Byrne was born in Scotland. I know the Cocteau Twins, Boards of Canada, Franz Ferdinand, and others, they are OK but I do not love them. Dire Straits and Annie Lennox deserve mention, but overall I suspect many of you rate this group higher than I do. Jesus and Mary Chain? While we’re at it, there is Ewan McLennan and Bert Jansch, both of whom I enjoy.
The bottom line: These are people of intellect (remember the Enlightenment!) and also people of action. For explorers and inventors the record is extremely strong. Yet for music and some of the arts the contributions are rather faint.