March 15

Although I'm skeptical that all of these examples of misplaced advertising are genuine, they are terribly funny anyway (hat tip to A Natural Curiosity):

http://www.masalatime.com/?p=414

On the heels of Gatz, the theatrical presentation of every word of The Great Gatsby, comes a 12-hour adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Demons. Endurance theater is in:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/theater/12play.html

Thirty years I bought a standing room ticket for the Royal Shakespeare Company's eight-hour production of Nicholas Nickleby in New York, and even though a seat became available for the second half, I declined it because I wanted to be able to brag truthfully that I had stood for the entire eight hours.

Steven Strogatz offers an interesting account of the "discovery" of imaginary and complex numbers (hat tip to 3quarksdaily):

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/finding-your-roots/

Did a French village in 1951 go bonkers from ergot, or from a CIA LSD experiment? (On very slight inspection, the ergot theory seems more plausible, the LSD theory more fun.)

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/opinions/view/opinion/Did+the+CIA+Really+Dose+a+French+Village+With+LSD%3F-2818

Ken Jennings is a big fan of the British band The Clientele:

http://ken-jennings.com/blog/?p=1702

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clientele

Stephen Bowie at Classic TV History has posted a detailed consideration of the Western series Rawhide:

http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-rawhide/

Longtime New Republic film critic Stanley Kauffmann is, sad to say, a deadly guide to quality in movies -- he has no feeling whatsoever for cinema, yet has kept at writing about it for fifty years, a bizarre record of futility. I had Kauffmann as a film professor at Yale, and he was as singularly uninspiring in person as he is on the page. Yet he was also a fiction writer, and since the Books Blog at the Guardian has seen fit to praise his 1954 novel The Philanderer, I'll try to hold out hope that he had talent in that area:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/mar/11/stanley-kauffmann-law-philanderer

Abebooks describes the world's finest collection of the books of Wyndham Lewis, James Joyce's exact contemporary (both born in 1882) who never achieved his fame or canonical status yet who has always been vociferously championed by his admirers:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/collecting-artist-ephemera-wyndham-lewis/collector-cy-fox.shtml

Experimental sculptor Robert Mallary (1917-1997) is having a revival at The Box in Los Angeles:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36736

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/02/art-review-robert-mallary-at-the-box.html

http://www.theboxla.com/exhibitions/index.html

I am not quite sure how I feel about the new Tampa Museum of Art, designed by Stanley Saitowitz. Impressive in photographs, to be sure, but does it look a little too much like what I would expect a new American museum of art to look like?




http://www.archdaily.com/52247/tampa-museum-of-art-stanley-saitowitz-natoma-architects/

Among notables born on this date are President Andrew Jackson, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, astronaut Alan Bean, jazz pianist Cecil Taylor, bandleader Harry James, Beach Boys member Mike Love, Grateful Dead member Phil Lesh, singer/songwriters Ry Cooder and Terence Trent D'Arby, biographer Richard Ellmann, film directors David Cronenberg and Jacques Doillon, composer Ben Johnston, poets Paul Heyse (Germany) and Angelos Sikelianos (Greece), novelists Louis Paul Boon (Belgium) and Ben Okri (Nigeria), and actors Lawrence Tierney, Judd Hirsch, and Craig Wasson. Of the nine surviving "moon-walkers," Alan Bean certainly comes across as one of the most appealing in Andrew Smith's first-rate Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth. He has found a happy second life as a painter:

http://www.alanbeangallery.com/