January 28

Matt Taibbi vs. David Brooks, Round 17 or 18, I don't know, but I think Taibbi scores a knockout here:

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/01/27/populism-just-like-racism/

The Onion AV Club is doing a nice job of covering Sundance with critics Noel Murray and Nathan Rabin:

http://www.avclub.com/features/sundance/

The 28-year-old mandolinist Chris Thile, who plays with and across musical genres, sounds like an exciting talent in this review (and a little exploration on YouTube readily confirms it):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/01/music-review-mandolinist-extraordinaire-chris-thile.html

The Los Angeles Times keeps exposing me to artists I want to know more about -- in part because the paper's critics write of them with such enthusiasm. Painter/sculptor Tom LaDuke has a new gallery show reviewed here:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/01/art-review-laduke-at-angles-gallery.html

More of LaDuke's work is at the gallery's website:

http://www.anglesgallery.com/art2.php?aid=56

Over on the other side of the continent, the New York Times is impressed by the work of Indonesian-born Dutch painter Fendry Ekel, who has a show at the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/24/nyregion/24ekelwe.html

Neither the Times nor (perplexingly) the HVCCA website presents enough of the visual evidence for Ekel's distinction. However, the Priska C. Juschka Fine Art gallery in NYC makes up the lack:

http://www.priskajuschkafineart.com/artists/Fendry__Ekel/Fendry__Ekel.php

RIP: Louis Auchincloss. Auchincloss, who dies at 92, was an underappreciated novelist of manners, concentrating on the New York upper crust and the legal profession (his own milieux). He was also a fine literary appreciator in volumes such as The Man Behind the Book. Naturally I have a friendly feeling towards Auchincloss as a fellow Yalie (his son John was in my Yale class, 1980), and I enjoyed a quotation the New York Times used in its obituary:

I used to say to my father, ‘Everything would be all right if only my class at Yale ran the country.’ Well, they did run the country during the Vietnam War, and look what happened!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/nyregion/28auchincloss.html

No one who enjoys clear, thoughtful social fiction will go amiss by picking up an Auchincloss volume -- he was prolific and there are many -- at the library this week.

Among notables born on this date are novelists Colette, David Lodge, Valentin Katayev (Russia), Marthe Bibesco (Romania), and Ismail Kadare (Albania), Cuban poet Jose Marti, German dramatist Johann Elias Schlegel, Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold, painter Jackson Pollock, sculptor Claes Oldenburg, explorer Henry Morton Stanley, film directors Ernst Lubitsch, Hiroshi Teshigahara, and Frank Darabont, theologian Thomas Aquinas, pianist Arthur Rubinstein, actor Alan Alda, rapper Rakim, and composer John Tavener. When I was reading Russian literature in college, one of my most enjoyable discoveries was Katayev's Time, Forward!, about a Soviet industrial competition. How a factory novel can be sprightly may be hard to imagine, but this one surely is.