February 27

I am out of touch with Tabloid America. It used to be that I had at least some vague sense of what transpired there, which I excused on the grounds that it was almost impossible not to. But such has been the proliferation of minor celebrities and reality TV "stars" that I happily no longer have the slightest idea what is going on. This morning on the supermarket check-out line, I could learn from the cover of In Touch that Kourtney is pretending to be in love with Scott. Who is Kourtney? Who is Scott? Or from the cover of OK that Ali and Jake's "secret reunion" (nothing on the cover of a tabloid is a secret) is "Vienna's worst nightmare." Who are these people? Why does anyone care? I think I need to watch Idiocracy again, as we're obviously getting closer to its premise by the minute.

Vulpes Libris shares my liking for field guides:

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/thursday-soapboxa-fondness-for-field-guides/

As I wrote in a comment at the blog: "I complete agree about the delights of field guides. Those Golden Guides, pocket-sized as they were, were awesome books for a kid naturalist. My absolute favorite was Pond Life, published in 1967 when I was 9. I took that book with me to local ponds and parks and on vacations, always looking for the creatures and plants and phenomena it described. Since the guide concentrated on a setting rather than a category such as birds or fish, it gave me a wonderful feeling for what an ecosystem is."

Another fun type of book is the Fireside Book of various sports:

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=322

The Singapore-based opera blog The Mad Scene -- let it never be said that I do not go far afield in collecting material for PMD! -- interviews singer Thomas Mannhart on the occasion of his involvement in a Singapore production of Orazio Vecchi's 1597 madrigal comedy L'Amfiparnaso (produced the same year as Jacopo Peri's lost Dafne, the first true opera):

http://themadscene.athenarts.com/?p=1037

Anthony Tommasini at the New York Times makes an interesting comparison of two young classical pianists, David Greilsammer and Denis Matsuev:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/arts/music/26greil.html

The Hollywood Interview quizzes William Friedkin on his notorious, misunderstood, and vastly underrated film Cruising:

http://thehollywoodinterview.blogspot.com/2008/01/cruising-with-billy.html

I remember watching this film on video with a group of about six gay friends; of course, we were aware of the film's "homophobic" reputation. (It was the subject of protests while it was being filmed and when it was released.) In actually watching the movie, however, we were -- unanimously -- completely enthralled. It struck us all as an honest outsider's view of the leather subculture, filmed with considerable atmosphere and erotic charge.

The Theatre de Quat'sous in Montreal certainly brings life to its street corner:

http://www.archdaily.com/50039/theatre-de-quat%E2%80%99sous-fab

The wood sculptures of the Uruguayan artist Joaquin Torres Garcia (1874-1949) are being re-assessed in an exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36384

http://www.sdmart.org/exhibition-torres-garcia.html

Tragically, many of Torres Garcia's works were lost during an earlier exhibition in 1979 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, when a fire broke out.

One of my favorite visual blogs is If Charlie Parker was a Gunslinger, There's Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats, which continuously offers enthralling images such as this 1940 shot of the RCA Building in New York:

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2010/02/old-new-york-45.html

Among notables born on this date are singers Mildred Bailey, Marian Anderson, Lotte Lehmann, and Mirella Freni, violinist Gidon Kremer, politician Ralph Nader, legendary theatrical actress Ellen Terry, jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon, golfer Gene Sarazen, broadcaster Charlayne Hunter-Gault, actors Franchot Tone, Joan Bennett, Barbara Babcock, Howard Hesseman, Van Williams, Donal Logue, Elizabeth Taylor, and Joanne Woodward, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and novelists James T. Farrell, N, Scott Momaday, John Steinbeck, Lawrence Durrell, Irwin Shaw, and Peter De Vries. I've always been amused by the fact that, concurrently with her appearances as America's archetypal mom in Vincente Minnelli's Father of the Bride and Father's Little Dividend (the first a great film, the second a tolerable sequel), Joan Bennett was smothered in scandal when her producer husband Walter Wanger shot her agent and presumed paramour Jennings Lang. Ironically, both Wanger (who served four months) and Lang came out of this just fine and continued to work for decades, but the incident pretty much wrecked Bennett's film career. Now that's tabloid.