April 13

Lewis R. Gordon of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University has interesting thoughts about the "market colonization" of the academy, but I suspect they are historic in nature; the battle for intellectual values in higher education (however you define them) has already been lost.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Academe-on-Other-Peoples/22501/

http://www.truthout.org/the-market-colonization-intellectuals58310

http://www.temple.edu/isrst/LGordon/

Elie Mystal of Above the Law is understandably angry with a generation of students who all think they are the special case and not the norm:

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/04/the-hubris-of-would-be-lawyers/

You see the kind of thing he talks about all over; I remember an MBA student in a Wall Street Journal comments section a few weeks ago saying it didn't matter in the least if only 10% of new MBAs were going to get offered choice jobs, because he was just so great, he was definitely going to be in the 10%! I wouldn't feel that certain if I was Barack Obama. Confidence is a winning quality, but anyone who is that confident in this economy is a fool.

I mentioned the other day that many great plays of the past languish long between productions, but this is somewhat less true in London; God bless the English theatre. First Strindberg's Creditors, now Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard (adapted by Bulgakov from his own novel):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/arts/14iht-lon14.html

The blog Coffee Coffee and More Coffee has been taking a careful look at many films by the great Japanese director Mikio Naruse, who as a director of shomin-geki (working class dramas) was overshadowed for a long time by my hero Yasujiro Ozu, but who has been coming more into his critical own of late. All the Naruse posts at the site are worth reading:

http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/archives/2010/04/lightning.html

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

Stephen Bowie at Classic TV History has posted a very rewarding consideration of the career of the late Robert Culp:

It may have begun as too-cool-for-the-room attitudinizing, but Culp found a way to build his distance from the material into his acting in a way that was seamless, and exciting.  Unlike most TV people, but like most of us in the real world, Culp’s characters considered their words as they spoke.  They slowed down as they formulated a thought; underscored a remark with a note of sarcasm or doubt; interjected a chuckle at something that came out sounding silly.
 
http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/culp/

Zachary Watterson at Fiction Writers Review interviews the National Book Award-winning novelist Charles Johnson, who is rightly concerned about "the lack of civility and the disinterest in civilized living that I see every day around me in contemporary America, the lowering of personal and professional standards, the selfishness and violence and anger, and the absence of shared values in a country that has been culturally Balkanized for my entire adult life."

http://americanfiction.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/charles-johnsons-throwaway-pages/

http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/literary-mentors-friends-an-interview-with-charles-johnson

Since I can be readily seduced by color, Shirley Jaffe pretty much had me at hello:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37383

http://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions/shirley-jaffe_1/

Among notables born on this date are President Thomas Jefferson, painters Thomas Lawrence and James Ensor, philosopher Jacques Lacan, literary critic Georg Lukacs, journalist Christopher Hitchens, Ecuadoran essayist Juan Montalvo, novelists Eudora Welty, Nella Larsen, John Braine and J.M.G. Le Clezio, poet Seamus Heaney, playwrights Samuel Beckett and Lanford Wilson, film director Stanley Donen, soul singer Al Green, golfer Davis Love III, and actors Peter Davison, Howard Keel, Edward Fox, Maurice Ronet, Paul Sorvino, and Ron Perlman. Since at least one reader has been enjoying the musical clips, I'm happy to oblige again with an excellent live Al Green performance of "Let's Stay Together":