April 26

Quotation of the day from scientist Stephen Hawking, who wishes to discourage our trying to contact alien civilizations: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet."

Touche.

Odd Moments in Radio History: Back in the early Nineties, when the New York classical music station WNCN-FM was in its final days, someone in management had the notion of hiring announcers whose delivery styles were not stereotypically "classical," but more pop-sounding. The results were, to put it mildly, bizarre. "Next up, some anonymous 16th century dances for ya, here at Classical NCN!"

If you want to hear something like that clash of matter and manner on the radio nowadays, you could check out Drew Mariani, the afternoon drive-time announcer on the shrinking Catholic "Relevant Radio" network. The Green Bay-based Mariani uses a sportcaster-type voice and delivery, but to talk about the "magisterium" rather than Brett Favre. If Relevant Radio goes under altogether, as seems possible (it's had two major rounds of layoffs and an across-the-board pay cut), Mariani could shift to balls and baskets without skipping a beat.

RIP: Gene Lees. JazzWax has an appreciation of the late jazz critic:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/sundaywaxbits.html

The Neglected Books Page looks at an early novel by Lees, and decides that he was correct to migrate to jazz writing:

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=337

John Nathan, whose excellent Yukio Mishima biography I read a couple of years back, gives an extensive interview about his obsession with Japanese culture to Colin Marshall at NPR's The Marketplace of Ideas. His observations about figures such as Mishima, Kenzaburo Oe, and composer Toru Takemitsu are based on his personal relationships with them, and are profoundly insightful:

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/unceasing-fascination-with-japan-immersion-in-literary-culture-and-the-pleasures-and-sorrows-of-the-.html

A world away from Japan is another country whose culture I respond to strongly, Argentina, and it is pleasing to read about a bit of a literary renaissance in Buenos Aires, centering on classic literary gathering spots such as the cafe at the Hotel Castelar:

"The most beautiful thing about reading is talking about it," says Hernan Lombardi, Buenos Aires's Minister of Culture. "There is nothing more lovely than reading some Borges and meeting a friend in a cafe who is doing the same. Part of stimulating people to read is stimulating people to talk about what they read," he says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8635289.stm 

The Minister has a point, and such conversations need to happen in real space and time, face to face. The Internet promised to bring like-minded people from around the world together in lively online discussion, and by and large it has not lived up to that promise. Online "discussions" are both under-communicative and over-communicative. "Under," in the sense that when you post in a group and receive no responses to your point, you can never be sure whether you said something "wrong," or whether no one was interested, or what the deal was; you can't just look at your companions and tell. "Over," in the sense that uninvited people stop at your "table," and even the people you know let their ids spill out, and before you know it there is shouting and spitting and weapons being pulled. Wouldn't usually happen in a cafe. Maybe people's Internet selves are in fact their "real" selves, but if so, I prefer the polite fictions of civilized in-person discourse.

The Los Angeles gallery Edward Cella Art + Architecture is featuring a show of very appealing drawings by architect Frederick Fisher:

(If you fancy you see a Giorgio Morandi influence in that drawing, it's no accident; some of Fisher's other drawings are labeled as homages to Morandi.)

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37642

http://www.edwardcella.com/html/home.asp

Nearby in Long Beach, the Museum of Latin American Art will be putting on what looks to be a very exciting show of David Siqueiros's landscapes, opening September 11:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/museum-of-latin-american-art-to-present-rare-show-of-siqueiros-landscape-paintings.html

http://www.molaa.com/Art/Exhibitions/upcoming-exhibitions/Siqueiros-Paisajista--Siqueiros-Landscape-Painter.aspx

The dependably excellent Chicago Opera Theater is apparently doing very nicely by Francesco Cavalli's 1649 opera Giasone:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-live-0426-opera-review-20100426,0,2659380.column

Another stage event that would be worth going a long way to see: Patrick Stewart as William Shakespeare in Edward Bond's 1974 play Bingo. Bond, born in 1934, is one of the world's major living writers, long overdue for Nobel Prize consideration.

http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831272273079/Bingo+%28Chichester%29.html

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

Among notables born on this date are philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, philosophers Thomas Reid and Ludwig Wittgenstein, architects I.M. Pei and Peter Zumthor, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, ornithologist John James Audubon, film composer Francis Lai, film directors John Grierson and Douglas Sirk, painter Eugene Delacroix, blues singer Ma Rainey, rock guitarist Duane Eddy, novelists Bernard Malamud and Anita Loos, science fiction novelist A.E. van Vogt, poets Vicente Aleixandre (Spain) and Gabdulla Tuqay (Tatarstan), and actors Carol Burnett and Joan Chen. Marcus Aurelius's Meditations is a book that, two millennia after it was written, still abounds in useful wisdom about how the world actually works. One of its themes is that, although no one else can ever genuinely be trusted, there is no need to make ourselves miserable on that account; after all, they can't trust us, either.

When an opponent in the gymnasium gashes us with his nails or bruises our head in a collision, we do not protest or take offence, and we do not suspect him ever afterwards of  malicious intent. However, we do regard him with a wary eye; not in enmity or suspicion, yet good-temperedly keeping  our distance. So let it be, too, at other times in life; let us agree to overlook a great many things in those who are, as it were, our fellow-contestants. A simple avoidance, as I have said, is always open to us, without either suspicion or ill-will.
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The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in as much as it, too, demands a firm and watchful stance against any unexpected onset.