January 24

The blog The Beiderbecke Affair highlights a extremely interesting biographical debate about one of my artistic heroes, jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke (1903-1931):

http://beiderbecke.typepad.com/tba/2010/01/in-which-bix-beiderbecke-is-burgled.html

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has landed its first piece by the startling 18th century sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. One glance tells you it's a masterpiece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/arts/design/22vogel.html

The news out of Mexico is so bad these days, with drug traffic deaths piling up and a general state of terror existing in many towns, that it pays to be reminded how beautiful and joyous a country it is at its best. Jim & Carole's Mexico Adventure visits the small city of Colima, and the results are delightful:

http://cookjmex.blogspot.com/2010/01/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.html

I just watched the acclaimed film Moon. Director Duncan Jones and his collaborators deserve great credit for crafting a fine-looking science fiction film on an indy budget, and Sam Rockwell's strong performance makes the movie worth seeing. Unfortunately, both dramatically and visually it feels very second-hand, derived from 2001, THX 1138, and many other sf films of the 1965-1985 period. Decent first feature for Jones, though; he merits encouragement.

Among notables born on this date are novelists Edith Wharton and Santha Rama Rau, German story writer E.T.A. Hoffmann, poet Keith Douglas, playwrights William Congreve and Pierre Beaumarchais, Russian painters Vasily Surikov and Konstantin Bogaevsky, American painter Robert Motherwell, composer Norman Dello Joio, pop musicians Warren Zevon, Neil Diamond, Aaron Neville, and Doug Kershaw, ballerina Maria Tallchief, anthropologist Desmond Morris, film director Henry King, and actors Michael Ontkean, Daniel Auteuil, Natassja Kinski, and John Belushi. It has been a great pleasure in recent years to see Edith Wharton taking her rightful place in public estimation as one of the greatest American novelists; as the critic Martin Seymour-Smith said, her writing is not simply pleasurable, but profound in its insights. Because Wharton was quite prolific, there is still plenty of her output for most readers to discover beyond the well-known, movie-adapted novels; I would single out The Children as a particular joy. It has to do with proto-jet setters of the Roaring Twenties who marry, procreate, divorce, and re-marry with dizzying speed, creating a mixed family of half- and step-siblings who cling to each other because the adults in their lives are completely undependable.